Illustrated by Christoph Niemann.

“I’m back to Safari. I still love Chrome but Safari’s latest update made it edge out Chrome for speed. Speed, it seems, is the killer feature for me in Web browsers.”

It seems I’m going to follow the speed and it turns out that Chrome is faster than lightning. I’m glad to be back on Chrome as Safari’s address bar is, as Jonathan Christopher put it, annoying but I will miss the Top Sites screen and visual history search.

I hadn’t realized how many Web sites I’d been missing out on until this update rolled through. Then I found myself browsing Web sites in Polish, Chinese, and other languages I have no idea how to read. Surprised it took this long for a browser to natively support a translation API.

Not anymore. I’ve been wanting to switch to the Google Chrome Developer channel (or, the still pretty darned bleed edge releases) for a few weeks but hadn’t had the time to figure out how. After I saw my friend in bleeding edge Chromium releases Justin Blanton take the plunge I began hunting. Turns out, it is pretty easy once you found the right link.

I found this link via the Chromium Blog – but there is an Early Access Release Channels page that explains what each release channel is, its purpose, and how you can get involved. The nice thing about these channels is that these are releases of Google Chrome, not just Chromium, and as such are slightly more stable and refined then the Chromium nightlies I’ve been using. Updating to the next release is also easier in that it happens within the application itself and it continues on the same channel you choose be it beta or developer.

Left: Chromium Right: Google Chrome Dev channel

For example, remember how I complained about Chromium’s Bookmark Manager? Remember those hideous buttons? Well, they are much nicer in Google Chrome then they are in Chromium. Take a look at the graphic that shows the difference between the two. Though the action button doesn’t do much (yet) it does fit much nicer into the Mac ecosystem. Obviously the source list on the left is much nicer as well.

Switching from Chromium to Google Chrome was made all the more easy due to Google’s free Bookmark Syncing service. If you’d like to help test the very latest build of Chrome follow the links on that Early Access Release Channels to download your flavor of Chrome based on which channel you’d like.

A few days ago I updated to the latest nightly build of Chromium, something I do every few days using TechCrunch’s Chrome-Up application, and was elated to discover that Chromium finally has a Bookmark Manager. Up until this release I was unable to edit any of the bookmarks that I had imported from Safari into Chromium. It was frustrating.

I’ve now finally been able to update, sort and delete my bookmarks (which are automatically synced with my Google Account). Something I wasn’t able to do for months and has taken my already fairly bubbly adoration of Chromium and taken it to the next level. A clean browser is a happy browser.

I was surprised, though, at the overall design and implementation of the Bookmark Manager in Chromium. It feels very rushed. Even though I use a nightly build, which is as cutting-edge as you can possibly get, I expected to see a very different approach than what is pictured above.

Chromium’s New Tab, History, Downloads and Extensions pages are very different from what we see in most other browsers. The New Tab page, as an example, is much more like Safari’s Top Sites page (although not nearly as cool). The Downloads page I find particularly useful. It shows up like a Web page and shows you everything that you downloaded recently, by day, with a link back to the page it originated from, a link to the file itself on your own system, etc. Functionally it is very much the same as Safari and Firefox’s Downloads pop-up window but Chrome’s is altogether nicer, in my opinion, because it shows up in a tab.

I expected Chromium to have the same sort of “Web page” feeling to its Bookmark Manager. Maybe this is a case of ‘don’t fix it if it ain’t broken’ but I think there is huge potential for browsers to reinvent the way bookmarks are managed. Why not plug into some social bookmarking sites? (I know there are Firefox plugins that do stuff like this) Why not give us an unlimited amount of metadata to attribute to a bookmark? I remember when Firefox implemented shortcodes for bookmarks, like ‘gr’ for Google Reader as an example, and you could just type ‘gr’ + Enter and off you went to that bookmark. I would love to see that in Chromium (and Safari).

And what about the plus, minus, and eye buttons on the toolbar? I have never, ever, ever seen anything like those on any operating system. Perhaps I’m looking too far into what are basically alpha level builds. Maybe what will end up being released with Chrome for Mac will be vastly different than what is appearing currently in Chromium (I hope so).

And don’t get me wrong, I’m extremely happy to finally be able to edit my bookmarks in Chromium and I always look forward to the next nightly update.

To keep my build of Chromium up-to-date I use Techcrunch’s Chrome-Up application built by MG Siegler and Greg Rosen.

Now that an official release of Chrome for Mac is out there it is being evaluated by some of the Macintosh community. John Gruber recently linked to someone who had tried Chrome for a week before it actually stuck. I can see why – switching browsers from Safari to Chrome won’t win you any new features. In fact, it may even force you to give up a few. But what makes Chrome better than any other browser on the Macintosh, at least for me, is pure foot-to-the-floor speed.

There are a few neat features, for sure. The “New Tab” page, arguably not as nice as Safari’s Top Sites feature, makes it pretty simple to set up a good way to get to what you want. Bookmark sync is nice. Extensions, I think, will play a huge roll in the success of Chrome – especially when it is pitted against Safari. Google has taken the right path with Extensions and how you build them, too.

But that’s about it. Here’s the one-liner for Chrome; it is really fast. Everything else is gravy.

Viewing the source of a page on Google Chrome is, for the most part, a terrific experience. Chrome supports syntax highlighting of the underlying code of a page making it much more readable for us geeks while we look under the hood.

However, something I’ve run into of late is that it doesn’t work very well for dynamically generated pages. The issue seems to be that since Google Chrome opens a new tab to view the source of the current URL that you’re on, it actually “reloads” that page with new session data, as well as ditching all of the POST variables you may have sent to it. This causes some confusion and may lead to head scratching (as it did for me).

