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Dogfooding Chrome
November 7th, 2009 by jens

As everyone knows who works in the pet-food industry (or computer software for that matter), it can be hard to start eating your own dogfood. Case in point: I just this week set Chrome to be my default browser, though I’ve been working on it for four months now.

Partly that’s because when I started in July the Mac version of Chrome was too immature; and partly it’s because a web browser is something you need to have running and working all the time—especially since the Chrome project’s bug tracker and code-review tool are web-based.

But Mac Chrome is quite stable enough to use now, and as I haven’t been doing much Chrome development on this MacBook Pro lately (it takes too long to compile compared to my souped-up Mac Pro) I’ve installed the latest dev-channel build and replaced Safari with it in my Dock and as my default browser.

It’s hard to get used to a new browser, after all these years. I remember that I dropped IE 5 like a hot rock as soon as Safari became useable, but that’s because IE sucked so badly on OS X (as you youngsters may not remember.) But Safari is a great browser. Chrome’s great too, but in different ways, and the Mac version’s not finished yet so there are some missing bits.

I should note that I generally don’t work on the user-visible parts of Chrome, rather the underlying WebKit engine; so I haven’t been focusing on the UI much, or noticing the features being added, until experiencing them as an end-user.

In Chrome’s favor:

  • It definitely feels faster. At work I’ve been obsessing over some micro-benchmarks, but in regular use what I notice is simply that pages come up more quickly. I think a lot of this has to do with DNS pre-fetching, because DNS query times here at home can often be slow.
  • The UI of the tabs is better than Safari’s. I like that they take up less room (though without eliminating the title bar the way the Safari 4 beta did), and the transition animations when opening/closing/detaching tabs are extremely slick, definitely Apple-quality.
  • The downloads shelf at the bottom of the window is more visible than Safari’s little Downloads window, which always gets hidden behind the browser.
  • The list of recently-closed tabs at the bottom of the new-tab page is very thoughtful and handy. In general I find the new-tab page more useful than Safari’s, if less flashy.

Rough edges (remember, this is a pre-beta build):

  • PDF display doesn’t work well. There’s no way to switch pages yet (making multi-page documents unusable), there’s no zooming, the Save command doesn’t work, and often the renderer process starts redrawing constantly and eating up CPU time.
  • The only indication you have that a page is loading is the little 16×16-pixel spinning circle that replaces the tab’s icon. I like the visual design of this, but it’s too hard to find. I still miss the big progress bar in the address bar from Safari 1-3. (Cursor feedback would be nice—wasn’t there a browser once that put a little wristwatch badge on the arrow cursor?)
  • The bookmarking UI is still unfinished and unpolished. In particular, there’s no way to edit/move/delete bookmarks yet. I love the idea of being able to quickly bookmark by clicking a Google-y star icon, but in practice it pops up a floating panel for choosing a folder, which makes me think about where to put it just like Safari’s bookmark sheet does. I’d rather the star button just added it to an “Unsorted” folder that I could open and organize later.
  • Autofill doesn’t seem to work as well as in Safari. For example, it won’t autofill login forms until I type in the username; I think this may be a security feature, but I find it annoying.

I’ve been impressed by Chrome’s stability too, for a pre-beta development build. The app hasn’t crashed once, and I haven’t even gotten the “Oh, snap!” page that shows that a renderer process crashed. (I’ve seen plugins crash a few times, but that’s probably Flash’s fault, and as in Safari on 10.6, this doesn’t affect the browser or even the rest of the page.)

One thing I’m really looking forward to is extensions. Safari’s a closed system, and I’ve long been envious of the plethora of cool plug-ins available for Firefox. I’m looking forward to using, and maybe developing, extensions for Chrome. (In the current dev channel Mac release, extensions can be installed, but the ones I’ve tried don’t do anything yet.)


9 Responses  
  • Justin Williams writes:
    November 7th, 20099:58 AMat

    I made the fulltime switch to Chrome from Safari this week as well. It has survived two days thus far, which is more than I can say for anytime I’ve switched to Camino or Firefox. Really impressed with how far its come in the past few months.

