Whoa. I just clicked on a Greasemonkey script in the latest dev version of Chrome (4.0.266.0 on Linux). Chrome offered to install the GM script, so I said okay. The script ran perfectly in Chrome with no changes at all! I don’t know how many Greasemonkey scripts will run in Chrome unchanged, but at least some will.

Last week brought that news as an official announcement. My guess is that scripts that don’t use specific Greasemonkey APIs should be fine.

(Side-note: I found a good post from November that claims that ~60% of Greasemonkey scripts don’t use any sort of special API calls at all. The top API calls appear to be GM_getValue and GM_setValue (16.5% of Greasemonkey scripts), plus GM_xmlhttpRequest (15.5% of Greasemonkey scripts). It’s unclear which of these functions might be worth supporting. Some could have security implications (GM_xmlhttpRequest). Others like the get/setValue functions could be done by using other ways to store data.)

So this is cool. There’s a good chance that your favorite Greasemonkey script might just work in Chrome. Personally, I recommend the dev channel version of Chrome. It gets all the cool features early, and it’s been very stable/fast for me.

For starters, here’s what Google announced about Chrome OS back in July. At that time, Google called out “speed, simplicity and security” as the key ideas behind Chrome OS. Google released Chrome a little over a year ago with a novel idea–a comic book to describe the features and design decisions behind Chrome.

Looks like Danny Sullivan is live blogging too.

Google OS just noticed that the source code for Chrome OS is available. (Maybe they’ll call the open version “Chromium OS”?)

Sundar Pichai (a Vice President of Product Management at Google) is talking about the progress of Google Chrome over the last year, and the progress of HTML5 as well. Pichai notes some large-scale trends:
- Netbooks are becoming more popular.
- Hundreds of millions of users are living in the cloud. [Yup, I went Microsoft-free as a challenge and I haven't looked back. I do almost everything I need to do in a browser.]
- Innovation in computing devices. For example, phones are getting smarter and more capable–more like mini-computers.

MG Siegler is live-blogging over on TechCrunch.

Every application in Chrome OS is a web application. Sundar Pichai repeated this for emphasis. That means “don’t expect to be able to run .exe files.”

Pichai emphasizes that Speed, Simplicity, and Security are the pillars of Chrome OS:
- Speed: the goal is that boot and execution is blazingly fast. The OS currently boots in 7 seconds.
- Simplicity: the browser is the front-end. If you can run a browser, you should be able to use Chrome OS.
- Security: no code is installed on the system, so detecting malicious processes is easier.

Demo time! 7 seconds to boot. Ooh, they’ve been running the demo on a Chrome OS machine. The UI is still in flux (final machines might not appear for a year).

Chrome OS looks very much like Chrome. There’s an extra pinned tab on the left-hand side to open web applications. When you open up a web application, up pops a “mole” (because it comes from underground) that’s a persistent small window. These “moles” are expected to be called “panels” in the external release. The panels persist as you move between tabs and can be minimized down to the bottom right or they can be closed.

You can also have different windows or workspaces, so you could have a set of tabs for some work and a set of tabs for blog post and switch between them easily. You can drag and drop tabs just like with Chrome.

You can plug in a phone and browse pictures or video files. Then from there you could upload stuff to the web. They showed Flash working. Everything is web-based, e.g. they took a Excel file and loaded it into SkyDrive and viewed it using a Microsoft web app for viewing Excel files.

I want this OS, like now. Matt Papakipos, an engineering director at Google, just announced that they’re releasing the Chrome OS. They’re also releasing a bunch of design docs, not just code. Everything is flash-memory-based–no hard drive.

Matt Papakipos is talking about verified boot. It looks like the Chrome OS team is working hard to verify that code is secure via cryptographic signatures. If you get typical malware, you just reboot–seven seconds later, you’re clean again. Chrome OS does a lot of work behind the scenes to make sure that from the firmware upwards, everything is secure and has the latest patches. The application security model changes in Chrome OS. Instead of running with the privileges of “you” (e.g. administrator capabilities). Under Chrome OS, web applications can’t change your underlying hardware settings, so things are safely sandboxed (chroot, namespaces, stack protection, toolchain). The root partitiion in file system is read-only, including the Chrome executable, which is unusual.

User data is encrypted on a Chrome OS machine. If you lose your laptop, the attacker gets nothing of value. Aside: what will people call these machines? Netbook? Chromebook? Webbook? Webtop? Chrometop? I don’t know what people will decide to call these machines. I like “chromebook.” User data and settings are synced to the cloud. So if you have a wifi network you’ve configured, that data is stored in the cloud. If you dunk your “Chromebook” in a pool or lose it, it sounds like you can pick a new one off the shelf, log in, and it will be as if you never lose your machine.

You can’t download Chrome OS and be guaranteed it will work on a random machine. Target time is end of next year. Google will work to ensure that these machines will be a good experience (good keyboard, resolution). They want compelling devices.

Google is going to be good open-source citizens and contribute code upstream (e.g. to Linux, Ubuntu, Moblin). [I've seen this with Chrome and it's worked well.]

We’re watching this video which is on the Google Chrome channel on YouTube:

Okay, it looks like Google has released a ton of Chromium OS videos on the Chrome channel on YouTube.

Question: How much will it cost?
Answer: You’ll hear that from our partners. Expect prices in the range of what people expect for computer products today.

Question: What are machine you running?
Answer: Sundar Pichai says that the demo was running on an off-the-shelf EEE PC.

Question: Standards?
Answer: MattP: Google is going to be a good citizen on pushing web standards forward, but standards take a while to be finalized. They want e.g. HTML5 to run in multiple browsers.

Questions: Drivers and hardware?
Answer: We’re looking for high-quality components with open-source drivers wherever possible.

Question: Applications?
Answer: Use case is web only. Again, don’t expect to run .exe files on a “Chromebook.” Web-based applications (e.g. photo-editing) can do most of what you want. If you’re a lawyer and editing Word files all day, this wouldn’t be your preferred machine. Sundar mentions that this might be your “backup” machine in that you might want a “primary” machine that can run Windows or Mac apps, but your Chrome machine might actually be your “primary” machine in terms of the time you spend.

Question: Compatibility between Chrome and Chrome OS?
Answer: Everything that works in Chrome works in Chrome OS. Things like Native Client are an important of this story.

Question: Will it run different browsers?
Answer: “Chrome is the OS.” End-to-end is/will be open-source. If someone wanted to make a similar OS with a different browser, they can. But don’t expect e.g. Opera to run under Chrome OS.

Questions: Is this netbook-only?
Answer: Initially focused on netbook-type form factors because they want a compelling experience. Can go bigger later, but for 2010 focusing on netbook.

Questions: Call out hardware partners?
Answer: Probably in the middle of next year?

Question: Size of the code base?
Answer: It’s open, so people can check it out themselves. They want to simplify things, so they don’t want a huge code base.

Question: Any offline access?
Answer: Primarily intended for wifi connectivity. If you use HTML5 you could in theory do offline. You could plug in media and run (say) a Flash game off of the media too. [For example, I played Machinarium, which is a Flash-based game, offline on a plane with my vanilla Ubuntu machine on a recent trip.]

Questions: Wide-band or other unusual networking?
Answer: Mainly focused on 802.11n.

Question: Can it be run in a virtual machine?
Answer: Yes.

Question: Can Android apps run?
Answer: No, only web apps.

Question (Mike Arrington): No plans for native executables?
Answer: Current plan is to only support web apps.
Arrington: That’s exactly what Steve Jobs said, and he changed his stance within a year.
Sundar Pichai: But even the

Question: Native Client implies an Intel processor. Do you plan to support ARM? < - [Smart question from InfoWorld.]
Answer: (Pichai) we want to work with a wide variety of possible partners. MattP seemed to indicate interest in ARM.

