Everybody seems to be talking about Chrome. It is a new browser from Google. Chrome is being hyped as a faster, safer, and easier web browser. Google is releasing it under the BSD license. Part of the speed increase is due to a new JavaScript virtual machine named V8. The most prominent user interface change is that the tabs are at the very top of the window.Chrome is in Beta right now. Under the hood, separate tabs are in sandboxes. Other tabs should continue to function if one of them crashes. There is also a window which does not log any activity to your PC. Google released the Windows version of Chrome this week. Versions for the Max and Linux are coming soon. Google stated that they used parts of Mozilla Firefox and Apple WebKit to develop Chrome.
Google man Matt Cutts came out with a blog post explaining what types of information the Chrome application sends to Google. Nothing is sent to Google if you surf around by clicking links. However Chrome will contact Google search if you type something in the address bar. By default the crash reports are not sent to Google. However for some 404 error pages, Chrome will contact Google to recommend other pages to you. Chrome does phone home to check for an update every 25 hours, and it downloads a list of dangerous URLs from Google every 30 minutes. It also downloads a dictionary when you initially choose your language in Chrome.
I read on Robert Synnett’s web site that he found Chrome a blazing twice as fast as Firefox in general. It also goes real fast when accessing Google JavaScript. Go figure. Robert also mentions that the JavaScript debug tools that come with Chrome are very strong. I confess that I have not installed and used Chrome yet. But with all the buzz I cannot help but be curious and will most likely take it for a test drive soon. I do use a lot of sites from Google which are heavy with JavaScript. I will keep you posted.
