A little over a week ago I downloaded the beta version of Google’s new browser (Chrome) to give it a test run.
Believe it or not, there was a time when Internet Explorer didn’t come bundled with Windows. Then again, believe it or not, there was a time when most people didn’t have a use for Internet Explorer because they didn’t have Internet access! These days Internet Explorer comes pre-installed (and deeply embedded) in Microsoft’s operating systems, and therein lies the problem. To challenge the throne, your browser must be so good that users must be willing to avoid using the pre-bundled browser that comes with their operating system and manually go find, download and install another company’s browser.
Finding Google Chrome wasn’t hard — the link sitting at the bottom of Google’s home page (it’s since been relocated to google.com/chrome). Installing Chrome was as painless as it gets. Chrome offered to convert all my IE bookmarks over to Chrome’s, and I let it. It also kindly offered to become my default browser — not so fast, my dear, let’s get to know each other first.
The first thing I noticed while surfing with Chrome is that it’s fast. Like, really fast. Pages that took five to ten seconds to fully display with IE pop up instantly in Chrome. That right there was almost enough to sell me on switching to Chrome.
Chrome supports tabbed browsing like most of the other major browsers. That means you can open a lot of websites at once and store them in tabs. Moving the tabs around is easy. Not only can you drag tabs out of Chrome to open new browsing windows, but you can drag them back into Chrome and recombine them. That’s neat! You can also open “Incognito Tabs” that do not store cookies, history, or anything. Why this isn’t simply labeled “porn mode” is beyond me; let’s call a spade a spade.
Another neat feature is that the address bar is also a Google search bar — there’s only one bar. By being able to type your Google searches directly into the address bar, you can save yourself a step. That’s pretty nifty, too.
Unlike Internet Explorer’s pages and pages of options, there are only two drop down menus in Chrome. One of those leads you to Chrome’s Options, which are also pretty simplified. You can make basic changes (like picking your starting page), minor tweaks (choosing a default download location and managing how the browser stores your passwords) and “under the hood” which isn’t as intimidating as it sounds with less than ten choices.
By default Chrome minimizes pop-ups at the bottom of the screen and displays a small bar that would allow you to expand the pop-up or close it; do nothing and it goes away quickly. After using Chrome for two weeks I haven’t seen a single pop-up, so that’s nice. (In the “under the hood” settings you can turn off the pop-up notification as well.) Downloads are also handled smoothly; pick your default location, and downloads simply go there. No more dealing with IE blocking downloads, or picking a location to save them to (that can be configured as well).
If you’re an old school IE user like myself there are a few changes you’ll have to adjust to. You have to manually turn on the “home page” icon (why wouldn’t you want one?) in the option settings. The Bookmark manager is as basic as it gets (folders and sites), although you can add your most common bookmarks to the toolbar which is convenient. Also, unlike IE who assumes I’m a dummy when I click “X” and try to close ten open tabs by accident (it’s always by accident), Chrome assumes you know what you’re doing and will close your tabs right up for you. I’ve already done that by accident one too many times. One other difference is that there is no way to configure Chrome to set new tabs to open to your default website; instead, you’re presented with thumbnails of your nine most-visited sites. I presume this could lead to embarassment if you’ve not been using “Incognito Mode” for certain sites. I guess since the address bar doubles as a Google search bar opening to Google’s home page isn’t necessary any more, but it still takes a little getting used to.
The biggest problem with Chrome right now is that it’s not IE. While for the most part that’s a good thing, let’s face it — the majority of the web is written with Internet Explorer in mind. Web pages work and display correctly for the most part — I’ve seen little glitches here and there, but nothing earth shattering. Where Chrome falls apart right now is with web-based applications. At work, I use four main web-based applications: Trend Micro’s OfficeScan, What’s Up Gold, SharePoint, and a web-based Internet Access Point. ALL FOUR FAILED. While using Chrome, SharePoint was unable to launch the Microsoft Office applications associated with online documents. The Internet Access Point launches an executable to connect you; this didn’t happen in Chrome, either. Both OfficeScan and What’s Up Gold shut me down right up front by telling me they didn’t recognize my browser version. It sounds ironic, but Chrome will have to become a little more like IE before it will replace it.
For now I’m keeping Chrome installed, but I have enough applications that won’t work with it that I’ve had to switch back to IE for my default work browser. Only after running Chrome for a couple of weeks do I see just how bloated IE is. Google has played their hand; we’ll see what Microsoft counters with in IE8.
Corporate environments are always the problem for alternative browsers. But the problem isn’t necessarily limited just to alternative browsers. The web application I support for a living had trouble working with IE7, so you can pretty much forget about using it with Chrome or Firefox or anything else. For that matter, the web-based version of Microsoft Project 2003 breaks horribly under IE7 without some serious hacking, and we’re talking about a product from the same company that makes the browser here!
IE’s nonstandard rendering is one of the problems (visit a site that doesn’t render right in Chrome and I’ll bet it doesn’t render right in Opera or Firefox either) but lack of ActiveX is a big one. Implement ActiveX, and corporate apps have a prayer of working (Mozilla actually planned to implement ActiveX at one point). But if you do that, your browser is suddenly just as insecure as IE.
So I’m stuck using IE at work. I pretty much have been since the late 1990s when companies started drinking Microsoft’s Kool-Aid. But at home, I’ve been using alternative browsers for years and years. Most sites render fine; a minority render passably, and those that don’t, well, I’ve always been able to live without them. And those get more and more rare as alternative browsers gain market share. Nobody wants to torque off the Macintosh crowd too badly (they tend to be vocal and they also tend to have money), so more and more sites render just fine in the two most popular browsers that run on OS X.
But in the corporate world, I can see even IE7 and IE8 having trouble getting in because of that one web-based application that one department in a company has to have, and the company is out of business so it’ll never change, and replacing the app isn’t an option, so IE6 stays. (We’ve got one of those where I work, and I was hoping IE7 would drive us to get rid of that piece of junk because there’s a whole lot more wrong with it than just that, but nope.)