Question: timeframe for non-netbooks?
Answer: Focused on netbook for 2010.

Question: Business model?
Answer: Just people using the web more can be really good for Google. Every app is the same web app (seemed to imply no additional ads). The OS is free/open-source, so you could always strip out ads. But the demo didn't show any ads. [This question reminded me of the people who claimed that Android would be a mobile phone OS that would show ads everywhere. That clearly didn't happen.]

Question: Reliability? e.g. Gmail down for two hours stalls me.
[My answer: Cloud-based services are still more reliable than client-based solutions ]

Sergey Brin just showed up.

Question: storage devices?
Answer: Anything that identifies itself as storage should work. They’re taking a new approach to printing (Chrome OS will be able to print) but will share details later.

Question from Niall Kennedy: With Chrome, the release was a stake in the ground and about inviting the community in to help out. This event seems similar?
Answer: Exactly. Officially supported hardware will take a while, but the community can come and join in.

Question: Is this a “War of the Clouds”?
Answer from Sergey: We focus on user needs rather than obsess about strategy. There’s a real user need to use computers easily. You could buy a bunch of netbooks, but managing the software would be unwieldy. If your machine is “stateless” then they’re much easier to use.

For the last 30 days, here are my Google Analytics stats for mattcutts.com:

For me, 8.97% of my readers run Chrome, up from 7.04% in March 2009.

Some different browser marketshare numbers:

- Net Applications says that Chrome went from 2.59% to 2.84% from July 2009 to August 2009.

- StatCounter gives daily stats. I’m seeing 3.31% on Saturday August 1st to 3.59% on Saturday August 29th.

- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 3.376% to 4.004%:

So after one year, three different sources report market share of 2.84%, 3.59%, and 4.004%. That’s pretty good for 12 months. More importantly, Chrome has pushed all browsers to be faster, more modern, and generally better.

I’m also looking forward to some of the fun things coming in Chrome. Features like bookmark syncing and themes in the latest developer or “dev” release of Chrome are quite nice. If you’re adventurous, you can also try dev versions of Chrome for the Mac and Linux too. And if extensions are your thing, those are coming along as well.

Does anyone know of other sources for browser marketshare? How do the browser stats look for your site(s)?

Some different browser marketshare numbers:

- Net Applications says that Chrome went from 1.15% to 1.23% in the last ~30 days.

- StatCounter says that Chrome topped 2% recently. Click through to see fewer people using Internet Explorer and more people using Firefox and Chrome over the weekends. StatCounter provides CSV export, so I made a separate chart for Chrome:

- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 2.099% to 2.479%

Not shabby for a little over six months since Chrome was released. My favorite Chrome links recently are:

- The dev channel switcher to get the latest/greatest features in Chrome. For example, the dev channel uses the F11 key to switch to full-screen mode. You can also delete auto-form-fill suggestions by cursoring down to them and hitting the “Delete” key.

- The Chrome Experiments site demonstrates how well Chrome handles JavaScript. My favorite demos are Browser Ball, Ball Pool, Wavy Scrollbars, and the bizarrely addictive Twitch.

How do the browser stats look for your site(s)? And does anyone know of other sources for browser marketshare?

Here’s how to write your own Google Chrome extension in three steps:

1. Install the developer-channel version of Google Chrome. I don’t know if this is 100% necessary, but new support for plugins will probably show up in the developer version first. You can read instructions on how to switch to the developer version. It takes maybe 3-4 minutes — you basically run a small program to indicate your preference. In case you’re worried that the developer version will crash a lot: I’ve been running the developer version for months and haven’t seen any major issues. The developer version also gets new features (such as pressing “F11″ to get full-screen mode) way before the beta/stable releases of Chrome. I’m using version 2.0.170.0 of Chrome and the “hello world” extension worked fine for me.

