Blogosphere Buzzes Over Google Chrome
When Google released its long-rumored Chrome browser today, the reviews, opinions and forward-thinking analysis immediately flooded our RSS readers. Now that we’ve had time to breathe and ingest some of the coverage (and actually test the browser), here are our picks of the highlights.
Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal chimes in with his review on AllThingsD.com, complete with a video. Uncle Walt was impressed by the browser, but noted that Chrome is still a little rough around the edges. He also questions its speed, something we didn’t have a problem with. Granted, he’s been playing with it for a week, so we’ll take his word for it.
Mossberg notes Chrome’s uncluttered appearance: “(It) does away with most menus and toolbar icons to give maximum screen space for the Web pages themselves.” This is a feature we praised (See our screenshot tour), but Mossberg considers this a fault, observing that the change “will require some adjustment on the part of users.”
He also places Chrome head-to-head with the just-released IE8 Beta 2, saying “each of these browsers has a good chance of besting Firefox 3.0.”
Speaking of Firefox, Mozilla CEO John Lilly handed out praise for Chrome after a demo on Monday night, saying the browser is impressive and that it raises the bar for all players in the game. He points to enhancements in Firefox 3.1, due this month, and how they will help Firefox to compete. He also makes mention of the fact that, unlike Google, Mozilla has no profit motive, and he expects those with the similar mindset will stick with the browser that isn’t “owned” by anyone.
Here are some more:
- In case you missed it, the illustrated guide to Chrome by Scott McCloud (I used a clip from his comic to pretty up this blog post).
- And definitely check out sister-site Portfolio’s mashup.
- Ryan Paul of ArsTechnica (also a sister site to Webmonkey) digs into Chrome’s multiprocess design, and what that means for performance and stability.
- See Chris Messina’s essay at FactoryJoe.com, a thoughtful piece touching on the business of the browser world — how brain drain at Mozilla and Google’s savvy hiring led to such a forward-thinking product — as well as how Chrome fits into Google’s vision for an entire industry powered by the cloud.
- Check out John Gruber’s thought-provoking note that Chrome “sounds more like an application runtime than a web browser.”
- Louis Gray has a lot of questions.
- Meanwhile, the Twitterverse is testing, loving/hating all the new features while finding bugs and other surprises.
And finally, here’s a widget we cooked up to monitor Twitter tweets about Chrome in real time:
