In this interview, the Mozilla Europe president states that he doesn’t think Google Chrome is competing with Firefox, rather it is competing with Internet Explorer, citing reasons of competing on search/advertising etc.

Just one question: Why do most Internet Explorer users use Internet Explorer? I’m tempted to set up a web survey, but I’m fairly sure the most popular reason will be “there’s an alternative? (confused look)”. Agree or no?

OK, so having established that, now I’d like to compare the demographic who will install, try and then continue to use Google Chrome with the demographic who know there are possible alternatives to IE and so use Firefox. Once again I’ll forego the web survey, but I think you’ll see a similarity in those two groups nonetheless.

Soooo. Taking these things into account, which browser do you think will lose more users to Chrome? At this point Firefox’s main defence is it’s massive and massively useful library of addons (even if Chrome comes complete with a cut-down replacement for my favourite FF addon, Firebug), but if Google adds a plugin capacity to Chrome, all bets are off.

I read the comic, liked the idea. Downloading and installing was painless, and it looks good when it starts.

Unfortunately, you then have to try browsing some sites…

OK, so judging it badly because a plug-in doesn’t work so well (the flash video on the front page of this site stuffs it, for instance – YouTube takes ages, and throws up a “script unresponsive” type error), but try going to Google Maps. You’d think they’d make sure their own browser was the mutt’s nuts at displaying their own sites, but no. It’s slow and jerky, and nowhere near as good as Firefox. Not sure why though – my first guess would be Javascript performance, but that seems really fast on other sites – check this Javascript test from Quirksmode. It keeps freezing on random pages as well, for no particular reason that I can see.

Shame really – usually Google’s “beta” products are more polished than many a production release (witness Gmail – I swear they only leave the “beta” there for a laugh). Either this really is just an early beta, or ZDNet are right and they just want to give Microsoft and Mozilla a few ideas to chew on.

<edit> (03/09/2008) – Of course, having now tried it on several other PCs, and rebooted the one I originally tested it on, I can say that most of the problems I came across earlier were actually rubbish. It plays flash just fine, google maps is quick and smooth. </edit>

On the plus side, it does work well on most sites. Wikipedia is really quick, it passes the Acid2 test, more than you can say for IE, and does quite well on Acid3 (compared to many others). That’s probably down to Webkit more than Google though. The Chrome-specific task manager is useful when you find a site that crashes it, too – it just crashes a single tab rather than the whole browser.

Anyway, checkitout: http://www.google.com/chrome