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Closed 10 years ago.
From a web developer point of view, what changes are expected in the development arena when Google Chrome is released?
Are the developments powerful enough to make another revolution in the web? Will the way we see web programming change?
Or is it just another web browser?
I think this is just another web browser. The most impact I expect to be improved Javascript performance, and the usability perspective. The first will benefit developers, especially when using Google Gears. I think the users will benefit the most from an enhanced user experience, the safety features, and ease of use.
I can only hope other browser vendors (MS) will follow Mozilla and Google to create a faster Javascript implementation, since this is the only thing that can truly impact web development.
This is long-term positioning for Google; they are clearly trying to build a more stable application platform for web-based development. All of their changes (security, sandboxing, process isolation) are clearly intended to make the browser a better application for hosting complex apps.
This is what Microsoft was worried about with netscape, and why they broke antitrust rules to "cut off their air supply". It's going to be interesting to see how MS responds.
It's also interesting to see how the mozilla / firefox team deals with this- Google is pretty much funding firefox now, so it's going to be a potential conflict of interest for these folks down the road.
In a nutshell, things are going to get more complex, require more testing, and will (hopefully) force recalcitrant vendors like Microsoft to become more standards-compliant.
Considering most develops want to reach the larger audience, it just means one more place to test. Since it uses Webkit, hopefully it will render almost identical to Safari.
Integrated Gears may mean a solid place for apps to be developed though. If you have an internal system it may be nicer to just put Chrome on all the machines than building an app that runs locally.
I think the whole purpose or at least the emphasis of the release, as Kamiel said, is to provide better javascript performance. So many of Google's services rely on heavy javascript usage that this is a smart move by them. This should be good for everyone as IE and Firefox work to compete against Google every browser should get better at javascript.
Google Chrome looks promising. It is of course in an early beta so it's missing a lot of the things people would need or at least feel they need, like plugins, cross-machine synchronization of data (could be done with plugins), cross-platform support (ie. Linux and Mac versions).
So far it renders Gmail like a bat out of hell, so I'm going to pay very close attention to it.
Edit: In fact, these posts are done using it, and except for some minor issues like smaller font in input fields, it works as I expect it to. Fast, stable (already tested it with a javascript killer-page I have for some test applications).
This is just a natural for Google. This way they can control how well their apps work in a container on & off line. Expect more tools, potentially GUI designer type tools and an IDE for use with their cloud offerings as well as a mobile version of this for Android. It's most likely a lead in to Visual Google.
If they are smart they will have this container/browser perform other tasks like parsing content for a fresher Google cache and search results.
Personally, I'm hoping it has less of an impact on web developers and more of an impact on browser developers. Some of the features are really nice, and while the process-oriented approach to separation of tabs will probably make it hefty compared to other browsers, I like the ideas behind it.
My guess is it's going to have to spend a year or longer post-beta to make the kind of impact that Firefox has on web development.
I'd say that I see the improved Javascript engine being the major contribution as far as web applications go. And hopefully will cause a new look for the other browsers and possibly make Javascript implementations a bit more standardized.
Chiming in on this topic. If you have used Chrome, you'll notice a significant speed upgrade, especially on sites using js. I have found that it renders things almost EXACTLY the same as Safari (as you would assume), so I think this drastically minimizes the issue of having to develop on yet another browser.
I think the main thing Chrome does is to offer another (and even perhaps the best to date) alternative to IE. If people start using these, 'advanced' web browsers (man it's sad I have to say that), Microsoft will almost certainly have to step things up with IE9. IE8 seems to me to be more of the same from Microsoft who just can't seem to grasp the UI goodness and overall speed of Safari, Firefox and now Chrome. IE8 is freaking 360MB for godsakes. I think FF3 is like 90MB.
On a side note, has anyone checked out how fast Chrome opens? I found that very impressive.
#Lassevek - The first thing I did was check the js speeds on gmail and "bat out of hell" is precisely how I would describe it.
I just hope Chrome, Firefox and Safari can be temporary friends so they can overthrow IE. After that, it's fair game!
