More About Google Chrome

I’ve been read­ing a few more com­ments about Google Chrome last night and this morn­ing and have kept using it for brows­ing since yes­ter­day. Here’s a few more points :

• My com­ments from yes­ter­day and today take into account that Chrome is a first beta. People have to remem­ber that this is not yet a replace­ment for anyone’s reg­u­lar browser. Many com­ments say that it doesn’t sup­port exten­sions like Firefox, IE or Opera (they may call it diff­fer­ent things but you get my gist). It also has some annoy­ing ren­der­ing bugs that seem to be due to Webkit and misses basic func­tion­al­ity like a way to turn off scripts which is a very good point that a com­menter to my pre­vi­ous post brought up. All valid points but remem­ber that this is a FIRST beta. Chrome will evolve.
• I saw a com­ment today on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site that summed up my first impres­sion of it : “At present this seems like a solu­tion wait­ing for a prob­lem”. The more I think about it, the more I think that’s true. Did we “really” need a new browser in the market?
• The above ties in with some of Zeldman’s com­ments as well as Tantek Celik who com­mented on the same post. Both say the same thing which is that, in order to com­pete, a new browser must offer some­thing that oth­ers do not. They then dis­cuss ways a browser may dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself and Tantek brings up the point that, with a sim­i­lar fea­ture set, a browser may win mar­ket share by bring­ing bet­ter per­for­mance. So far, this seems to be the main thing Chrome brings to the table. But is it enough?
• While Chrome is cer­tainly much faster than Firefox, even Firefox 3 which improved its prdecessor’s very slug­gish per­for­mance, is it really much faster than Opera 9.5? Not in my expe­ri­ence. On some pages, Opera is actu­ally still faster than Chrome. So again, is it enough?

Like I said yes­ter­day, only time will tell what impact Chrome will have when it reaches gold sta­tus and reaches a wider audi­ence out­side Web pro­fes­sion­als and hard core tech geeks. Will peo­ple be will­ing to swicth? Personally, I have my doubts, espe­cially if Chrome’s dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion fac­tors are not more vis­i­ble than just speed. That may be enough for some peo­ple but most IT depart­ments will prob­a­bly keep using IE and those who moved to Firefox, Opera or Safari may choose to stay with the devil they know…