my desk, where I spend all my time.

I noticed the other day at the office, after installing Google Chrome, that the browser had a slightly obnoxious rendering glitch.  It’s apparent when viewing the jQuery Growl demo page.

Basically, it boils down to this … Chrome renders PNG’s exactly as one would expect it too, the same way that Safari and Firefox handle them … transparencies are … you got it, transparent!

Do you remember the ugly IE PNG bug where it doesn’t know how to handle the transparency layer and treats the alpha pixels ‘oddly’, almost randomly picking a color of choice and replacing your alpha pixel with a 100% opaque color? Well, looks like Chrome has a similar bug, at least … visually.

When jQuery Growl appends a new notification element to the DOM, and then fades it in … Chrome goofs the rendering up and makes the transparent pixels … non-transparent.  It appears to only do this on pixels that are not 100% transparent (opacity = 0). See the screenshot below for an example:

Chrome Render Bug

As you can see, the corners are 100% transparent … but everything else is not … since the background image has a weird glow/drop shadow effect on it … and you can see the notifications above it that have there CSS opacity set to 100, the PNG renders perfectly.

This bug appears to be present when the DOM Element’s opacity is set to anything other then 100, such as a jQuery fadeIn or fadeOut animation that is executing.

Nice, eh?

Hopefully, they fix this bug in the next beta …

However, as with all things that are new … the number one issue I had was with it’s lack of support for Plugins.  Firefox is an open-source browser, and to my knowledge, so is the API that powers plugins for Firefox.  With a little bit of crafting, I’m sure Google Chrome could support Firefox plugins in no time flat.

Just imagine, the full power of WebKit, with the extensibility of Firefox and the stability of Chrome’s architecture.  The web looks like it’s going to be getting quite a face lift in the near future, with the way that Chrome handles rendering and how it isolate’s javascript and to that affect, optimizes it as well… we’re looking at a whole new ‘big picture’ for the web in the near future.  I don’t think anyone will adopt the technology ‘right away’ and require it for ‘stability’, but I do see it being looked at very seriously for all future web ventures … just picture, if Facebook was designed to work exclusively with Chrome’s architecture, how much more they could do with the ‘web app’ without affecting the user’s experience by slowing down other pages, etc?

One thumb up for Google so far … two if they integrate Firefox plugins, none if they go the route of developing their own Plugin API… cause we all know, we don’t need yet another browser plugin API…. geez, can’t we all just get along, and share the brilliant power of freely downloable browser plugins without needing to have Browser X or Y installed to utilize them?  We all know, Microsoft will never jump on that band wagon, but Google … they just might.

I also see a future release of Firefox taking advantage of the Chrome architecture as well … in the near future.