2. Read the initial documentation. This is a brand-new feature, but you can already start hacking. Extensions currently have very Greasemonkey-like functionality: you identify which web pages should be modified, plus JavaScript to be added to those pages. By default, the extension’s JavaScript runs after the page loads, but you can specify that the extension’s JavaScript should run before the page loads. Right now, you can only load one JS file, but that could change in the future. You also can’t currently load Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), but that might also change.

I like several things about the extension framework:
- Your plugin has to have a unique identifier (40 digit hexadecimal number). Given an identifier such as “00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456″, an extension can include an image such as foo.gif and then easily access that image by using a full path such as “chrome-extension://00123456789ABCDEF0123456789ABCDEF0123456/foo.gif”
- The “content script” (the JavaScript of an extension) gets its own global scope separate from the web page, so you don’t need to worry about global variables conflicting. But you can still get access to the web page’s global variables using the “contentWindow” variable.
- Bundling your extension directory into a “.crx” Chrome Extension file is as simple as running a short Python script.
- Chrome also supports binary NPAPI (Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface) plugins.

The Chrome extension manifest, which has metadata about your extension such as name, version, etc., looks much simpler to me than how Firefox wants extensions to be packaged. That’s a big plus in my book, because you spend most of your time writing code and not worrying about packaging up your plug-in. On the down side, I didn’t see any support for internationalization, which is one of the benefits of Firefox’s more comprehensive way of packaging up plugins. Another limitation of the current Chrome extension spec is that you can’t do much other than modify pages via JavaScript. And I didn’t see a way to introduce new widgets into the actual “chrome” of the Chrome browser.

3. Try it out! If you’re running the developer version of Chrome, you can install the “hello world” plugin from the extension howto page just by clicking to download the .crx file. Then type “chrome-ui://extensions/” and you’ll see something like this:

Once you see how it works, just start hacking around and see what happens. Remember, this howto document is only a few days old. I’m sure the Chrome team is thinking about ways to add more functionality to extensions, but the current developer version of Chrome already lets you do a lot of neat things.

One more nice thing: it looks like installing extensions doesn’t require you to restart the browser. And a hat-tip to Google OS for pointing out this document.

I’ve covered the issue of when Chrome communicates on your behalf before, but recent versions of Chrome have made it even easier to understand. Back in early November, the Chrome team addressed this concern:

Privacy section in Options.
We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.

And here’s a picture of what the Privacy section looks like:

There’s also a link to this web page with more information on each option, and from that web page you can drill down in more detail into any specific feature that interests you. For example, I opted-in to send usage/crash data to Google to improve future versions of Chrome (that option is off by default).

I like that you can manage Chrome’s communications settings in a centralized location. I don’t consider features such as phishing protection or DNS pre-fetching to be worrisome, but it’s nice to give easy controls to turn features on or off. I don’t expect that will stop people from mistakenly repeating that Chrome is somehow scary or has privacy issues, but for the people that care enough to do the research, they’ll be happy to find out that Chrome lets you choose exactly how and when Chrome sends data to the outside world.

By the way, I think Chrome was released on September 2, 2008, which makes it the four-month birthday of Chrome. Happy birthday to the Google Chrome team!

When 96% of your computer time is spent in a browser, that’s living in the cloud.

Normally when I have suggestions or complaints about a Google product, I talk directly to that team within Google — the Google Chrome team is especially good about listening to feedback. They also provide a very easy way to file bugs or feature requests against Chrome, and they do triage those requests. But I’ve written so positively about Google Chrome in the past that I wanted to show the sort of feedback that I give when I really care about a product.

So here’s what I would change about Google Chrome:

- Hitting the escape key should freeze any animated GIFs on a web page.
This is now filed as a bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=3690

- Fixed: Middle-clicking on a tab is a fast, easy way to close tabs. But it can’t currently be aborted — what if you click your middle button on a tab and then realize that you don’t want to close that tab? On Firefox you can move your mouse off the tab before releasing the button to abort closing the tab. That doesn’t work on Chrome right now.

