Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

Google’s Chrome continues to generate lots of media attention and wild speculation on its potential future and impact on the browser world. The wife and I took our four year-old daughter to the Natural History museum in London today, and I even found an article on Chrome in one of the free papers that get thrust at you everywhere you go after 4pm in central London. Rather oddly, they were comparing “the big three”, with Chrome being one of them.

Anyway, of more technical relevance, here are two nicely juxtaposed artcles:

• Five reasons why Chrome will crash and burn
• Five reasons why Chrome will take over the world

On a different note, there was much talk yesterday over the clause in the End User License Agreement (EULA) that claimed Google gained a non-exclusive right to do what they wanted with every bit of data you viewed through Chrome, as well as every bit of data you uploaded via Chrome. Unsurprisingly, such a ridiculous clause made a lot of people unhappy. The good news is that Google rapidly responded to that unhappiness and the clause has now been removed from the EULA.

Chrome has been released into the wild and the initial feedback seems less than shiny:

1. Only the Windows version has been released. Will there be a Mac and Linux versions? What about Solaris and other Unix flavours? If so, when? Chrome is up against pretty tough competition, so was it wise to risk alienating potential users by going the Windows-only route with the first release.
2. Google are trumpeting the process-per-tab feature as some great new never-before-thought-of browser solution. Shame they’ve never heard of Maxthon, a tab-based browser that ran an IE process in each tab. This was a solution to IE 6 not supporting tabs. Guess this feature isn’t quite so innovative as Google would have us believe.
3. And of course the comic has received a bit of a satirical make-over too.

All that aside, it is an interesting browser design, if a little strange to use. It is extremely minimalist. I find the lack of a home button for example to be just plain weird.

Do Internet Explorer, FireFox, Opera and Safari all fail to meet your needs? Does the world need a fifth mainstream browser to fill some gaping browser functionality hole? It seems that Google feels the answer is “yes”, and so has developed a web browser from scratch (UPDATE: apparently it’s based on the webkit core that powers Konquerer and Safari, so it’s not from scratch).

You can read all about it on the Google Blog.

UPDATE - It is now available for download from http://www.google.com/chrome. Please note that it is a beta download for Windows XP/ Vista at this stage (sorry for not mentioning the OS restriction before)

Here’s a sneak screen-shot for those without Windows (courtesy of Google Blogoscoped). It looks even better on Vista as they’ve used the Aero Glass effect well: