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More About Google Chrome

By on September 3, 2008 in General, reviews

I’ve been read­ing a few more com­ments about Google Chrome last night and this morn­ing and have kept using it for brows­ing since yes­ter­day. Here’s a few more points :

  • My com­ments from yes­ter­day and today take into account that Chrome is a first beta. People have to remem­ber that this is not yet a replace­ment for anyone’s reg­u­lar browser. Many com­ments say that it doesn’t sup­port exten­sions like Firefox, IE or Opera (they may call it diff­fer­ent things but you get my gist). It also has some annoy­ing ren­der­ing bugs that seem to be due to Webkit and misses basic func­tion­al­ity like a way to turn off scripts which is a very good point that a com­menter to my pre­vi­ous post brought up. All valid points but remem­ber that this is a FIRST beta. Chrome will evolve.
  • I saw a com­ment today on Jeffrey Zeldman’s site that summed up my first impres­sion of it : “At present this seems like a solu­tion wait­ing for a prob­lem”. The more I think about it, the more I think that’s true. Did we “really” need a new browser in the market?
  • The above ties in with some of Zeldman’s com­ments as well as Tantek Celik who com­mented on the same post. Both say the same thing which is that, in order to com­pete, a new browser must offer some­thing that oth­ers do not. They then dis­cuss ways a browser may dif­fer­en­ti­ate itself and Tantek brings up the point that, with a sim­i­lar fea­ture set, a browser may win mar­ket share by bring­ing bet­ter per­for­mance. So far, this seems to be the main thing Chrome brings to the table. But is it enough?
  • While Chrome is cer­tainly much faster than Firefox, even Firefox 3 which improved its prdecessor’s very slug­gish per­for­mance, is it really much faster than Opera 9.5? Not in my expe­ri­ence. On some pages, Opera is actu­ally still faster than Chrome. So again, is it enough?

Like I said yes­ter­day, only time will tell what impact Chrome will have when it reaches gold sta­tus and reaches a wider audi­ence out­side Web pro­fes­sion­als and hard core tech geeks. Will peo­ple be will­ing to swicth? Personally, I have my doubts, espe­cially if Chrome’s dif­fer­en­ti­a­tion fac­tors are not more vis­i­ble than just speed. That may be enough for some peo­ple but most IT depart­ments will prob­a­bly keep using IE and those who moved to Firefox, Opera or Safari may choose to stay with the devil they know…

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Google Chrome

By on September 2, 2008 in General, reviews

I just down­loaded and installed Google Chrome after read­ing the comic book that explains the details of the project. I had been hear­ing rumors about it last week but I didn’t pay much atten­tion to them. In the last cou­ple days there had seemed to be much antic­i­pa­tion (and over-​hype) about its release and what it means. I must say I was pre­pared to be under­whelmed… and, as a Web designer, think­ing, who needs yet another new browser to test sites into? But after using it for a lit­tle bit, I must admit I like what I see.

My ini­tial hes­i­ta­tion came mostly from the fact that, aside from its search engine tech­nol­ogy, I haven’t been impressed by much of what Google has released in the past. I don’t use GMail and I don’t use Google Documents for the same basic rea­son. So far, I still much pre­fer desk­top appli­ca­tions for email and office type tasks and my com­mu­ni­ca­tions and orga­ni­za­tional activ­i­ties are pretty much cen­tered in Outlook 2007. It works very well for me and my data is on my own machine where I want it. I never liked Web based email to begin with.

But Chrome is dif­fer­ent because it is a desk­top appli­ca­tion and the foun­da­tions and ideas on which it was built are very inter­est­ing. As many noted and despite a lot of over-​hype (what else is new in the tech world…), Chrome has a lot of things that were already in other browsers. My main browser is Opera 9.5 and I really have not seen any other that is as fast or feature-​rich. But Chrome is fast too… damn fast actu­ally, espe­cially with JavaScript and I really like the min­i­mal inter­face. This is a first beta and can only improve with time. Also, so far all my sites I looked at with Chrome dis­play cor­rectly and pretty much the same as Safari, FF 3 or IE7. Its text ren­der­ing seems iden­ti­cal to Safari which is nor­mal since both are based on the WebKit ren­der­ing engine.

So, in sum­mary, Google Chrome seems like a solid entry in the crowded browser world and will only get bet­ter. But, I would take the pre­ma­ture pre­vi­sions of some pun­dits that Chrome will cause the demise of MSIE with a huge grain of salt… Haven’t we heard that one before?

Won’t tech com­men­ta­tors ever learn that “reg­u­lar” peo­ple are crea­tures of habit and are unlikely to change browsers just because a new player’s in town? Don’t they get that Microsoft is entrenched in the busi­ness world for the fore­see­able future? Those who should be wor­ried by this are the other smaller play­ers IMO, like Opera and Firefox and maybe even Safari which seems to be as entrenched on the Mac as MSIE is on PCs… for now.

Anyway, only time will tell how Chrome will affect the browser wars but it is a good piece of soft­ware that brings wel­come com­pe­ti­tion and inno­va­tion. And did I say it was fast! I’m writ­ing this blog post in it through TinyMCE now which unfor­tu­nately doesn’t work in Opera yet. Good going with this one Google!

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