In a move that suprised me quite a bit Google have announced their own web browser. Pitches directly in competion with IE and Firefox but apparently designed from scratch to suit today’s modern web user – or some such waffle – it works a bit differently.
Google have even come out with a comic to tell the story. It’s 30 something pages and does get a bit detailed but certainly the first 10 pages show you where they’re going.
It’s also open source, and I get the feeling they’re looking for someone like Firefox to pick up their ball and run with it – Firefox Chrome with a silver fox instead of the usual red one perhaps?
It certainly looks interesting from the screenshots.
Google Chrome Screenshot (click to enlarge)
The beta is apparently available tomorrow but I’m hoping that they release an OSX version not just a Windows variety. They’ve not ignored Apple completely because googleblog makes reference to the fact they borrowed opensource code from “Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla’s Firefox, among others”.
on Sep 2nd, 2008 at 2:44 pm
I’ll certainly be giving it a look – if it can improve on the stability of FF3, it’ll be worth looking into further.
on Sep 2nd, 2008 at 8:23 pm
Dammit – it’s now available http://www.google.com/chrome/ but windows only at the moment
on Sep 3rd, 2008 at 10:50 am
You can download the code and compile it yourself for Mac OS X:
http://dev.chromium.org/developers/how-tos/build-instructions-os-x
Just Leopard though, so if you’re still using Tiger (like I am) I’m not sure it’ll be possible.
on Sep 3rd, 2008 at 11:34 am
Cheers Dave – I’ll take a look