Josh is a blogger. Have you heard of him? If not… check out his blog over at Extendably. It’s totally as good as TechCrunch but with less ego… and traffic.

Let’s talk about Google Chrome. Why not? Everyone else is.

I would be willing to bet anyone reading this article has already downloaded the Windows beta and is probably using it right now so I’m not going to go through the feature list or anything like that, besides, Martin’s already taken a look at that side of Chrome.

I downloaded it this morning as well… and I have to admit I was pleasantly surprised. Personally when I saw the screenshots yesterday my first thoughts where; ‘it looks like Opera 9’ and then, ‘it looks ugly’. I find that the Google minimalist style works great on the web, but in conventional software it simply looks tacky.

However I was wrong. Trying out the product in reality and it’s actually really nice in terms of user interface, visual effects and functionality. The typical Google design ‘quirks’ which look out of place in a screenshot make perfect sense when you actually use the product.

continue reading "Chromatose"

The new browser by Google called Google Chrome is now available for download in various languages on the Google Chrome website. The installation file has a size of 474 Kilobytes on Windows XP and downloads additional components during installation. The first thing that users will realize after starting Google Chrome is that it will import bookmarks from Firefox and Internet Explorer blazingly fast. It took no longer than a second to import all of my Firefox bookmarks into Google Chrome including the saved passwords, browsing history and search engines.

If you remember the comic that introduced Google Chrome or the article on Ghacks or at other websites you might remember that Google Chrome uses tabs that are independent from each other. If you analyze the computer memory usage of the browser you need to check all instances of chrome.exe that are visible in the Windows Task Manager which is one instance of chrome.exe for the browser itself and another instance for every open tab that displays a website on the Internet. The interesting fact about this method is that the browser will never use more memory than it needs and that the memory will be cleared completely when the user closes a tab. This principle works extremely well during the tests.

Websites are loading faster than in other browsers which can be attributed to the new Javascript rendering engine and the browser engine. Everything about Google Chrome feels faster than in the other browsers.

continue reading "Google Chrome Now Available"

Rumors have been filling forums, blogs and websites that Google was working on a browser to compete with Microsoft on yet another level. Those rumors never ceased completely in the last three years or so and today those rumors seem to have gone over into a semi-official announcement of Google Chrome.

Google sent out a 38-paged comic book illustrated by Scott McCloud to selected individuals which is entitled Google Chrome - Behind the Open Source browser project. The complete comic can be accessed at the Google Blogoscoped website. The comic is showing real Google employees and their thoughts, ideas and functions in the browser project.

It begins by outlining the basic concepts of a browser as Google sees it. A browser should be stable, a lot faster, more secure, clean, simple, efficient and Open Source. Google Chrome will make use of multiple processes which means that each tab is rendered separately which includes Javascript. This means that if one process in one tab crashes because of a bug then only this tab will go down but the rest of the browser will remain stable. Microsoft introduced that feature in Internet Explorer 8 as well.

continue reading "Google Enters The Browser Market With Google Chrome"

Google is testing new ideas and implementations before they go public for everyone. The testing grounds for Google Search are called Google Experimental, a publicly accessible area where everyone can test out a few new features that might make it into the public Google search.

Three ideas are currently listed on that page: Alternate views for search results, Keyword suggestions and Keyboard shortcuts.

Alternate views for search results provide timelines, maps and in-context information. A search for Civil Rights Movement would for instance display a timeline above the search results that is showing the amount of information available for that period in time. A click on a period displays only search results about that time period.

continue reading "Google Experimental Search"

Joshua was born naked, screaming and totally helpless during the late 20th century. Some people get over these things and now he freelances while attempting to develop his own blog; extendably.com – check it out!

Just a word of warning, this is very likely going to turn into a rant. (But not the rant you may have expected)

If you follow tech blogs then you could hardly fail to have noticed the reaction the other day when Gmail went down for the total time period of about 1-2 hours.

The screenshot below shows the feeds in my RSS reader.

Pretty much the same thing happened when Amazon hosting services went down a few weeks ago for 8 hours or so; a huge over-reaction of from the blogosphere; dire warnings about cloud computing and questions over the quality of service.

Anyone else wonder about this? Think it’s just a little bit of an over-reaction?

continue reading "Cloud Computing Totally Failed us"