To be quite honest I've always hated Google, with a passion. But, I love their web browser Chrome. It just works. No need to download updates every 5 minutes, No stupid security bars that pop up every time you visit a website, and when I'm writing webpages - I don't even have to test my code anymore because it is standards-compliant, and it just works properly. My current website that I'm building now is about half-done, and it works and looks perfect in Google Chrome. Looks and works perfect in Opera, but as for Internet Explorer, it looks terrible, and it looks fairly good in Firefox.
I don't know. People should stop using Internet Explorer (in my opinion) because it just doesn't work the way it should. Have YOU ever noticed after downloading Internet Explorer 8 on WindwosXP that once you start visiting a few websites, the more sites you visit the longer it takes IE to open a new tab. Sometimes I'm left frustrated, almost sending me into a murderous-rage waiting for a new empty tab to open up! Blah!
As always, it depends on their implementation. If they decide to mess with the rendering engine, we could be looking at a whole new list of browser "quirks" which will mean WebDev's will be uber-pissed.
If they stay standards-compliant (which TBH, I expect they will) it could be a really good thing to heat up the competition.
Be interesting to see how the sandbox mode affects plugin compat, and of course, the tight Gears integration..
That fact that its OSS is a really good thing.. Since any of the above issues could easily be fixed with a patch as soon as the dev community get on to it. :)
Hopefully it will be standards compliant and erase a little midget of Internet Explorer's market share - Firefox has ease of use and plugins going for it, but "security" is something non-technical people can understand... which one could hope would make development easier.
That's assuming it stays standards compliant and innovates well, of course.
As long as there are the other web browsers (and I don't believe that they will die - which is good, because I don't want to see the internet in the hands of Google) it's just another web browser that you need to check compatibility with.
It's not good. More platforms leads to more testing, leads to more time fixing bugs, leads to less time having fun implementing new features, leads to anger, hate, suffering, etc.
I wonder whether plugins/addons will ever be a big focus for Chrome. It seems to be very much focused on providing a fast, clean environment that puts the focus on the web rather than the browser. I suspect that in order to keep it nimble and stable, they may keep the extension capabilities fairly limited (plus, they wouldn't want Adblock for Chrome, would they :-)
I wonder also, given Google's existing relationships with OEMs to include things like the Google Desktop on PCs sold, whether we might start to see Chrome pre-installed on computers. If that were the case, it might become more prevalent than other competitors to IE.
#bpapa
It's just another web browser that
very few people are going to use
because there are already 4 major
browsers out there that work just fine
for most people. It doesn't have the
extensions like Firefox,
Actually, it is pretty clear that it has a plugin architecture
it doesn't
have browser sync with an iPhone like
Safari, it doesn't come with your
computer like IE, and it doesn't...
well I don't know what Opera does that
makes it stand out but I don't think
Chrome has it.
"I don't know what Opera has, but this piece of software that I've never touched clearly doesn't have it"... what??
Another reason why I don't see it
taking off - since it's not on OS X a
lot of tech people aren't going to be
using it.
Did you miss the part where the Linux and OS X distros are coming right behind Windows?
Related
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Closed 9 years ago.
My team is working on a new site which should be cross browser compatible (IE 8+, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera) and cross platform compatible (Desktop, Tablet, Smartphone).
We've been looking at a lot of the new methodologies for achieving this such as HTML 5, responsive design, using JS libraries that abstract a lot of the browser mess away from the user but since the browsers and even MVVM, but the one major issue that I've been facing is how fast the browsers are changing. With both Chrome and Firefox using a model of continuous delivery it becomes harder and harder to test. And from the looks of it other sites have the same problem (it seems like it's hit or miss these days as to whether a site will work in a particular browser)
What suggestions do you or your team have for testing new browsers as they come out?
What things do you do during development to decrease possibility of having code break when a browser update comes out?
And how do you decide when you will or will drop support for a browser version?
NOTE: I've altered the order of your questions to leave the longer answer at the end.
Your questions
What suggestions do you or your team have for testing new browsers as they come out?
Actually, as you said, Chrome and Firefox are continuosly delivering so it eases the process. The last version you have is mostly always the version the user has.
For any other browser (and Chrome and Firefox old versions) just select a version of each and act as a "high pass filter", testing any version up from the one you selected.
How do you decide when you will or will drop support for a browser version?
Take a look at the statistics of browser use. There are many resources such as statcounter, w3counter, w3cschools, or wikimedia. If possible, add an analytics tracker to your page and you will have data about what devices, platforms, browsers, and versions of them the visitors use to access the site.
What things do you do during development to decrease possibility of having code break when a browser update comes out?
The key is to use a well defined methodology, based on the existing standards. Continue reading for a personal recommendation.
Workflow to ease cross-browsing
Step 1: Bootstrapping
At first decide: Graceful degredation versus progressive enhancement. Both are valid techniques, but makes sense using the first to fix existing projects and the second for newly created projects.
Then select libraries to avoid typing existing code, focusing on the 3 languages: JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. HTML5 (+CSS3) is the better choice today but support for older browsers must be provided. The following libraries ease supporting them:
modernizr for feature detection and conditional loading of js or css.
jQuery for ajax and dom related tasks.
normalize.css for normalize default browser styles, rather than just "resetting" them.
Notice that all of the js libraries listed above allow custom builds, an important thing when performance matters.
Html5 Boilerplate provides a strong template from which start the layout. It includes modernizr, jQuery, and normalize.css. Its github repository is a good resource to learn a lot about cross-browsing techniques. This article on its wiki has a nice set of links to start learning.
Step 2: Do the work
Designs should be mobile-first and responsive. This article on html5rocks introduces well why and how.
While "doing the work":
Follow the w3c standards. Avoids using hacks, specially CSS hacks, when possible. Review often the HTML5 specification as it is pretty unstable.
Take care of ECMAScript 5 features when writing javascript. Rely on libraries to avoid code breaks caused by deficient browser implementations. Do not extend the DOM.
Automate tests when possible. Layout and specially layout polishing, including animations, are manually tested cause it's quicker but UI functionalities like form submision can be perfectly tested with automated tests.
Use tools to ease tasks. Chrome + devtools or Firefox + firebug are the very basic must-use, but there are a bunch of tools to ease cross-browsing tests, even automating those tests.
Annex: Tools and resources
Cross-browser testing
Browserstack is just awesome. Allows testing on all devices, platforms, browsers, and versions.
Browserling is an alternative to browserstack. It is developed and maintained by Peteris Krumins and James Halliday, both recognized members of the node.js community and well-known developers. They also published a tool to automate the process called testling-ci, but this is only relevant if using node.js on the back-end.
modern.ie provides tools to ease testing on internet explorer. Developed by Microsoft, the site provides live testing through browserstack and downloadable virtual machine images with pre installed software.
adaptability testing for "responsive design"
respon.si is an online tool meant to test the visually appearance of layouts. It allows selecting a resolution so it's useful for responsive layouts testing. Notice that any other tool to select a resolution can easily do the same.
What suggestions do you or your team have for testing new browsers as they come out?
As part of our definition of done we support the following desktop browsers:
IE8+
Firefox 3.6
Firefox (latest)
Chrome (latest)
Safari 6
The support of the latest versions of Firefox/Chrome is fine because they both provide automatic updates, and so if anybody has a problem on an older version of the browser, it's out of our hands and they should update.
The majority of Firefox/Chrome testing can be done on our machines, but there are obviously discrepancies with how the different OS' handle fonts, and some quirks with native form elements that may or may not carry over to versions on Windows.
To test Firefox versions on OS X I use the "Install all Firefoxes" script that I created, to allow me to run multiple versions of Firefox side-by-side.
Our development team uses Ubuntu and Mac OS as their environments, so we have a dedicated machine with virtual machines for each version of IE, and Chrome/Firefox on Windows, and Safari 6 on OS X.
These virtual machines were setup using the images provided by modern.ie. We're remotely accessing the machine with the virtual machines on so that we don't need to break our workflow and go to another machine.
What things do you do during development to decrease possibility of having code break when a browser update comes out?
The obvious things are avoiding CSS hacks, and making sure that the HTML/CSS/JavaScript that is written meets our code standards, and our definition of done.
If we're using experimental CSS features, we ensure that we're providing vendor prefixed and lastly w3 definitions of properties:
-moz-foo: bar;
-ms-foo: bar;
-o-foo: bar;
-webkit-foo: bar;
foo: bar;
Obviously this introduces some technical debt, but if you're using a preprocessor for your CSS, the overhead of this can be reduced.