           
  • jens writes:
    November 7th, 200910:26 AMat

    “Really impressed with how far its come in the past few months.”

    Yeah, the team is fantastic — a huge well-organized coding machine. Makes me feel quite humble. Plus of course we’re building on (and assisting with) the awesomeness that is WebKit.

    The team is really serious about the Mac version, too. There’s absolutely no sense of the Mac (or Linux) being a second-class platform. The decision to do Windows first was just driven by market share and the realities of ramping up a new project.

           
  • Jesper writes:
    November 7th, 20094:12 PMat

    It’s been more than a year, but I still dearly miss the persistent status bar in Chrome when I’m using it in the capacity of my default browser on Windows. I know it’s a stand that’s been taken from a philosophy standpoint, but the on-hover status bar is actually crippled, since it just won’t show URLs beyond a certain length. (As, in all honesty, won’t every other browser — but the length in this case is significantly larger and can be controlled!)

    Mac Chrome is probably the best Mac “port” ever of any product that started out somewhere else, and I don’t say that lightly. It’s amazing how good it is as a product and how true it manages to stay to the feel of the platform despite staying its own thing. (I guess it was very Mac-like even on Windows in the sense that it was a brilliant piece of UI design.)

    However, I think I’ll continue to stick with OmniWeb until someone else gets vertical tabs (with loading indicators and drag and drop), site-specific preferences, minimal UI footprint (Chrome comes close), persistence and updating “view source” right.

           
  • Ed Marshall writes:
    November 7th, 20099:08 PMat

    I can’t speak to the Mac build, but the Linux version is impressing the pants off of me. ;) Over here, our choices are Firefox, Opera, a Chromium nightly build, or any of a half-dozen minor webkit-based browsers, so a couple of days ago I decided to give the 64-bit build of Chromium another try.

    Chrome is several orders of magnitude faster at basic window rendering than Firefox; while the rendering and javascript engines in FF might be comparable, actually displaying anything on the screen results in noticeable delays, tearing, and general unpleasantness.

    And now that there’s an AdblockPlus implementation for Chrome (along with user scripts/Greasemonkey), I have very little reason to use Firefox anymore. It’s simply too painful to use after spending time with Chrome.

    Interestingly, the Windows build of FF doesn’t exhibit the same issues, on similar hardware, and the comparison between Chrome and Firefox there becomes one of features and UI; but as a regular Linux desktop user, the fact that the Firefox developers don’t seem to care much about performance means I need another browser. Chrome is it. :)

           
  • Akin writes:
    November 8th, 200912:06 AMat

    I did try chrome for couple months but had to go back to firefox. Main problem was with pages that utilize heavy javascripts (gmail, google reader etc) cause chrome to consume 10-15% cpu utilization constantly. Same pages had 3 to 4 % CPU utilization with IE 8 or Firefox 3.5

           
    • jens writes:
      November 8th, 20098:42 AMat

      Akin — That’s probably due to a Chrome bug where timers were being leaked, causing more and more CPU usage over time. That was fixed a month or so ago; try one of the latest dev channel builds and it should behave better for you. (There have also been some significant memory usage fixes on Windows recently.)

             
  • Dan Kegel writes:
    November 8th, 20097:20 PMat

    Jens,
    I fixed yet another timer leak (in message_pump_libevent.cc) a couple days
    ago, maybe that’ll help some more.

           
  • Andrew Thompson writes:
    November 9th, 20093:36 PMat

    “wasn’t there a browser once that put a little wristwatch badge on the arrow cursor?”

    Ahem, Firefox and Camino on Mac OS. I know, I wrote the code :)

           
  • Ask Bjørn Hansen writes:
    November 22nd, 200912:27 PMat

    Since you posting this, I’ve tried it on my Mac, too. It’s very enjoyable; but I can’t use it as a daily browser without 1Password support. There are just too many websites to login to…

           


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