The Chrome team
announced the early versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux, you can get them from the
dev channel.
Although it feels much faster than Firefox (specially with GMail and Google Reader, no surprise here) it's not meant to be your main browser just yet. There are a
ton of features still missing or bugs such as
not being able to accent letters, but I've been using it for the weekend and I like it.
I'm loving the minimalistic interface which leaves more room for the content because, who on Earth needs a Home button?! On a second thought, I bet a trillion people use it, I just don't know why. There are, though, still some things that I don't quite get yet. Like the
superbar where you type whatever you like and brings either the URL or a Google search for the term. I don't know, I think it's doing weird stuff, but might be the incomplete Linux version.
And it's interesting coming back to the Internet with ads and without Flash. Boy, that's odd. At the moment Chrome for Mac and Linux lacks extensions (although apparently
some are on their way) and also 3rd party plugins, so I'm realizing these 2 things:
** I feel much less guilty of using AdBlock on FF. Honestly, banners SUCK SO BADLY that blocking them is pretty much a self-defense action. Let alone the ones you see on Chrome are GIFs, not Flash. On a related note, lately I'm white-listing some websites I visit often IF they run Adwords or a similar sort of thing, but I digress.
** Devs using Flash out there: You must provide at least
some alternative content. Cannot believe there're still websites relying
only on Flash for navigation or important content.
And to wrap up, a little note about Open Source. Still amazes me that you can actually download and study the code, how amazing is that? Don't understand V8? No worries,
here's how it works. Personally I don't get half of the explanations, but from time to time I
waste my time get inspired reading stuff like that.
Some people moan about the fact that Chrome is going to hurt more FF than IE, but I say screw you and thanks Google for Chrome. What it's going to be interesting is what happens to FF because Google is who pays the bills atm. But although it seems Google is investing in 2 different browsers, that's not the point. The point is Google needs web standards. Google needs IE under 40% usage, it doesn't really matter for them what browser people use as long it's not IE.
Luckily for all of us the internet is moving towards that. And we are lucky because the amount of people
not using IE is so big that you can't ignore them any more. No one on their right mind would create an IE-only site these days.
Well, in their right mind, you know.