First experience with Google Chrome

Whereyougonnabe makes heavy use of JavaScript in the browser, using the Ext JS library, which provides a very rich and dynamic user experience but also tests the limits of browser compatibility. This is especially true when running inside Facebook, which provides another level of complexity and has a knack of showing up obscure low level differences between browsers - we have hit several tricky issues in handling sessions and security recently. FireFox has generally given us the fewest issues. Early on we had some problems with Safari, and today we have had a day of major frustration as we were about to launch a new release, everything was running fine on FireFox and Safari, and on Internet Explorer if you ran our application outside a Facebook frame, but inside Facebook Internet Explorer has suddenly started abruptly refusing to load pages with no helpful error messages - we're still bashing our heads against the wall trying to track this one down.

So I have to say my initial reaction to seeing that Google has announced a new browser called Chrome was "oh no, not another browser to support".  It's currently Windows only which I also wasn't too keen on. But nevertheless I fired up my Windows laptop for the second time in a week to try it out. And I was pleasantly surprised and impressed that it worked first time with whereyougonnabe with no apparent problems :) !!  And subjectively it seemed fast too. We'll be testing it more thoroughly of course, but first impressions are encouraging in terms of compatibility with complex Javascript applications, which Google claim as a major design aim for Chrome.