Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Nice chrome.

Google has unveiled their own web browser, Chromium.

The concept was to strip off all the "chrome," aka unnecesary menus and visual effects that most apps have. The second concept was to revolved around the "web app," such as Gmail, Google Docs and other web applications. It will use Google Gears to actually "save" the webapp to your computer so you can run it offline.

So far, it looks really cool, and I hear its quick. It has a few really neat features, such as: each tab is its own process, so if one tab crashes it doesn't take the whole browser down with it; inline search, like Safari; Firefox's spell check; "private browsing" mode; and a thumbnail view of your sites, similar to Opera's "Speed Dial" function. The developers describe the browser as drawing on the best features of today's web browsers, and they hope their open-source code will be used to improve other browsers.

The downside is that it's beta. From what I've read, having each tab really takes up way too much memory; and there's no real bookmark manager in place. Plus, they're still working on MacOS X and Linux versions.

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