Google Chrome turns 10 with a fresh look, better omnibox, and more

Google Chrome just turned 10, wrapping up a decade where the browser captured the world by rapidly becoming the browser of choice for people who “knew better.” For the anniversary, Google is rolling out a revamped design and a slew of new features, including a more powerful omnibox.

Back in 2008, web browsers were broken. While they served their utilitarian function of enabling us to browse the cornucopia of web content, features like plug-ins, custom software, and enterprise tools were starting to creep past the point of usefulness, often slowing things down and generally getting in the way. Our window to the internet, once clear and full of potential, had become sullied with frustration. Even Firefox, at the time the browser of choice for power users, had become a toolbar-laden mess.

Then, on Sept. 2, 2008, Google launched Chrome. The name was consciously ironic: Chrome did away with the toolbars, menus, text fields, and other “chrome” that was taking up more and more room in your browser window. All of that fell to the background, and you were left with just a single “omnibox” for you to type in and, well, the web.

In other words it was a triumph of design.

By discarding much of the junk, Chrome was an inherently faster browser, and much of the early discussion around Google’s web browser was about speed. But in the years since Chrome has consistently led the way on features that improve the browsing experience — some of which, like preventing videos from autoplaying, might be surprising coming from the company behind the largest ad network in the world.

That’s probably why Chrome’s market share has continued to dominate on desktops even though Apple’s Safari and Microsoft Edge offer comparable browsing experiences and tend to have faster performance on their native platforms. (Chrome doesn’t dominate mobile since iOS makes it difficult for browsers other than Safari to gain a foothold on the iPhone.)

One of the people behind much of Chrome’s design over the past decade is Alex Ainslie, Google’s head of design for Chrome. Ainslie spoke to Mashable about Chrome’s 10th anniversary makeover and the things to come for Chrome.

“We have the four S’s,” Ainslie says. “Chrome values of speed, simplicity, security, and stability. I think there could be a misperception that the design team is responsible only for simplicity. But actually, more and more design effort is related to those other pillars.”

The new stuff

The first thing people will notice is the new look. Starting today (with Chrome version 69 and teased to users of Canary, the experimental version of Chrome), you’ll start to see more rounded corners and a new color palette. The shape of the tabs makes site favicons easier to see so you can navigate them better. And on iOS, where Chrome has been sorely neglected for a long while, the toolbar finally goes to the right place — the bottom of the screen, closer to where your thumbs are.

There are new customization features, too. For the “new tab” screen, you can easily change the background image as well as the site suggestions.

Eagle-eyed users will notice the new Chrome handles URLs differently. This will be the first version of Chrome to discard the “http://” from how the URL is displayed, which, from a design perspective, is a relic of the early days of the web when navigating in any detail could often be an exercise in coding.

“If you step back and consider like your first day with a computing device, which is a phone, probably an Android phone you’ve just purchased,” explains Ainslie. “And then you encounter a URL in Chrome’s omnibox that is filled with acronyms: HTTPS, colon, slash, slash, www dot Google dot com slash, dub, dub, dub — all these things. It’s incomprehensible. So we’re pushing to make the resting state of our omnibox more human readable.”

Of course, the change also means users won’t be able to see “https” either, an indicator that a site has a basic level of security. Ainslie isn’t worried, since the browser will still show the lock icon.

“The effort to move the web towards https is something the Chrome team has been working on for many years,” he says. “It was not just a technical challenge — it really was a design problem. We did a bunch of research about iconography in the omnibox for connection security, to try to make sure we were communicating better about whether [the user] was safe or not.”

Chrome is smarter now, too. If you hate browser autofill like I do, you may want to give the new way Chrome does it a chance. Ainslie says Google has studied the pain points in autofill, and has improved the feature in key ways.

“There’s been a lot of investment on the engineering side to make it more robust, so better at identifying fields and filling in the right stuff in the right place.”

Autocomplete gets a overdue upgrade: You’ll see favicons of sites in the drop-down, and Chrome will now show answers to some queries right in the autocomplete list, even before you hit Return. Safari already has a similar feature, offering links to things Wikipedia and recent news articles about some subjects. However, the suggestions often default to selling you something from an Apple service — for example, if you type the name of a movie, it’ll point you to iTunes.

The autocomplete is also a not-so-subtle reminder that Google is watching everything you’re doing in Chrome to some extent, even the things you haven’t finished typing. In fairness, you can turn the feature off, and Google says doing so will also block any record-keeping of what you typed.

There’s a nice autocomplete bonus for power users like myself: If you type in a website that you already have open in another tab, autocomplete will tell you and give the option to jump to that tab, even if it’s three browser windows removed. A later upgrade will even let you search files from Google Drive right from the omnibox.

Chrome will also handle passwords better. It’ll suggest passwords automatically when you log into a site for the first time and remember them when you come back.

Chrome’s legacy

The changes to Chrome are mostly subtle, which may disappoint some users. While Chrome is dominant on desktops, it’s also arguably been complacent the last few years, and often Google’s geek pedigree shows in some features, like extensions.

But all that versatility has its downsides. Extensions and apps can easily get out of control, and all that interactivity has encouraged the bane of web browsing in 2018: near-constant requests for sites to send desktop notifications. While Ainslie admits they can be an issue, they’re also an outgrowth of the communication Chrome was built to enable, so it’s a delicate balance.

“We have a bunch of moments where we try to broker commincation between a site and an end user. Permission prompts are a really good one. I think we have a challenge in that space of permissions. One change we made on Android recently is that the prompt, instead of being ignorable, we made them modal to force a choice between block or allow.”

In today’s announcement, Google suggests it will enhance Chrome’s augmented-reality features in the near future, so you’ll be able to, say, select a product and see how it looks in real life using your phone’s camera. It’s also working on improved Google Translate features and better defenses against phishing attacks.

That all sounds good, but it’s not like other browsers are standing still. Safari is now insanely fast on most Macs, and Microsoft Edge has completed its evolution into a full-featured competitor to Chrome, and Microsoft has no shame in pushing its native browser to users as hard as possible, even through ads in the OS itself.

But Chrome, despite a few years where it was sitting on its laurels, is still king. That’s partly because it’s cross-platform: There is no Safari for Android or Windows, and Edge is still too new to have earned enough trust among users — especially since so many were burned by Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, which became synonymous with a poor browsing experience.

But the main reason Chrome is still the browser for people who know better in 2018 is because of how much Google services have become intertwined with our digital lives. Whether it’s Search or Maps or Drive or Photos, chances are you depend on at least one Google service, and using it with Chrome is simply a better experience.

That goes double for anyone whose uses G Suite: Chrome will let you switch user profiles easily without switching the user account on a PC or Mac — both Safari and Edge force you to log out completely to do so (although private browsing works in a pinch).

In short, Google appears to really mean it when it says it prioritizes the user experience above all else. Back in 2008, that novel idea helped clean up browsers for a whole generation of people raised on the web. By keeping its eye on the design ball, Chrome’s reign could last another decade.