We keep a separate stylesheet for IE and load it using conditional comments, so that we can fix problems in IE without affecting the integrity of the rest of the front-end for other browsers. There's a movement lately to moving this in to a shame.css though, which you can read about here: http://csswizardry.com/2013/04/shame-css/
And how do you decide when you will or will drop support for a browser version?
Google Analytics. Segmenting by browser type in Google Analytics is very useful. When usage for a particular browser drops below 10% it's a good time to stop developing new features for it.
You could do something as radical as throwing away all of your hacks/styles for that browser too, but for a smoother transition (and to encourage people to upgrade) it's better to simply stop developing for the older browser, and maybe conditionally display a message.
We dropped support for IE7 recently, and now visitors using IE7 will get a message telling them to upgrade, and they don't get any more fixes or additional features.
Mobile is a whole other kettle of fish, and if your site is completely responsive it's an extra layer of pain.
We've got a bunch of different size/version Android devices, a couple of old iPhones and an iPad kicking around the office that we use for testing the majority of mobile browsers on.
Obviously there are differences with screen size, DPI, browser version etc. The best you can do in this regard is cater for the most common case, and fix any issues as they surface.
design and develop with web standards. validate the web platform. all of the libs/solutions/etc., already listed are phenomenal and quite useful, but if you stick to standards, you'll find you need those libs less and less...at least for gracefully degrading user agent support. i find i use them more and more for progressive enhancement.
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Closed 10 years ago.
I am doing a project, which is a website and my plan is to write every html,css,javascript in notepad++, checking everything in google chrome all the time and when i am finished I will test from the start with IE (which is the most difficult) and the other known browsers and I will correct any issues (with the known methods).
My question is this: Which do you think is the best browser for this work? Which is most compatible with the others, so I won't have to do much work after finish my website on this and correct it for the others? In a few words, which browser is most cross borwser testing material?
Thank you in advance.
I would sudgest using Mozilla Firefox for playing with HTML / CSS.
One great thing it has is the FIREBUG add-on, which can be more tnah usefull while building your website. Check it out on https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/firebug/
You're doing it wrong - it's far easier to fix cross-browser issues as they occur, rather than have to tear through a complex project for a minor issue.
IE6 and IE7 can be safely discounted - as no-one uses them anymore. IE8 is the latest first-party browser for Windows XP and should be tested - it doesn't have any layout bugs, but doesn't support many CSS3 features like rounded-corners - so you might want a fallback stylesheet.
Firefox and Chrome are both very bug-free and have excellent CSS3 support, but have different styling defaults, so I strongly suggest using reset.css: http://meyerweb.com/eric/tools/css/reset/ as this irons out any potential issues.
I suggest Chrome.
1) It's the most popular browser.
2) It's got excellent developer tools.
3) It's webkit so you've also pretty much got Safari covered as well and webkit is also the foundation of most mobile browsers out there (Android/iOS).
IE 10 and Firefox are very similar to what Chrome will show as they're modern browsers. Then you're left with IE8, which I argue these days it's best not to worry about making it look perfect, just make it look good enough. Consider asking yourself what "support" means. I argue supporting an old browser means the site works, not that the experience is the same as Chrome.
Personally I would suggest Firefox - I find firebug invaluable (I've never been able to get along well with Chrome's dev tools) and it commands a reasonably high market share.
That said, if you find Chrome's dev tools good, it may be better to use Chrome (as has already been said, this covers you for Chrome + Safari, which is about 35-40% browser share)
Really it depends on personal preference, try both and see which you prefer.
As a web developer, you must be able to view your website/pages and easily debug it. Therefore, using Chrome is your best bet.
1. Built in Dev Tools.
2. Webkit. This is mostly supported on Safari as well.
3. A great browser to play around with. You can make all your fancy css3 stuff and test it out. If you like it, you can eventually add those to other browsers with javascript/jQuery.
4. Many many extentions. Though there just about the same amount of useful ones on Firefox, Chrome is IMO the best and most supported.
My list of Plugins:
- Chrome Sniffer - shows the framework a site is using... great for curiosity when browsing the net.
- Cloud Save - Lets you save files from websites to your cloud service of choice... great for web idea/resource browsing as well.
- Code Cola - Edit a section on your webpage directly for testing... like Chrome Dev tools but more direct.