Update: Peter Kasting, a Chromium developer, stopped by in the comments and mentioned that the 1.0.154.39 dev channel release adds this functionality. The fact that a team member is willing to wade into the comments and address specific complaints/questions is one of the factors that makes me think Chrome will be a successful project.

- If I start typing “Google webmaster blog” into the Omnibox, it offers to search Google for “webmaster blog”:

I’m a power user, so I want a way to turn that quicksearch off. I type a lot of searches of the form [Google X Y Z] but that doesn’t mean I want to search on Google for [X Y Z].

Update: Solved. Barry Hunter made this observation:

It is possible to turn off, I also found it very annoying. Goto Options, and on the Basics tab, click the ‘Manage’ in Default Search bit. You probably have a ‘Google’ listed in ‘Other Search Engines’ – delete that – which was probably imported from Firefox via an original OpenSearch description.
(if you dont, look for an entry with ‘google’ in the keyword column)

Thanks, Barry!

- Chrome doesn’t recover submitted form data as well as Firefox if you have to click the back button.
Follow this bug here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2636

- There’s a weird interaction between WordPress and at least the current dev version of Chrome. If I select some text and click the “link” button when writing a blog post, I get a pop-up that already contains “http://”. The text “http://” should be selected so that I can delete it or paste over it easily. Right now I have to select the text and then delete it. This is really annoying.
Chrome 2 fixed this, but it’s broken again in Chrome 2.0.162.0. Filed a bug: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=7754

- One thing I love about Chrome is that you can type ‘t’ in the omnibox and it will suggest something reasonable like “techmeme.com” and you can just hit return to go there. But if you’ve been to a hostname that exists (e.g. if you’ve visited a valid internal server at http://t/ ) then you have to type ‘te’ before the “techmeme.com” suggestion comes up, because Chrome assumes that you want the server with that name:

I want to be able to right-click and delete any Omnibox suggestion. Then ‘t’ will suggestion techmeme.com again.

Update: Solved, again thanks to Peter Kasting in the comments:

Hit shift-delete on the item (this also works in Firefox). Caveat: You have to arrow to the item (that means that if the item is the default selection, arrow away, then back). This is to avoid conflation with the system level shift-delete “cut” shortcut.

- I’m a weirdo, but I want the ability to add user styles so that I can (say) highlight nofollow links. So I want the equivalent of userContent.css that Firefox offers.
Follow the bug to add user stylesheets here: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=2393

Update: Hacky workaround. Thanks to a friend for pointing out how to do this. This is a temporary stopgap and may void your warranty. Don’t complain if this breaks anything. Here’s how to do it:

1) Sign up for the dev channel of Chrome.
2) Create a directory C:\scripts\ and save http://blog.bubble.ro/wp-content/uploads/2007/07/nofollowhighlight.user.js into C:\scripts\ (the path is deliberately ugly to remind you that this is a temporary workaround).
3) Run Chrome with –enable-greasemonkey (make sure to close all Chrome instances so you get a fresh invocation of Chrome when you start). To do this, right-click on the Chrome shortcut and select “Properties”. In the “Target:” text box, add “–enable-greasemonkey” at the very end of the line (note that it’s two hyphens before “enable-greasemonkey”). It should look like this:

Now you can see nofollow links!

- A friend pointed this one out to me: If you’re using a proxy url and get on a VPN, Chrome can take 20-30 seconds to refresh/reload the proxy script. I think Chrome might use a Windows-wide service, which is why it takes a while? In Firefox you can click a “Reload” button to force a refresh of the proxy configuration URL.

- Chrome doesn’t have that many options now, but eventually I’d love the equivalent of Firefox’s about:config method of changing settings.

- I don’t know if this is a Chrome issue, but when I use Chrome with Twitter, copying and pasting urls/text in the text box can be weird sometimes, e.g. you copy/paste urls and it copy/pastes from a different location in the text box. I don’t know how to describe it, but people who use Chrome and Twitter a lot might have seen this too.

