When a company like Google releases a free service, it is always worth taking a look. Their free versions of common desktop publishing (DTP) applications released previously, such as Google Docs, are enough to satisfy the needs of any average user.
However, when Google makes public an internet browser, with so many browsers already available, it makes you wonder what are they upto. Google released their internet browser, Chrome, on September 2, 2008 in beta to gauge what the initial public perception of their offering was. This beta has only been released for Windows users, with Mac OS x and Linux version to follow differ shortly. The search engine giant has placed links on all of its search pages for all supported languages, allowing everyone to find it easily.
Some may wonder why the folks at Google released Chrome, especially when FireFox 3.0 has become such a big hit. What is it that they are trying to prove? The real reason is that Google isn't trying to prove anything. Chrome was merely released in an attempt to fill in the gaps left by other similar applications. As it is an open source initiative, it is obvious that Google doesn't plan on making any money from Chrome. This can be inferred from a statement issued by them:
We owe a great debt to many oepn source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's FireFox, among others - and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.
User Interface:
The user interface has been kept as simple and clean as possible. The tabs also allow drag and drop operation, so that you can create an entirely new window from them. The windows version applies the user interface styling of Windows Vista to the browser window itself although its colour scheme is that of the classic Google blue.
The browser offers very limited customisation options and does not allow users to change the default colour scheme. This issue may, however, be addressed in a subsequent stable release.
The usual "File" and "Edit" menus in the browser window have been removed and replaced with two button on the right hand side which contain all the necessary options.
There are also built-in tools for web developers, such as the "Inspect Element" option, which not only displays every element of a webpage, but also shows the size and time taken to load it.
Privacy:
Chrome has a handy "Incognito" mode which does not log browsing sessions. In other words, pages viewed during a session will not appear in the browser history. Once you have finished, you can seamlessly switch back to allowing the browser to display visited pages in its history.
An issue of concern was Google's initial EULA (End User License Agreement), which granted Google ownership to any content created or uploaded by users through their browser. This Section in the EULA has been changed, but some users argue that the "address bar" still submits your typing to Google inorder to produce search results, so in a way you are still being monitored. Based on that, Google can tune their advertisements to perfectly match user interests.
Google Chrome is not a browser that completely redefines the browsing world. However, it does provide a handy alternative for the open source community; one that lets you work faster by simplifying the interface and improving reliability.
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