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Woah, wait! I’m not going to blather on about Chrome like a lot of people are currently doing. Okay, I’m not going to slag it off like a lot are doing, and I’m not going to praise it as the best browser in the world. Like a lot of people are also doing.

What I am going to say is in regards to the WebKit engine contained within.

WebKit is supposedly the most standards compliant browser code-base out right now, but I, like a lot of people, have only ever seen it used within the Safari browser. Chrome may be a featureless skeleton of a shell (the screenshots look terrible, but actually look okay with Vista’s Glass replacing the blue background), but the WebKit devs must be ecstatic that people will actually be seeing their engine used in a browser that isn’t a rancid mess of an abortion. For that, Chrome is good.

While I’m here: Having the address bar contained in the tab pages is actually a good idea which doesn’t work too well in practice. Opera has this enabled by default and it’s, well, crap. I even had the same design in one of my apps back in 1999 – it made sense from a coupling point of view, but I removed it. One reason why is code duplication; having the same controls duped across tabs was just needless redundency. With browsers, it just seems to also “feel” wrong.

Anyway, that’s it. I basically wanted to say what a heap of shit Safari is and that WebKit is not Safari.

It seems like I lied about the blathering part.

Update: Lots of people are calling certain parts of Chrome invovative. For their information, the each-tab-as-a-process thing is from IE8. The “Incognito” mode is also from IE8 (which it calls InPrivate). The page with thumbnails of websites is from Opera, but Opera only shows pages you’ve specifically placed on the “Speed Dial” page. Chrome automatically showing it as a list of most-recently-viewed sites sounds like a problem, to me.

I’m impressed with Chrome’s start-up speed, that’s for sure. Hopefully it’ll get plugins and will become much more. I hate the current available web browsers and so I’m hoping Chrome may be The One.