I don’t know of a work around currently but knowing this may save you some time.

Side note: I’m loving Google Chrome for Mac.

The next version of Webkit that will be released will come with a new version of the Web Inspector, a tool used by Web developers to “inspect” an already-loaded Web page for debugging, testing, etc., that has some really great new features thanks in part to Joseph Pecoraro.

I love that I can choose either Safari or Chrome and I will still benefit from this update.

As it stands Safari is far and away the best browser available on the Macintosh. Firefox, which is a really solid browser and is much loved by many developers, just isn’t “Mac enough” for us real, devout Mac users. There are so many things missing when an application is not built as a native Macintosh application. Simple things, really. Being able to look up things from the built-in Mac OS X dictionary is one thing. Native spell check. Speed! These are simple things, since Firefox handles some of these things on its own, but once you’ve grown accustomed how real, native Mac applications feel – you want that from all applications on your Mac. Opera and Camino, both very respectable browsers, just are not as lean and mean as Safari is. The are other browsers, to be sure, but none that are backed by corporations with enough resources, or an active enough development community, to really push for the top-spot on the Mac.

Which is why it’d be great for a really, really good browser to emerge on the Macintosh to rival Safari. Both Safari and the Webkit teams are on a tear lately. They have made tremendous strides towards making Safari better and Webkit (along with Squirelfish which is now called Nitro) much, much faster. They’ve improved Webkit’s page rendering (or, how it displays the page based on open standards) to such a degree that it is the envy of all other engines. But, they could do better.

For example, Chrome renders pages faster than Safari. I don’t need a fancy graph or test to show me this – I’ve loaded pages on my Macbook Pro using Chrome and the speed at which the page becomes usable is hands-down much, much faster in Chrome than in Safari (and Safari is fast).

For example, Firefox has add-ons which enhance the features of the core browser. There are add-ons for everything like plugging into your favorite Web sites, aggregating content, security and privacy enhancements, music, calendaring, etc. etc. etc. All optional, based on your needs/wants. Chrome will also support extensions, which are similar to add-ons, that will use open standards (this excites me very, very much).

Competition. That is what it comes down to. Not just competition based on marketing or market share or even mindshare – but an all-out race to be the best. The unequivocal best even if you’re not the biggest. If Google Chrome for Mac is released and is only marginally better than the developer preview releases I’ve been using – the people that are responsible for making Safari will need to trot a little quicker to keep up with where Google is going.

Hooray for us.

Side note: Why I can’t use Google Chrome full time, yet

I’d be tempted to use the developer preview releases of Google Chrome for Mac full time but there are a few key things that are ultimately missing from the application that are vital to my daily browsing needs. Here they are, in case you’re wondering:

• Adobe Flash support is simply not yet available. I’m not sure what makes Google Chrome for Mac any different than any other browser but I’m hoping this is addressed soon.
• Google Gears support. Both Google Reader and WordPress, two applications that I use quite often, support Gears and make the experience of using them much nicer. Kind of ironic that Google Chrome for Mac still doesn’t have Google Gears support.
• Import from Safari. I could probably hack my way into bringing all of my bookmarks and preferences from Safari into Google Chrome – but I hope that an upcoming release has this built-in.

That’s really about it. If I had these things I could probably make the jump to do some real testing of Google Chrome for Mac. For now, I’ll stick with the best browser available for the Mac, Safari.

Google’s Chrome, the new Web browser by Google, has been getting a lot of attention because of its simple approach to browsing the Web.  But there is more here than meets the eye. It is all about the approach.

The new application has its flaws, for sure, but what it gets wrong it makes up for in what it gets right.  Google has long been an advocate of speed.  ”Speed is a feature.”  Many other browser manufacturers, namely Apple, Microsoft, and Mozilla, have continuously strived to push the needle on speed, faster page loading time, and overall memory usage of their software products. They’ve done this while also trying to jam more features into the browser.  What they’ve ultimately failed to do though, is what Google succeeded at; removing the application from the application.

Google’s approach here is interesting.  This is the first real step towards making the Web the application, and the browser just the “thing” that loads it into view.  Over on Daring Fireball John Gruber quoted this bit, which I find really interesting:

“In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems.”

You know how the iPhone or iPod touch loads web applications with nearly no UI unless you scroll up?  That is sort of the approach that Google Chrome is taking.  Just render the page in an insanely fast and stable way – that is the goal.

Is Google Chrome a “Single Site Browser” the way the next version of Safari is going to be or the way that Fluid already is?  Sort of.  In the “Page control” menu (not sure I like that name either) there is an option to “Create application short cuts”.  You can install these shortcuts on your Desktop, Start Menu, and Quick Launch bar.  Personally I think it would have been neat if they automatically asked to setup Gmail, Google Reader, Calendar, etc. when I installed – but everyone knows that they would have caught some serious heat for that if they did.  For those of us liking the SSB experience, Google Chrome works.

It is tough to say what Google Chrome “gets wrong”.  I’ve seen reports of various rendering problems, but I don’t think that is something Chrome got wrong.  That is fairly easily fixed in the next version so long as they iron out their use of Webkit.

To sum up; the approach Google is taking here is refreshing.  Clean, simple, and fast. A feature for feature comparison of Google Chrome against any browser would not be a fair way to gauge its affect on the marketplace.  Time will tell.

Now, when they release a Macintosh version, then I’ll really kick the tires.