- Eye Dropper - A must... lets you pick colors from webpages and find their various color codes.
- IE Tab - If you have windows, this is a great tool to have so you can view IE view inside Chrome.
- IPCV(Image Property Context Viewer) - See image values and such.
- Measureit - Find the dimensions of objects/classes/etc.
- Palette - Click on an image and it generates a palette from it.
- Resolution Test - A must have... check to see how your site displays on various browser dimensions.
- Session Manager - Save all your tabs for another session of Chrome.
- Web Developer - It does just about anything a Web Developer would need to know/test.
- WhatFont - Find out what font a website uses.
There is my qualities for Chrome... hope it is helpful!
Why pick one? If you include live.js and do your development with a locally running web server and then have your page open on all browsers you are testing against, the live.js code will automatically refresh the page every time you save a CSS, HTML or JavaScript file. You just have to add this line of JavaScript to the top of the page:
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://livejs.com/live.js"></script>
Also checkout IETester it lets you run multiple IE Rendering engines on a single PC (great way to test IE5, 6, 7, 8 and 9 (all on the same computer))
IE is the best for testing. here u can solve your design issue easily in compare of any other browser.
I recommend downloading Visual Web Developer 2010 Express (which is free), coding it there and checking you work with Chrome developer tools or Firefox firebug. In my opinion they are the best dev tools out there. Coding with Visual Web Developer express will be much easier as it has Intellisense built in and will save you lots of time. If you want to check your code for validation, use the W3C markup validator.
What are the current best recommended resources for cross-browser testing in the CSS3 jquery world? I am adopting html5 and have adopted parts of css3 into my latest web project. I have also changed over to jquery for my scripting needs. The best answer I have seen for testing this pre-dates html5 and css3 being ready for primetime.
I am testing in Windows Opera, Safari, 2 Firefoxes+firebug, IE+f12 and two Androids. I test myself for input=expected output in my javascript and browser-sizing and other rendering issues. I test my php generated code by rendering it in firefox, then validating. I am trying to test for user experience by having myself and other people use the site and reporting on their opinion of the design, usability and overall impressions of the site-in-action. I present them with views on different sized devices. I even am lucky to have a friend with color-blindness;-} The F12 solution is particularly dissatisfying when testing in IE and the css rendering consumes large chunks of my development time.
Is better emulation available? Has anyone found a better (i.e. fast, easy, efficient, scientific) way to test across platforms yet? I am hoping for a strategy like unit-testing to emerge in the online community so we can make our apps more stable and robust as they become more powerful and influential. I can't seem to find a way to tame this chaos!
Have you used Selenium?
http://seleniumhq.org/
It is a tool to automate browser testing. Some people at Google made it and open sourced it.
You may want to look at RIATest for cross-platform cross-browser testing of HTML5 applications.
It works on Windows and Mac, supported browsers are Firefox, IE and Chrome. Automated testing scripts written on one platform/browser can be run against all other supported platforms/browsers.
(Disclaimer: I am a RIATest team member).
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When I build a site, I'd like to have at least one browser I can show it off in without any hacks or workarounds, and yet still retain maximum functionality. Knowing that none of the browsers have perfect standards adherence, which one comes closest?
Also, are there any standards areas in which a single browser seems to specialize? Opera, for instance, seems to be bent on adhering to all voice-related CSS standards.
The way most people I know work is to run Firefox(with Firebug) and develop in that. Firebug is an invaluable tool for debugging. They will usually take what the get there and try to squeak it into IE and other browsers. Not exactly the answer to your question (Its not 100% compliant but its close), but hopefully it helps.
Safari using the latest WebKit nightly build.
Not that any browser in the world uses this yet (not even Chrome) but if all you're worried about is standards then that's your best bet - it passes Acid3, something no browser on the market can do yet.
This is an excellent question, but I find it hard to give a single answer. Traditionally, Opera has been the most standards compliant. For a long time, it was the ONLY browser to pass the ACID2 test in fact. FireFox and IE haven't been able to claim that (although supposedly IE8 is supposed to fix that, and FF is working on it all the time).
That having been said however, bear mind that IE has the largest "market share" of all the browsers right now (businesses have ties to MS, and Windows always comes with IE out of the box) followed closely by FireFox. So if your goal is to show off your app in a browser that most people will be using, it'll have to be one of those.
