Google Chrome is out and like any new product destined to revolutionize the way we use the web, the Internet is aflutter with activity. What is Google Chrome? Google’s answer to your current browser. In their blog post, they are throwing around words buzzwords like “rich” and “interactive” experience. But so what, isn’t Mozilla’s Firefox, Flock and Window’s Internet Explorer also “rich” and “interactive” experience?
Yes and no. I’m going to use a term that strikes fear into the heart of most everyday web users and gives web nerds warm feelings in their special places, “open-source”. Chrome is designed to be the first open-source web browser that you can design for your needs and acclimates to how you browse the web. When it launches it will be for Windows users only with Mac and Linux shortly.
I was skeptical when I heard that Google is launching a web browser. It’s hard to compete in a market that is already well saturated and I’ve got my Google Homepage and Netvibe accounts set up so all of my web needs are gathered in one spot. Plus the open-source probably means I’ll have to program a bunch of stuff before I can use it. Then I read the Scott McCloud comic that outlines all the features and how the browser will run, it’s impressive and if they can pull it off, Google will once again prove they own the internet.
Here is a quick highlight of a few of the features.
• It works out of the box so you don’t have to worry about programming anything. Chrome takes the best of Apple's Webkit and Mozilla’s Firefox and makes them open source so you can create and share features for your browsers if you want.
• They super charged JavaScript though a company in Denmark with a new engine called V8. It looks at your cpu and writes it’s code to the specifications of your machine.
• Each tab is it’s own “sandbox”, which means each tab gets it’s own processing engine instead of sharing with all the tabs. That means if a tab crashes, it doesn’t kill the browser but just the tab so you can keep on searching without having to find all the sites you were just on.
• Chrome gets a constant list of malware sites and protects against them. Nothing is written to your hard drive and if the window is closed, all the processes associated with that window are closed as well. If you hit a site with malware on it, Chrome will let you know.
• Incognito lets you surf the web without saving anything in your history and cookies are wiped clean when that window is closed. They say it’s a great way to cover your tracks if you are look for that perfect gift, but I’m willing to bet it’s used for other reasons.
• The Omnibox is an interesting feature that will either be a great asset or a bust. It serves two functions; each tab gets its own set of criteria depending on what the url is. Say you’re looking at cars, the omnibox will offer suggestions for searches, top pages you’ve visited, pages you haven’t visited but are popular and a full text search of your history if you can’t remember that great car site you went to yesterday.
• When you open a new tab, the omnibox will default with the nine boxes containing the most visited pages and list the sites most searched.
The features go on and on. Google Chrome is something to keep an eye and it’s easy to see why the Internet is a buzz with news of the beta release. Being a Mac user, I’m going to sit back and see how the windows roll out goes in anticipation of the Mac release. I've just worked most of the kinks out of Flock so the idea of starting over again is daunting.
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