Thinkervine

Chromatic influence

That was the blast of the day. Everyone’s been talking about it in the last 24h although rumors have been going for a while.

It has been announced through a comic strip, drawn by Scott McCloud, and yet it drew a great interest. Yesterday, the windows version of Google Chrome based on Webkit (the browser engine behind Safari), was available to download (Linux and Mac versions are on their way).

Google has a trend to get into anything that is related to the web. Starting from search to social networks. Yet, they were missing something. An end to end tool that will help analyze the average guy’s behavior on the Internet, helping them enhancing their search algorithms and construct browsing profiles for more accurate and targetted ads.

Although, Google toolbar was filling a part of the job, it didn’t provide enough information. So Google Chrome is there to fill the gap.

My first thoughts on the browser: light and fast, sober and user friendly. But it still has a lot of improvements to get before maturity. Still lot of bugs (javascript and SSL/Certificates handling), still missing lot of options (Java VM, extentions and theming, bookmark organization, own proxy management, RSS,).

But on the other side, it has few ups: the stealth navigation mode, the mozaic of most visited websites  (borrowed from Opera), the fading status bar and the modularization of tabs.

And geez, why “Chrome” ? They could have thought of a more unusual, something a bit out of the common.

So do we really need another browser ? Probably not, but Google might come with the new generation of browsers and toggle the hands. Meanwhile, they have extended their partnership with Mozilla until 2011 to have Google as the default homepage on Firefox.

I will be waiting for the next betas in order to see how it improves but it is still far from being mature enough to replace Firefox as my default browser.