Archive for September 2008

Google OS

Have you (we) been fooled into believing that Google released “just” a browser? Alhtough it seems like the initial deployment franzy came to a squicking hold, the blog world is still in uproar about Google’s latest release. But maybe we should start to look under the Chrome hood to see if Google’s browser is really more the operating system.

It may not be too obvious to the everyday user (although they probably did not download Chrome in the first place), but most developers probably noticed that the Task Manager inside the Developer menu not only lists each page you have opened and how much memory and processing time it uses but it also lets you end processes just like your Windows Task Manager or any other OS.

Does anybody remember Netscape … ? Just call it ‘Google OS’ already.

SuggestionBox.com

Google Satelite?

There have been reports that Google launched a satelite over the weekend to gather high resolution images of the earth. Whereas the launch of the satelite can be confirmed, the involvement of Google is still in question, specfically as the website for the project does not list google as one of its partners.

LinkedIn Hacked

It seems that LinkedIn got hacked. The site is showing a permanent ‘Http/1.1 Service Unavailable’ message for the last hour or so.

Google Browser

It seems long overdue, Google unveils its own browser: Google Chrome. No this time it is not an April Fools Joke (see here in case you’ve missed it). The browser is build on the WebKit open source project which Google also uses for Android and but of course Chroms will also include Google Gears.

Google says to have five main objectives for its browser:

  • Stability
  • Speed
  • Privacy/Security
  • Simple/effecient UI
  • Open Source

STABILITY. As useful and fun tab-browsing is, the way Internet Explorer and Firefox are handling tab-browsing is very processor intensive and can lead to a crash of the browser. Google Chrome is usind a multi-process design which should save a lot of memory power.

SPEED. As a default start page Chrome provides you with a kind of shortcuts, similar to the one of the Opera browser. On that page you will see your most visited site as screenshot thumbnails. On the side, you will see a couple of your recent searches and/or your recently bookmarked pages, and recently closed tabs. The Google browser includes a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8. One goal for V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser. The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features, called ’omnibox’. Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular and lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.

PRIVACY/SECURITY. Chrome has a privacy mode through creation of an incognito window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged”, a feature that is also available in Internet Explorer. For malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed.

Microsoft be afraid .. be very afraid.