The Internet browser wars certainly are heating up. Just a little over ten years ago Netscape dominated the field, but now Microsoft’s Internet Explorer reigns supreme with about 80% of the overall share. In second is Mozilla’s Firefox which has been steadily narrowing the gap with close to 20% of the browser market now. ADHEREL
Add in Opera and Safari and there’s plenty of competition. And now comes the release of Google’s much-anticipated Chrome browser.
Marketed as a simple and fast browser, the recently-launched Chrome lives up to the billing. I haven’t used it that much – I’ve been a Firefox guy for a few years now – but pages according to my unscientific study do render a bit quicker than Firefox or the bloated Internet Explorer.
It’s also very clean, very sleek and has a less weighty feel in use.
Among the attractions, tabs can be created with a single click or via a drag. New, blank tabs bring up snapshots of most visited sites and recent bookmarks to get you started faster. And if one tab crashes, unlike Firefox the other tabs remain alive – a very nice feature!
The browser’s address bar serves as a direct URL entry and a Google search box, all in one (Firefox also has this).
There’s also an “incognito” browser feature, which when activated allows you to surf the web without those page data, cookies, etc., stored in your history or anywhere on your hard drive.
And of course because it is Google, everything from your bookmarks to browsing history is quickly and easily searchable.
So where is Google going with Chrome? To the top, at least that’s where their hoping to go. While I won’t be switching permanently to Chrome anytime soon (at least not until some great apps warrant such a move), what it looks like to me is that Google is slowly creating its own web-based operating system, and Chrome is a major piece of that puzzle.
Google already has Gmail as an answer to locally based email clients. Google Docs may indeed one day take the place of Microsoft Office and there’s also Google Calendar, Google Messaging and a host of other apps to fill in the holes. I’d imagine in the Google master plan, in the near future we’ll just flip on the PC, Chrome will automatically load up and we’ll access all our applications from that browser. Think Bill Gates is worried?
I have all 4 browsers on my PC — I don’t use IE but its there because of bundling done by Microsoft. I use Apple’s Safari and Mozilla Firefox regularly but find myself using Google Chrome a lot. I have a Mac and a PC and as such use both the Mac versions of Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox and on top of that use Google Chrome which is still only available to Windows users on my PC. I cannot wait for the Mac version of Chrome to come out.
Another product by Google is the Google Toolbar for IE and Firefox with the Firefox version of Google Toolbar working on Mac, Windows and Linux and the IE version being Windows specific.
Google also has Google Gears which works with Safari on the Mac, and is available to Firefox and IE users also on multiple platforms with the IE version though being Windows specific.
This is great news about Chrome — Microsoft better watch their back even of the users who use IE a majority of people I know still running IE have Google Toolbar. So no matter which of the major browsers mentioned Google still wins, Safari has no Google Toolbar but they have Gears, and a Google search box.