There has been a considerable traffic spike here, since Google announced their new web browser, Google Chrome.

Not because I’ve spoken about it until now, but because it sparked interest in my thoughts on Gecko vs WebKit.

Google Chrome is considerably ‘buzz’-y at the moment, so I thought I would fire up an internet-connected Windows machine and give it a try.

While from a technical point of view much of the browser seems very interesting – and a very good idea (separating each tab into its own individual process, the new V8 JavaScript engine), at the moment I can’t see it offers much unique user-visible functionality.

Regardless of whether something is technically awesome or not, you won’t get the masses to use it unless they can see a killer feature – something that is visible to them and benefits them.

There are some unique elements to Chrome’s interface – specifically the single address/search bar (Omnibar), but I can’t help feeling underwhelmed at the lack of ‘killer-ness’ about the browser at the current time.

It is early days, though – and Chrome does show some promise.

So I’m downloading the WebKit source code which I need for an upcoming FOSSwire tutorial. Downloading it from SVN is painfully slow, but then I can’t remember SVN checkouts ever having been that fast.

There’s another option to download – grabbing a .tar.bz2 of the latest nightly. Downloading that over HTTP is, guess what, also painfully slow.

The top speed this connection can do on download is around 250 Kbytes per second. It’s downloading at less than 10% of that capacity, with no other activity on the connection. Downloads from other sites run much faster. Now it might just be me, but I can’t help thinking Apple are either not putting enough resources into WebKit.org, or they’re deliberately degrading the download experience.

I hope for their sake it’s the former, and if so, come on Apple, put some resources into it! You wouldn’t have a base for Safari if it wasn’t for the open source community, so let’s be nice back shall we?