Google to release new web browser
2/09/2008
Today is a new day in the browser wars. In the beginning (early 90s) there was Netscape, Opera and Internet Explorer, then for years there was pretty much just Internet Explorer. In 1999 Mozilla was born, and in the early 2000s Safari joined the race and Firefox arose from Phoenix.
Later today Google will release the first public beta of a brand new Browser – Google Chrome. Chrome borrows code from Firefox and Apple and will be an open source project meaning anyone can add and adapt the browser.
Google are touting Chrome as a lightweight browser that is “streamlined and simple”, saying “Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.”
I’ll be interested to compare the file size to the hefty 14.8MB for Internet Explorer 8 (beta) or the svelte full install file of just 7.8MB for a Firefox download. I’ll be even more interested in the speed it downloads and displays webpages and how it renders them.
Google say Chrome is ready for “the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers”. The true test of success for me will be how well it runs the websites I need today, such as eBay, PayPal, Parcelforce, Royal Mail and of course TameBay.
raeinbow says
3:45 am on 02/09/2008
it’s exciting. let’s see how it meets web standards for xml.
I use SeaMonkey, it’ll be nice having yet another browser to play with.
IE has some very quirky bugs that requires me to hit the space bar just to left click or to type in the address bar. And I can’t seem to use IE or Firefox [the updated versions] without having issues with freezing in IE and in Firefox it seems to use up my RAM (I have 3G). It is likely a virus/bug that has been eluding me .. however, I am able to use SeaMonkey all day long without any issue.
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ebuyerfb says
6:16 am on 02/09/2008
What is with all the blocked out shirts and hair? Did they buy this from another company?
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vzaar Jamie says
9:00 am on 02/09/2008
Interesting stuff and another browser for us coders to code for!
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northumbrian says
9:27 am on 02/09/2008
it needs to be all things to all people, not just the cyber geeks
little point in it dinging the bells of the anoraks ,if it wont do the everyday tasks
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system_skins says
9:45 am on 02/09/2008
Interesting… Can’t wait to give it a try !!
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ebuyerfb says
9:51 am on 02/09/2008
Google say Chrome is ready for “the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsersâ€.
But will it have the Awesome Bar?
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northumbrian says
11:41 am on 02/09/2008
Awesome Bar ?
is it a Hershey bar , or a Mars bar I need
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Allotment says
1:36 pm on 02/09/2008
Liked the comic strip approach, excellent piece of marketing.
If it delivers then this is really going to hurt Microsoft.
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faculty-x says
2:04 pm on 02/09/2008
gotta love those colours for the logo Google
do you reckon they are trying to annoy microsoft?
although for testing a wesbite opera has loads of very easy to click on functions to test the look of a website with i.e. with alt tags, text only, outline, accessability etxc in a drop down in author mode, very useful indeed.
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Sean Mewse says
8:53 pm on 02/09/2008
I like it, I have just downloaded the beta and you will be pleased to hear Tamebay looks good on it. It seems as fast as FF3 if not faster. Nice and clean and uncluttered. I shall go and have a real play now. eBay looks OK in it but I haven’t tried listing yet.
Seanie2288
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Ed says
9:00 pm on 02/09/2008
Downloaded and installed via admin account and works while still logged in as admin but nothing showing when I login as me?
not sure if I’m supposed to install seperately for each user?
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Ed says
9:38 pm on 02/09/2008
Downloaded and installed a seperate version whilst logged in as me (limited account). Works ok for browsing but wont allow me to install flash plugin so I can’t watch the chrome videos.
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Chris Dawson says
12:33 am on 03/09/2008
Hell you can tell it’s got Apple’s WebKit, it’s got all the things I hate about Safari built into the way it renders pages
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Chris Dawson says
12:52 am on 03/09/2008
I’m sorry Google, five minutes of using Chrome and I’ve hit too many pages rendered horribly. If I wanted to buy a Apple Mac and use safari I could.
Chrome…. the browser for the arty farty designer gurus that love the Mac, not a browser for plebs like me that use Windows and expect pages to render as they would in Firefox or IE.
I hope it doesn’t catch on, because if web designers design for Chrome then Apple will have beaten Microsoft through the Google back door
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ebuyerfb says
3:03 am on 03/09/2008
I tried watching a video on the weather.com . Extremely slow.
On google finance the page actually froze (cursor and all) for over a minute. The cursor was find outside of the browser.
It is a little better at rendering 800 5-star ratings on a page than the others but I’m not seeing the speed they were promising.
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Keithf says
8:02 am on 03/09/2008
No html for the description on the SYI form.
Used Google Chrome to write this comment.
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Ed says
8:07 am on 03/09/2008
Slightly off topic but when using ie6 on tamebays home page the center column gets pushed down below the bottom of the first colunm. looks ok with firefox and chrome though?
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Shock! says
9:10 am on 03/09/2008
Google are quite clear about the fact that Chrome is in Beta. To quote from the Google Blog;
“This is just the beginning — Google Chrome is far from done. We’re releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We’re hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.”