Purists will tell you that FF is more standards compliant than IE7 (and they are right), so that you should design for that and not IE. I can tell from many years as a designer/developer that pages taking that approach may not be a great idea. Bear in mind again - IE has the market share, and usually where it counts. So if it looks great in FF but breaks in IE, most users will be very upset, and the same vice-versa.
Best compromise - concentrate on those two. Tweak it to look right in at least FF AND IE, and now you've covered 90%+ of the people that will be using your website.
Don't get me wrong here - I'm not trying to dismiss the users of Opera, Safari, or any other browser. But if you want the most results for the least amount of work, then there ya go.
Best answer - take your time, do it right, test ALL the major browsers. The time spent working through these browser headaches ahead of time (when you can do it at your own pace) will be well rewarded. Compare that to the screaming client who wants to know why your page breaks in his favorite browser, and wants it fixed today. :)
"When I build a site, I'd like to have at least one browser I can show it off in without any hacks or workarounds, and yet still retain maximum functionality."
If you are testing your site, you would be better served to choose target browsers based on your users' needs.
Unless you are in a position where you can force your users to change to a particular browser, you need to test your site in whatever browser(s) they use.
Opera comes closest to standards compliance.
I use Firefox with IE tab and chrome. Firefox with IE tab because those are the two browsers with the most market share and chrome because it is one of the few windows browsers that use webkit, meaning it should display similarly to safari.
The way most people I know work is to
run Firefox(with Firebug) and develop
in that. Firebug is an invaluable tool
for debugging. They will usually take
what the get there and try to squeak
it into IE and other browsers. Not
exactly the answer to your question
(Its not 100% compliant but its
close), but hopefully it helps.
+1 - I prefer firefox for most browsing as I find it most stable and easiest to use, but when it comes to web development it takes the cake when combined with firebug! The others are good for testing, but I find that firefox+firebug makes everything so much easier to use
Try Google Chrome it uses the WebKit which is feature complete for the latest standards.
I used to use Opera and Firefox as my "Standards Compliant" browsers, but I've recently become much enamored with Safari. The WebKit under the hood is really solid, the javascript is really fast (or fast enough, anyway), and and the CSS support is pretty excellent. It's not perfect, but does a really solid job of doing what it's supposed to do.
Also, it has the greatest print-screen feature I've ever seen in a browser. Seriously. Whereas every other browser seems to really munge up any screen I try to print, Safari always seems to get it right. A minor thing, but worth major points in my book.
Edited to add: Chrome is coming close to taking Safari's place, but that print screen thing is still the deciding factor. Being able to just hit "print" during a meeting with a client and not have to fiddle with any settings to get it working right is a major relief.
Don't just use a standards compliant browser, use other tools such as the w3c validator.
I find that if you stick to standards compliant markup, and don't use anything too unusual, it will render fine in Firefox 2/3 and Safari/Chrome (and usually fine in IE7/8). If not, you're probably better off trying to simplify your markup, rather than introducing hacks and workarounds.
Using one browser for all your testing and then hacking it for others is how most people do it but that often leads to problems. Even though Safari may be a more standards compliant browser it is not a highly popular browser and I'd lean more toward using the browser your customer's are using most while writing 100% standard code and then adjusting for idiosyncrasies of other browsers. It's not ideal but it is more customer centered thinking.
I've seen web development companies with multiple full time employees that had bugs on their homepage because they did exactly what you seem to be thinking is your answer. They developed the webpage on a Mac and tested exclusively with Safari. The result was that over 60% of potential customers may have seen layout bugs if their browser was windowed.
Is anyone writing applications specifically to take advantage of google chrome?
Are there any enterprise users who are considering using it as the standard browser?
Yes, I have started to pay very good attention to Google Chrome for my applications. Recent analytics show that between 6%-15% of my users are accessing my applications (varies between 6 to 15 in different applications) on Chrome. And, this number looks on an upward trend.
Thus, I can't really ignore it for testing right now.
