Why Google’s Chrome?
Google just released a beta of a new web browser, Chrome. I played with it for a few minutes. It has a nice auto-fill feature that activates whenever you type something in the address bar. It claims to be faster than IE and Firefox, but I haven’t noticed a signfiicant difference in speed compared to Firefox, and claiming you are better than Internet Explorer is like bragging you can outrun a turtle attached to a mule attached to greased roller skates.
Why introduce a web browser anyway, especially when you are financing Firefox? This article claims that: Google’s research found that the faster a search page loads, the more people use search, and the more money they make. Google says they would be happy if the end result of their new browser is forcing IE and Firefox to be faster, that would be a success.
We’ll see. People’s browsing habits are hard to change. Forget Firefox, a big chunk of people aren’t even using the most recent version of IE. The biggest path to entry is still having your browser pre-installed on the computer, and IE owns that market. Firefox may have forced IE to improve itself, but that has been slow coming.
One thing Google gets right now is making the installation seamless, porting 100% of your previous bookmarks and settings. Some replacement programs only get 95%, but it’s that last 5% which makes people reluctant to try out a new program when they already have one they are pretty happy with.
Jim Mc said,
September 3, 2008 @ 11:08 am
I’ve enjoyed using it so far. I like that they’ve made it completely tab focused…to the point that each tab is it’s on process. Thus, if one tab goes crazy or creates a memory leak it won’t take the whole browser down, you can just kill that tab. It has a hard time with sites that stream via Windows media (such as mlb audio) but all in all I’m going to use it as my main browser for a while. It loads gmail REALLY fast, which is not really a surprise. Plus, firefox 3 seemed to be extremely buggy and kept crashing for me. The most recent IE keeps going through it’s first run page for me and also seems buggy.
So I like separate processes and the clean look.
Mitch said,
September 3, 2008 @ 11:38 am
I like it but agree with what you say about Firefox, my usual browser. I love the IE comment!