As far as I can see, there are plenty of exciting new ideas at the heart of this release – the ‘sandboxing’ of individual tabs, new Java engine etc + some good bits borrowed from existing browsers i.e. Opera’s ‘Most visited’ visual site history when opening new tab) Seems pretty snappy to me too!
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Andy Toogood says
9:12 am on 03/09/2008
#14 If pages aren’t rendering well for you in Chrome then maybe whoever is designing those pages should be thinking more about cross-browser support – not everyone uses IE and Firefox.
I like it. It’s clean and easy to use and I haven’t found a site yet that doesn’t render well.
Interesting that the BBC (Radio Five Live) have just had a piece about this browser being launched ‘last night’? Is all the other news they report on also that old?
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ebuyerfb says
9:21 am on 03/09/2008
@ #19
Safari’s market share is only 6.37% and that has the same rendering engine as Chrome.
Chrome does break the part of my site that has read-only text boxes with text in them. Not sure what to do about that.
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Chris Dawson says
9:39 am on 03/09/2008
#19 I’ll have a little word with eBay then
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Eddie (AuctionChex) says
11:48 am on 03/09/2008
Installed Chrome on a spare PC and my laptop :
Scroll up a page with a mouse wheel works on the laptop but not on the PC ??
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Paddymcc says
12:24 pm on 03/09/2008
Is it just me or is the text in My Ebay on Chrome on a very small setting?
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Eddie (AuctionChex) says
12:56 pm on 03/09/2008
Solved my wheel mouse scroll problem – updated the mouse driver
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Chris Dawson says
1:05 pm on 03/09/2008
#23 That’s one of the things I don’t like about how it renders the page.
Typically a lot of eBay pages (My eBay, SMP etc) are wider than a 1024×768 page, especially if you’ve added in extra columns. Chrome attempts to render the page so that it fits within the viewable browser and resizes everything to achieve this. That has the effect of reducing font sizes and quite frankly I don’t like it that much – Eye strain has never been high on my list of priorities.
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Ed says
2:02 pm on 03/09/2008
#25 Thanks for explaining that Chris, couldn’t figure out why it was just my eBay with small fonts. LOL.
Not a proper solution I know but you can use the mouse wheel in conjunction with the ctl button to quickly adjust font size.
Ideal would be if browser could remember settings for individual pages.
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Allotment says
2:04 pm on 03/09/2008
#23 & #25
Ctrl+ enlarges text size
Ctrl- reduces text size.
Overall I like it. Certainly faster. Not without the odd minor niggle but it’s early days yet. Like the fact that I can now have multiple eBay id sessions open concurrently in a single browser.
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Richard says
6:32 pm on 03/09/2008
If everyone was to stick to the standards, both in the creation and display of web pages there shouldn’t be any issues, there’s only one way, the correct way.
I assume everyone who’s installed Chrome read and digested the EULA they agreed to before they installed it?
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/03/google_chrome_eula_sucks/
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Andy Toogood says
9:49 pm on 03/09/2008
#21 Ebay have history of only bothering with IE. The print glitches in Firefox are still there and HTML designer on SYI also doesn’t work in Firefox so a word would be great.
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Andy Toogood says
10:04 pm on 03/09/2008
#28 Rebecca Ward, the Senior Product Counsel for Google Chrome:
“In order to keep things simple for our users, we try to use the same set of legal terms (our Universal Terms of Service) for many of our products. Sometimes, as in the case of Google Chrome, this means that the legal terms for a specific product may include terms that don’t apply well to the use of that product. We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome.â€
So that’s alright then!
Disclaimer: I do not work for Google
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Chris Dawson says
10:28 pm on 03/09/2008
#30 Now reads “11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services.“
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Nick Talley says
10:43 pm on 03/09/2008
I love it!
Downloaded last night and have been using it all day. I may change my default from firefox to chrome.
Just one problem with printing invoices that don’t render correctly on our bespoke self adhesive invoices.
It also froze on my web site search box but seemed to learn & recover?
Defo faster, cleaner and just more intuitive.
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Super Max says
1:38 am on 04/09/2008
#31 et al: nothing you submit through chrome will ever touch googles servers, unless it is sent to a google service, mainly gears which is what chrome seems to be built for.
If you stick tamebay.com in the address bar (as a example), make a post, or whatever, that post will go direct to tamebay’s servers, so no matter what googles terms of service say if it never see’s the content, and never gets a copy of the content, who cares.
This is only my opinion of course, other opinions may exist, and your copyright might be at risk if you listen to my opinion.
This was posted with chrome, and it can spot spelling mistakes, but how to i look up a replacement to them?
PS: This is a ebay business blog, why are people discussing a beta product, anyone who let chrome near a live ebay account that they where using for a ebay business would have to be daft, its called beta for a reason, use it in 2-3 years when its proved itself.
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ebuyerfb says
1:50 am on 04/09/2008
@ #33
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10032047-2.html
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northumbrian says
8:03 am on 04/09/2008
chrome dont work with ebay picture services on my computer and it locks up the ebay SYI form
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