As far as taking it as a standard goes, thats a long way off. I still have to test for IE6! :( Though, we have been planning to start using features like Gears (inbuilt in Chrome - downloadable elsewhere) once Chrome crosses the 25% mark. Thats when I believe that we will be looking at Chrome to be our preferred browser. I hope that we have Chrome 1.0+ by then! ;)
I switched to Chrome and haven't looked back except for the occasional site which doesn't work properly, forcing me to load it in Firefox. All my existing web applications work fine on it, and I'm using it for primary testing on my current development project.
I'm not actually targeting chrome, but I have added chrome to my browsers to test sites on. I've found some odd quirks in this product where some plugins cause the browser to hang, or run really slow in some environments, but they are still in beta in active development. But I definately now make sure sites I work on render well in chrome, as well as firefox, latest versions of IE, safari, Konquerer and opera. I usually check out how it looks on lynx as well, that helps me catch "un-alternated text" in images. Yeah, I know that isn't a word, but some people will understand what I'm saying.
Because chrome uses the webkit to render HTML, you can be assured if it works in safari, it'll work under chrome, however it's rendering engine isn't up to scratch quite yet. I think writing applications that take advantage of it is similar to writing iPhone applications, remember chrome is expected to be adopted by android to make it similar to iPhone. That way it pretty much takes advantage of all those iPhone apps.
Would I install it as the browser of choice? not yet - but i'll certainly work on valid web pages that will render across all browsers.
One of our major customers has outlawed Chrome because it installs on the C drive without asking. They deploy a standard image with a small C drive and large D drive so they can easily re-clone the system part of the image on C without destroying the client's personal files on D. Most software allows you to choose the install directory. Anything that violates this is disallowed, and they're a big enough company to have some weight with most vendors.
We have enough headaches trying to support
Firefox
Two versions of IE which have their own iffy bugs
Safari
I'm not sure why we continue to support Safari. Most of our users (corporate) use IE6 or IE7. We try to make sure that things work in both of those.
Maybe not for programming purposes but Chrome w/ Google Reader makes for the most powerful RSS reader. Can handle up to 1500 feeds w/ performance still ok, managing subscriptions still functioning.
I'm using it on my work machine, but that's about it. It's been stable for me, and I like the barebones UI. I'll still switch to Firefox for the web developer extensions however.
I'm liking some of GoogleChrome- the Start page with your 9 most recent is the winner for me. The interface takes a little getting used to, but the speed is impressive, especially with Gmail.
However, it glitches with Java, which rules it out for serious work at the moment. I use FireFox mostly and have Chrome for the "other" websites at work.
I'm considering using GWT on an intranet project and considering suggesting to the users that use Chrome to take advantage of the enhanced Javascript performance. Any AJAX-heavy app would be a great candidate to target Chrome.
At my company, we're not targeting it, but we're definitely paying attention to it. My boss is using it as his primary browser, and I have implemented browser detection for it in our scripts in case we ever to need to target it for some reason.
Chrome has the .png opacity bug where the transparent parts of the .png are a solid color if you try to transition the opacity from 0 to 1. In IE7 the opaque parts are black, and in Chrome, they are white. Today, I decided to go ahead and account for this bug in my JavaScript. I don't really test sites on Chrome that often, but I am actually using it for almost all of my browsing.
I will target Chrome as soon as a stable Linux and OSX client is available.
Targeting Chrome/Chromium right now, I think is like targeting Konqueror web browser. It will get popular, but you should wait to a more stable beta, and/or some Linux and OS X client.
My website statistics shows 3.xx % visitors using Chrome which arrived just few weeks back. And Opera is only 4.xx % which has been around for several years.
Easily you can see that rate at which Chrome is picking up.
You can see how easily Google takes over all areas of your computing world and personal world too.
Since Chrome uses Webkit, it has the same rendering engine and DOM support as Safari (not necessarily the same revision of Webkit though). By testing in Safari, you can generally get by without worrying about Chrome. Any differences you find are probably just bugs that you should file on instead of work around.
However, because Chrome uses a different JS engine, there may be a few incompatibilities with Safari. So, if you're doing anything with JS, you might as well fire up Chrome and see if there's anything obviously wrong.
Generally though, you don't target browsers, you target rendering engines (with their associated DOM support and JS engines).
I am using Google Chrome, so far all the web apps I have work fine in it with no modifications.
No.
Why help Google further build an evil empire? In this particular case it is so obvious that they do not care about users but only obsessed with gathering usage info.
It's not any major player yet