I read this fantastic article at theregister.co.uk about how some people in the media truly have no clue about the difference between a web browser and an operating system.
I agreed with the author on most points and think that non technical people should stick to writing stuff they know about, and not stuff the think they know about.
I have been using Chrome as much as possible to see how well it handles the sites I regularly go to. I have discovered that when you are in Facebook, and viewing photo galleries, you don’t seem to be able to move forward in the gallery more than twice by clicking on the next button. This makes it unusable in Facebook and I’m sure they would have tested it as it is one of the most popular sites that there is on the web at the moment with it just hitting 100 million users. I have also heard that Chrome has 3% of the browser market already.
I tried to install Google chrome on my laptop running 32bit Windows 2008 but I kept getting the following error:
“Error 1625 The installation is forbidden by group policy”
I realised that I needed to run the install as an administrator, so instead of running the install straight from the Google website, I saved the executable to my hard drive and then went to the folder where it was saved, right clicked and chose “run as administrator” and the installation went fine after this!
This issue can also occur on any Vista or Windows 2008 system with User Access Control (UAC) enabled on it.
The Google Chrome Beta got released today, so of course I had to download and install it right away. I have IE7, Firefox, Safari and Opera on my systems already so that I can test web page functionality across the different browsers, so I will need to run Chrome to test how well it can render the pages, and if the pages need to be modified to work with it.
So far, every page that I have gone to has worked perfectly except the Microsoft File Transfer Manager from the MSDN download site, and Silverlight and flash have displayed exactly as they should, so it gets a thumbs up for that. It also takes your links from IE and puts them under the address bar which is how I like it. When you open a new tab, it also graphically shows you the most visited pages by you in the new tab which is cool.
It also runs each browser window or tab as a separate process, which although requiring more memory, makes it better for crashes because a bad bit of javascript isn’t going to take down the whole 20 or so windows and tabs that we normally have open at the same time. This is a great way of thinking, and possibly one of the reasons I will move to this browser. You can also use the built in task manager to view which tabs are using CPU cycles and memory. If you want to move the tabs around, you can, even between separate browsing windows and it keeps the content. And for those of us who want to do a bit of sly browsing, you can use the “incognito” for a bit of untraceable browsing as it will leave no local record of any sites you visited or their cookies and other files.
The way the went about the thought process of developing the browser can be seen in this cartoon here which is a great way of showing us why they developed the browser in the first place, and is much more interesting than mere words could ever be.
So overall, on day one I have to say that I am impressed with what they have done with this Beta release, and I eagerly await the full release. It may be a while though, as google mail is still listed as Beta all these years later.