Google certainly made a big splash with their browser, the "blogosphere" is totally saturated with talk of Chrome. Overall, I’m pretty impressed by it. To me it feels like a "beefed up" Safari. It’s got Webkit under the hood, it comes with that fancy web inspector and activity monitor, and it has that all-around polished feel of Safari.
Chrome is super-fast, but for me not having extensions (yet) is kind of a deal breaker. There’s no built-in RSS reader, which is a minor oversight, but I thought they would have included it. I like the "speed dial" start page when you launch the browser (or a new window/tab), but I’d like to be able to define the sites myself as well as have it list my most frequently visited.
Some people have complained about their EULA being a tad over-ambitious, i.e. "anything you do or create or look at using Chrome is now property of Google forever and ever." Whether it’s all just legal jargon or it’s actually overly restricitve and invasive has yet to be seen and will probably be worked out over the next few days. (Looks like they’re already on it.)
Then there’s also the (confirmed?) story that Chrome is a glorified keylogger with a browser built on top. Apparently their "omni box" location bar can record anything you type into it and send it off to the mothership for analysis. Turn off auto-suggest or use "incognito" mode to prevent this.
Despite the tinfoil hat silliness, I think Google has done an excellent job of creating a browser that can go head-to-head with the other major players in the arena. Considering this is the first release of their first browser, and they have nowhere to go but up, Chrome’s future looks pretty promising.
It’s hard for Google to keep any of their products a total secret for very long. Somewhere along the line word leaks out and the internet starts buzzing about their next killer app; I think they like it that way. Turns out those sneaky Google engineers were working on a web browser all along.
The story reminds me of the early days of Firefox. "We didn’t totally like the browser scene, so we started coding from scratch…" It worked really well for Firefox, but can Google swoop in and take away some of their hard-earned market share?
"Chrome" brings some cool ideas to the table, mostly in the way of isolating all the resources associated with one tab in it’s own process. That way if you run into a page that starts to bog down your browser, you can close that tab without the whole browser crashing. The "omni" bar seems like a similar take on Firefox’s "awesome" bar with the added feature of "capturing" search functions from other sites for later use. They’ve also written their own JavaScript engine and created a cool "web process manager", letting you see which sites are stealing all your resources.
Google is in an easy position to get this product out in front of a lot of eyes. The question is: will it be slick enough to make a dent in the browser market. I suppose if anyone can, it’s Google.
They’ve put out a promotional "comic" that gives the low-down on all the features of Chrome (also check out their blog post). Keep an eye out for a beta release sometime tomorrow.
UPDATE: Looks like they’ve released it to the masses. I’m pretty impressed so far. Go get a copy and see for yourself!
Mozilla Labs just released a new Firefox super-plugin called Ubiquity. Their description is pretty on-point:
"With search, users type what they want to find. With Ubiquity, they type what they want to do."
If you have a Mac and are familiar with Quicksilver, it’s a similar concept applied to the web. In essence, Ubiquity gives you a pop-up command line of sorts, and it tries to figure out things to do with the inputs you give it.
For example, you type in wiki peanut butter and it gives you the Wikipedia page for peanut butter. Or select an unknown word on a page and type define this and it gives you a quick dictionary lookup of the word. It comes with a pretty impressive list of built-in commands: Google Maps, Gmail, Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, Digg, Yelp, IMDB, and more.
What’s even cooler is the code that makes these commands run is really pretty minimal. You can do a lot with just a little bit of JavaScript. It comes with jQuery tacked on so all the fancy effects and Ajax goodness are available without hassle.
Admittedly, this is obviously geared more towards "power users" and it’s still very alpha, but I think this has huge potential to take the web to a whole new level. The ease of development of commands will make this thing hugely powerful in a very short time. Check out their introduction video for some more in depth information.
Make your own mosaic:
- Type your answer to the questions into a flickr search
- Using only the first page, pick an image
- Copy and paste each of the urls in the Mosaic Maker
- What is your first name?
- What is your favorite food?
- What high school did you go to?
- What is your favorite color?
- Who is your celebrity crush?
- What is your favorite drink?
- What is your dream vacation?
- What is your favorite dessert?
- What do you want to do when you grow up?
- Who/ what do you love most in life?
- Choose one word that describes you?
- What is your Flickr name?
Thanks, Mike, for the idea!