Added: Here’s how to reproduce the Twitter/Chrome weirdism. Open http://www.cnn.com/ in one tab in Chrome. Copy the url. Open Twitter in another tab. In the “What are you doing?” box, type “One two three: “. Then paste the url “http://www.cnn.com/ ” into the box. Then type “four five six seven eight nine ten eleven twelve fourteen.” into the text box. Now click on the text between “twelve” and “fourteen” (as if you were going to add a new word between them). Instead, the cursor position will move to just before the “http://www.cnn.com/” text. If you double-click between the twelve and fourteen, the “http” will be selected. It looks like this:

One weird thing is that this bug only fires when you have two lines filled in that Twitter text box. If the text was “One two three: http://www.cnn.com/ four five six seven eight nine ten eleven.” (which fits on one line) then you don’t see this issue. I also didn’t see this issue in Firefox.
Filed a bug for this issue: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=7755

Do you have Google Chrome nitpicks or things you would change? Assume that the team has heard the feedback on
- Mac and Linux versions
- extensions
- perhaps better integration (Google Toolbar-like features, or Google Bookmarks)

and that they don’t need to hear that feedback. Are there other annoyances or things that you would change about Google Chrome? The Chrome team is a top-notch group of people in my experience and they release new dev channel versions of Chrome almost every week, so I’d be curious if you’ve run across specific bugs, annoyances, or niggly things that might be easy to change.

(And just to be clear, I love and use Google Chrome all the time. I didn’t mind posting this because I know the Chrome team is so strong that they can handle suggestions from a passionate user.)

Rough browser numbers are

OneStat says that they see 0.54% share for Google Chrome. Net Applications provides an hour-by-hour graph, which is nice, but they hardwired it to look for the string “Chrome 0.2″ when Chrome is on version 0.3 or 0.4 by now. Just eyeballing the Chrome 0.3 version stats, it looked like about 0.85% market share according to Net Applications. Hey Net Applications folks, any chance you’d be willing to roll up all the Chrome versions into your hourly report?

I hadn’t realized that Internet Explorer usage had dropped so low for my site (~26%). What does your browser marketshare stats look like for the last month or so for your site(s)?

P.S. Stephen Shankland writes about switching to Google Chrome because of the speed, while ExtremeTech also concluded that Chrome is speedy. And if you haven’t seen it, there’s a new version of Chrome (0.4.154.25) that adds a couple nice features:

Bookmark manager with import/export.
Use the ‘Customize and control Google Chrome’ (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager’s Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.

Privacy section in Options.
We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.

Personally, I run the dev channel version of Chrome because I like to see what cool features are coming soon. I think the dev channel has averaged weekly updates, which is really nice because you can literally watch plug-in fixes and other improvements arrive every few days. It’s wild to see client software updated that often instead of every few months.

Update, 11/28/2008: Somehow I missed the getclicky.com browser marketshare stats from 60K+ sites. They peg Chrome at 1.55%, with a little bit of 1.6% to 1.7% in the last week or so.

Like many Google engineers, I’ve been running Google Chrome for several months. When I sat down with a blank piece of paper to write down why you should try Google Chrome, I ended up with several reasons, including speed, security, stability, and openness. I’ll run through them for you.

Speed. Google Chrome is wicked fast, especially if you use AJAX/JavaScript-heavy web applications such as Gmail. And it’s not just “benchmark fast,” it’s end-to-end fast. Google Chrome puts special emphasis on never making the user wait. Opening a tab is essentially instantaneous, and all the little pauses that would normally interrupt your workflow just don’t happen. Of course, sometimes a remote web server is slow to return data–there’s nothing that a web browser can do about that–but for everything else, the browser speeds along like lightning.

When Gmail came out, it took me months to switch over. Before Gmail, I used mutt and I had all kinds of crazy customizations and wild procmail rules, so it took quite a while for Gmail to convince me to switch. In contrast, it took less than a week for me to switch to Google Chrome. It’s so scary fast that I felt like I was taking smart pills because of all the extra work and email I could blast through.

