Those of you that may have read some of my earlier articles will know I am an enthusiatic user of chrome; google’s new browser. Only, it’s not so new. Google chrome turns one: has it been a success? asks Ben Parr. Google thinks it has, but what many people care most about is browser market share, which to date, is only 2.8%. A little disappointing, but then it’s early days.
In my opinion, we need competition in the browser market. Infact we need strong competition in every market where Microsoft is powerful. I was reminded this morning of the autocrats at Microsoft when my laptop spontaneously rebooted itself to download a vista OS update, interrupting what I was doing at the time. How arrogant! Why is their update more important than my work? I know the settings can be changed, but that’s the default, which most people don’t or can’t change because they don’t know how. More market share for chrome and firefox please.
Google are working hard to develop and improve chrome. Developer builds are now Snow Leopard-ready (Snow Leopard is the new Apple Macintosh operating system) and chrome will gain a new feature called desktops notifications. So, an API (Application Programming Interface) should be coming soon. Things are moving in the right direction.
And talking of competition, Opera 10 has been released. For those that don’t know, opera is an open source developed, free browser, and it’s coming on in leaps and bounds with opera mini and mobile for surfing-on-the-go. Just like google chrome, the developers are focussed on fast-loading web pages. A welcome relief from slow Microsoft software.
So if you want to try something different to browse the web, it’s easy to download Opera or download chrome and simply try them out. If you want to learn more about chrome and why google decided to build a new browser, here are some videos worth watching. I’m always curious to get behind the scenes.
Building better browsers is a must. Long may it continue.
