Website Designers, Google Wants To Be Your Browser Too
September 1st, 2008 by Ernesto Gluecksmann
Google Chrome
Today on Google’s Blog, it was announced that Google will launch in 100 countries a brand spankin’ new browser and it’s called…
drum roll please…
Google Chrome
Aw yeah! Aren’t we all excited? Well for us website designers in DC, well at least this one that is, not so much.
“So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”
Lets translate the subtext - we’re doing this here at Google, because we can. We own the world’s largest market share in online search services, lets get the last mile going with a spiffy browser.
“We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we’re committed to continuing on their path. We’ve used components from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others — and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.”
Well, it is interesting to note that they making all of their code open source. We’ll see how this plays out. In the meantime, here’s yet another browser us web guys are going to have to test for… and surely there will be bugs.
September 3rd, 2008 at 7:29 pm
i’ve been using Chrome for about a day now and it seems to be a lot faster than FireFox or IE… though i do miss the “recently closed tabs” feature in Firefox
September 3rd, 2008 at 8:02 pm
Matt Cutts actually threw out a link today to someone that did some stress testing it. Apparently, it is a lot faster than FireFox and Safari.
http://timepedia.blogspot.com/2008/09/google-chrome-smokes-competition-on.html
Then again, there are some folks stress testing Javascript that’s making Chrome slower that IE and Firefox.
http://ptech.allthingsd.com/20080902/first-test-of-googles-new-browser/
An old friend of mine, Dabe Murphy, mentioned that it’s got new undercover features such as silo-ing (is that a word?) processes, so if a page crashes, it doesn’t bring down your entire browser. Raise your hands if you had FireFox or IE crash on you lately? Yeah, exactly, everyone.
Web Apps is really what’s on these guys minds, time for prime-time on that stuff.
September 5th, 2008 at 3:04 pm
Chrome made it to Talk of the Nation on NPR:
http://www.sciencefriday.com/program/archives/200809054
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=94299337
October 2nd, 2008 at 7:51 pm
Been using it since day one, much faster and other than a week or so without certain java plugins i have had no complaints. it is much faster than any other browser, and all of my pages look fine in it. the only thing i could ask for are the web dev plugins i use in firefox. i’m sure those will come shortly.