So today I'm playing with Google Chrome at work.  From my first look at it, it has promise. There's some beautiful things about it like when one tab freezes for one reason or another (something that would likely shut down Firefox / IE), only that tab freezes and not the entire application - allowing you to continue to work rather than stare at an un-responsive browser.

The one major beef I have is when fully maximized, there is a 10 pixel gap at the bottom of the screen where you can click on windows behind Chrome – this does annoy me because I have a habit of clicking there – and now that I know it’s there… it will annoy me… …

There are some cool features thought:

• Ability to resize any textarea control
• Screen realastate is huge!
• Google keeps a record of previous and most visited sites. So when you open chrome, you can see them all right there.
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• The: Right Click –>Page Info is quite amusing
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• But what do you expect from a Beta… oh wait… isn’t everything from Google in Beta?

JavaScript

First off I try it against my Vehicle Tracking application I wrote for police agencies in the states. Heck, it's quick. It does everything great! I then started to play with overlaying ESRI data on top of my maps, and working with my playback and history functions and again it amazed me with how quick it is.  The only hiccups I got was when I played around with running 50 simultaneous functions at the same time, each one doing a lot of trig. math. The browser finally gave up and crashed.  I'm not surprised, IE and Firefox did the same.

So as far as I'm concerned - it works great.

CSS

There is a bit of issues with CSS styling - mainly I believe it's being too pedantic.  Chrome has a feature that highlights <input /> elements with an orange glow. I can see how this is nice, however to those of us that sometimes spend too much time making our application visual appealing, it’s annoying.

INcogNITO!

IE8 has one, why not Chrome! HIDE EVERYTHING! No Cookies (sorry cookie monster), no traces… can we turn this off? I am personally not putting this browser on my computer at home because I do like to see what goes on with the history – and I don’t want to give anyone using my computer (<cough> kids) the ability to view bad (<wheeze> Sites with Barny the Dinosaur on them) sites without me knowing… stupid dinosaur…

Developer Tools

Google Chrome comes with a few developer tools built in.   The JavaScript debugger failed to impress me. I've used Firebug for the past few years and It's the only one that I will recommend. The JavaScript consol caused Chrome to freeze on me fully.

JavaScript Consol

Javascript Debugger (Command line? What is this COBOL?)

Having the Document Source open in a tab is... ok... and I can see the uses however I do like to move source around while I look at WebPages - why else would you use multiple monitors!?

The task manager is quite... "nifty", easy way of telling what applications are running under chrome. I especially appreciate the "Stats for Nerds" option which loads up the memory usage of the browsers (Firefox, IE, Chrome) opened and the processes (tabs) used.

Task manager

Memory Usage

All in All, it’s better than the beta of IE8 (Sorry MS), but I don’t think It’s going to be the next best thing to hit the Internet. Ninjas did that a long time ago.