What do you make of Google Chrome?

[Torsten]

Slava has just told me that yesterday Google released the Beta version of their own browser called Chrome. Since we both are big Google fans, we installed this new program to test it. So far, it looks and feels great! What about you, have you heard of Chrome too? What is your favourite Internet browser?

Many thanks,
Torsten
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[Molly]

Downloaded it an hour ago. Will test it out later.

[Yankee]

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My browser of choice is Firefox.
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Amy
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ESL teacher, and native speaker of American English

[Molly]

[Torsten]

No, if you want to test Firefox you need to install it on your computer. By the way, I've just found a very interesting statement on Wikipedia: "Mozilla said that Chrome's introduction into the web browser market comes as "no real surprise" and that "Chrome is not aimed at competing with Firefox" — and furthermore should not affect Google's financing of Firefox."

I think it will be very difficult for both the Internet Explorer as well as Firefox to retain their market share now that Google has entered the browser battlefield.
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[Jamie (K)]

I don't have any favorite browser, and I seem to use different browsers for different types of browsing.

I use Safari for most of my browsing, because it does a faster job of various things. For example, it remembers how I fill out forms and fills them out ahead of me, whereas Firefox will wait for me to fill in the first letter and then make me grab the mouse and click on the last way I filled out a similar field in a form. A lot of the time-saving things in Firefox actually seem like a time-consuming pain in the neck after you get used to Safari.

When I want a browser that doesn't do too many things automatically, I prefer Firefox. Safari will automatically decompress downloaded files, which gets to be a problem if the file is not supposed to be decompressed (such as project files for computer-assisted translation programs). Firefox won't necessarily decompress the files. I also like Firefox when I'm looking at a stock market site or some other site where prices and other data are constantly updated. Firefox evidently incorporates Ajax technology, so if I look at Yahoo Finance, for example, all the price data is continuously revised.

If some site I'm looking at has very obnoxious advertising that I don't want to see, I use Camino, which for years has done a very good job of blocking almost all advertising. You can also block ads with the Adblock Plus plugin in Firefox, but I find that Adblock Plus seems to think everything is an ad, whereas Camino appears to do a better job of distinguishing what is and what isn't. Sometimes web pages may hang up your browser while they load advertising from some remote third-party location, so if you have Camino blocking that, it speeds everything up.

[MrPedantic]

[Torsten]

[Jamie (K)]

I don't know why you have those problems with Safari, Torsten, because when I run Safari in Vista there are no such problems, and the browser works and looks the same as it does on a Mac. Other PC users (which I normally am not) think it works perfectly.

I've downloaded Chrome, but I don't see anything special about it yet.

[Lost_Soul]

Hi, guys

I downloaded Chrome, put it through its paces and I think I'm better off with tried and true IE.

Also, I want to spread awareness about a new, long-awaited (beta) version of Internet Explorer 8.0 that has been released and you can try it out for free downloading it form the Microsoft site. The user experience has been improved in several ways, and what gladdened me as a developer, now IE offers a built-in tool for looking at/modifying html code/CSS/javascripts. I haven't yet explored all the things this tool can do, but at first sight its abilities look very promising.
PS: it's not an advertisement
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Alex

How much upchuck would a woodchuck upchuck if a woodchuck could upchuck ?

(a guy from Russia)

[Jamie (K)]

It's interesting that you like Internet Explorer as a developer, Alex, because developers I know are so angry with IE that they've told their clients they won't support it anymore and are telling all their clients to use Firefox. It seems the problem is that Microsoft has a tendency to make major changes to their browser that happen to disable various common operations, but they don't inform developers ahead of time. When IE 7 came out, their and many other companies' web-based applications were disabled for clients who had upgraded while the developers ran around like chickens with their heads cut off, trying to find out what it was about the browser that was causing it and what they needed to do to fix it.

According to them, by doing things this way, Microsoft suddenly put thousands of enterprises out of business until they could find out what the problem was and work out a solution. After the second time Microsoft pulled a stunt like this, my developer friends decided to stop supporting IE. Now they support nearly every other browser EXCEPT Internet Explorer -- even Safari and Opera.

[Torsten]

I think IE has been constantly losing market share and this trend is going to continue for quite some time especially now that Google has entered this battle field. Chrome might still not offer as many 'add-ons' as Firefox but it certainly is fast and stable. One of the features that are unique to Chrome is called 'Incognito mode'. There are lot more useful features that only Chrome offers and I'm sure Google will gain a major market share of the browser market within the next couple years just as they did with other markets.
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[Yankee]

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I've tried several different browsers, and Google Chrome sounds like an interesting one to at least try out. Unfortunately, I'm still running Win2000 and it appears Google Chrome won't work with that. Do you know whether that's really true?
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Amy
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ESL teacher, and native speaker of American English

[Torsten]

Hi Amy,

As far as I can see, Chrome currently runs only on Vista and Windows XP. This might be one its drawbacks. Have you tried downloading and installing Chrome on your machine?
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[Yankee]

Hi Torsten

No, not yet. I might try it anyway, though, and see what happens.
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_________________
Amy
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ESL teacher, and native speaker of American English