Security. As the head of Google’s webspam team, I prowl around some pretty hairy places on the internet. Almost every day I encounter hacked pages, malware, porn, and generally scuzzy pages. The security model in Google Chrome is much stronger than most other browsers I’ve used. I’ve surfed through hundreds of seedy back alleys of the Internet over the last several months, and Google Chrome has safely kept me from being infected or affected by the junky web pages I encounter.

Stability. I loved my previous browser (and still do!), but I got used to killing my browser and restarting it daily to prevent memory leaks from hobbling my machine. I’ve run Google Chrome for weeks at a time with bunches of open tabs and it hasn’t crashed on me or bloated up my computer’s memory. I also love that Google has a “ChromeBot” which takes each new browser build and throws (put your pinky finger to your lips) one million webpages at the build as a torture test. That testing virtually guarantees that everyday web pages shouldn’t crash your browser. Google Chrome has been rock solid for me.

Openness. You aren’t locked in to using Google’s search; you can choose to use any major search engine in Google Chrome. Plus, as you click around the web, you don’t send surfing information to Google. Google Chrome is open-source under a BSD license, so you can check that for yourself. The cool bits of Google Chrome, including V8 (a from-the-ground-up JavaScript virtual machine), are open for anyone to take and use.

The comic book. Still not convinced? If you’re a geek, read the 40-page comic book about Google Chrome. It’s genuinely educational about the design choices that Google made. It turns out that a comic is one of the best ways to introduce a large piece of new software:

You’ve all heard the acronym “RTFM,” right? It stands for Read The *cough* Fine Manual. The next time someone asks whether Google Chrome uses WebKit or something else, I can say RTFC–Read The Fine Comic.

Okay, how well does that post hold up after a month?

On speed, I think Chrome really holds up well. Om’s comments are filled with people who got hooked on the speedy and nice Google Chrome browser experience. A couple people who didn’t like it only tried it for a day; I really think you need to give Chrome a few days (maybe a week) to really notice the end-to-end difference.

On security, I was impressed that so few security holes were found, and most of them required the user to take some additional action or involved social engineering. I have seen very few (no?) attacks like “surf to a random page and your browser gets pwned.” That’s really nice to see; I’m sure the Chrome team was anxious to see what would happen when the outside world tried to attack Chrome. Chrome has been quite robust for a web browser that was only recently released into beta. I continue to surf to really dangerous places with no resulting hijacks or malware.

How about stability? I always thought this would be the weakest point of the Chrome launch, and not because of web pages that would crash Chrome, but because it’s hard to test on a wide variety of real-world hardware when you’re trying to keep a product secret before releasing it. And again, I was surprised that so few things broke. The fact that the Chrome team has released four updates to Chrome in four weeks tells me two things: 1) the worst bugs are going to get knocked down pretty quickly and 2) the Chrome team is very serious about iterating to improve the browser.

Openness is an interesting one. I think the EULA issue caused a short-term goodwill hit. Google corrected the terms in about a day, but it still provided material for the people who dislike the fundamental notion of the Chrome browser. I have to admit that I was surprised that people objected to the “Suggest” feature when you’re typing into the address bar, but it’s good that Google reacted quickly on that one as well. I had a conversation with Danny Sullivan where he urged Google employees to try to look at Google as if they were outside the company and didn’t work for Google. It’s excellent advice and definitely provides a helpful perspective. Ultimately, I think that the open-source nature of Google Chrome’s code should reassure most people and win over fans with time.

And the comic book? I still think it’s a cool way to explain a lot of complex design decisions.

I’ve been watching the Chrome team work, and I believe that they’re going to earn the respect and loyalty of a lot of surfers over time. Their ability to execute reminds me of how the Google Reader team won me over a couple years ago. If you’re running Windows and haven’t taken it for a spin, if you try Chrome for 5-6 days, I think you’ll like it too.