I’ve been keeping a watchful eye on the Chrome Browser from Google and noticed they’d just released the Mac Beta version so I thought I’d have a quick ‘play’ with it.
As you’d expect it does everything you’d want from a browser, I’m pretty much a Firefox/Safari person (they complement each other pretty well particularly with APEX development).
If however you’re coming from an IE background, then Chrome adds a lot of nice features, for example I tried out Chrome against one of my local APEX instances and I had to say it *felt* pretty fast and I didn’t find anything in APEX that didn’t work in Chrome (which is pretty impressive considering APEX isn’t certified against Chrome yet, but I have heard that is something the Oracle APEX development team are looking at for the future).
Even SQL Workshop (which I’ve had a few issues in Safari with seemed to work nicely).
From a development perspective there are some very nice features, such as the “Developers Tools” panel which shows you detailed information about the pages you’re browsing. For example, it is now very easy to determine how long it takes to download and render all the resources in your webpage, or whether a particular Javascript routine is responsible for consuming all the time etc.
If you’ve already used Safari then most of this will already be familiar to you (as it appears to be the same code from WebKit). I’ve been using this functionality in Safari, together with the YSlow and Firebug plugins for Firefox to get the same information, but it’s always nice to have more options.
