Google Chrome Is Growing Up, Slowly but Surely
Most everyone acknowledges Google Chrome is both lightweight and lightning-fast, but the browser often falls short in the features department when compared to other offerings like Firefox and Safari.
However, several improvements will be showing up soon in Google’s web browser that bring it further up to speed with the competition in the features department.
Google is adding some rather sophisticated cloud-based data synchronization capabilities to its browser, according to a post on the Chromium mailing list (an e-mail list for developers working on Chrome’s code, which is open-source) from Friday.
The new features will let users sync their Google Accounts to Google Chrome. At first Chrome will just sync bookmarks, but looking at the documentation, it’s clear Chrome will be able to sync other user data — user preferences and more sensitive stuff like login credentials — in future releases. The sync features could start showing up in Chrome developer releases as early as this month, according to Ars Technica.
So, you’ll soon be able to load any instance of Chrome on any computer, log in to Google, and have access to all of your bookmarks. Firefox has a similar system called Weave, which is made by Mozilla and is available as an add-on along with a server-side component that can be run privately. However, Google’s sync plans involve “push” style notifications that provide instant updates, whereas Weave and sync tools like it rely on polling, so data is updated only when a button is clicked.
It was revealed last week that Google is also adding a theming system to Chrome, so users can apply skins and custom color schemes. Again, Firefox has its own themeing system called Personas.
There are other things happening in Chome’s universe as well. The latest builds have seen a speed boost on some Linux desktops, and the still-nascent Mac version of Chrome is close to offering support for the Flash Player.
In the world of web browsers, raw speed and useful features have always been a trade-off. Make a browser as lightweight and devoid of unnecessary features as possible, and it will require fewer system resources to get its job done faster, feeling snappier to the user and rendering pages more quickly. But people have come to expect more than just a blank window to the web, so browser makers have added things like bookmark and history managers, skinning and theming options, identity managers and bug reporting systems to their browsers’ default installations.
It’s a game of balance — add too few features and users feel cheated on what they’ve come to consider basic functionality. Add too many features and you start to slow the browser down.
The biggest browser makers, Microsoft and Mozilla, have gone the route of constructing plug-in architectures so people can add whatever extra third-party features they want. But Google and Apple have largely shied away from plug-ins so far — though there are some for Safari and Google is taking baby steps.
So do these latest developments mean that Chrome is slowly going to bulk up and become a contender? If so, signs point to the “filling out” kind of bulking up and not the “bloating” kind. Maybe it’s moving from featherweight to middleweight, at least.
Chrome’s svelte frame is why its proponents love it, though those same evangelists will also admit they keep Firefox around simply because of all the cool stuff it can do that Chrome can’t.
To take advantage of all the latest features showing up in Chrome, you need to download the Channel Chooser and make sure you switch to the developer’s stream. That’s the only way to get the latest experimental updates.
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