Gathered up some first impressions about Chrome and also a detail which is petty by google that pretty much mangles a great UX feature they have!
It's slick! It's cool! It's fresh, minimalistic and new and all that. Freshness is not bad at all.
Yet... It's tabs with no frame. I'm more impressed with the cocky idea that all you need is the browser and nothing else than I am with the look and feel.
It's speedy. Real fast actually. The memory footprint is not small but the CPU usage worries me. I have a monster machine with a speedy dual core and lots of RAM. Still I did take note when I opened lots of tabs. Each tab in Chrome has its own process which is good for apps in the browser. One tab dies the others can continue to run. However if I am "just browsing thank you" in the future, which I am sure we will continue to do for a long time yet, I will not always require a separate process for each browser window. That has to carry some excessive weight right?. But I am not a good perf profiler so I'll leave that part to the experts in that field.
Also the installation is simple. But what about the installation directory? Why are we way down in local settings? C:\Users\Magnus\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application Is there something wrong with following standards when it comes to using the Program Files directory? This is not an oversight so what's the rationale?
Naturally here in the beginning you miss all your Firefox and IE addins! But that will change real soon. The developer community will eat this new launch for lunch!
Just to make one more point which I find is so petty between these rival companies. The searches are weighted toward their own products. Before I say this note that IE 8 Beta 2 is copying the improved search feature of FireFox where the find feature turns up like a little bar at the bottom. IE 8 Beta 2 has that same bar... except it is not located at the bottom. It is located at the top instead. Petty rivalry! OK - so what about the search thing in Chrome then?
Chrome features a powerful suggestion box when you start to type in the address bar. If you type something it will begin to suggest pages you've seen before, searches you've made or services you might want to reach. Here's what it looks like when I start typing the word "maps". If I enter the first to letters "ma" the suggestion drop down looks like this:
Notice how my webmail comes up as suggestions and also at the bottom "maps.google.com". I enter a few more digits for "maps" and the suggestions focuses down:
The result is an immediate selection of the maps service from google; maps.google.com. Please note that I had no history of surfing at this service before I started typing. I stumbled across this behavior when I was testing different in-browser apps like maps services and so on.
My annoyance with this feature is how weighted the suggestions are. Typing the word "maps" in the address bar brings up a handy google service. But there is a live.com service too with maps that most of you may know of, right?
So lets try to get Chrome to suggest maps.live.com:
As you can see I've typed in "maps.l". At this point Chrome already knows I am heading for maps.live.com but it does not offer up the link automatically. Instead it offers you to search for lots of things where only the third result from the top is the obvious maps.live.com. I can now either hit the down arrow three times then enter or continue typing. Let's continue typing:
We are almost all the way there now. I've typed in "maps.live.co" and still Chrome does not let in and let me go to maps.live.com. It knows. It just wont let me go there easily. OK - time for the final digit. The "m" to complete the URL:
Finally! After typing the full URL: maps.live.com Chrome suggest: "Hey I know - could it be that you wanted to go to maps.live.com! Ah - silly me I didn't notice!" Also even at this point the URL is like an afterthought. It is not selected in the address bar like the maps.google.com URL. (Compare with above.)
Now I may be sensitive here and I may be asking for more than these cut-throat competitors might be able to stomach. I know.
However if I want a company to be a role model that I would look up to in technology this kind of petty behavior where giants are too small to endorse competing sites on equal terms is both a misuse of great UX and it's a sad thing to bare witness to. I want my role models to be above this kind of squabbling! It would be so much more cool and I would be proud of them if the search would look like this montage after the first two digits of "ma":
It would say to me and to the world that - we don't mind the competition! We even honor our competitors!
Guess that's just too much to ask for. It's petty and a pity! Doesn't really upset me all that much of course. But it disappoints me.
Cheers,
/Magnus
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posted @ Friday, September 05, 2008 12:10 AM