Google Starting to Lose It: Chrome
Having been a web-developer since 1996 I can tell you one of the biggest pains-in-the-ass is getting layouts consistent cross-browser. Back then, we had to test on Netscape, IE, and AOL. Nowadays, things have seemed to settle on either Firefox or IE7.
Why can't we leave well enough alone people? Why do you need Safari? Why Opera? You don't! Just settle on IE7 or FF.
But no, the jerks at Google have to keep trying to come up with the next best thing. Perhaps it's a result of their ridiculous "innovation time-off", who knows. The point is the world doesn't need a better browser. Why not spend all that dev muscle on Firefox and Add-Ons? Instead, web developers have to go and figure out a whole new set of hacks to accommodate what is sure to be an interesting product, tried by a lot of people, and probably with some really innovative and change-enticing new features.
Sheesh Google!
I think it's a sign that the company is beginning to lose control. Why is Gmail still in beta? Why are there so many almost-done projects yet they're launching yet another?
I for one welcome the
I for one welcome the competition - maybe this will accomplish the following:
- their focus on JavaScript performance is long overdue in my opinion. JavaScript is the de-facto language of dynamic HTML DOM manipulation and it runs like hell on most browsers
- get more people off of IEx
- put more focus on the garbage collection that currently sucks in all browsers on pretty much all platforms. sucks something terrible. ff3 is _still_ eating up my memory at a tremendous rate.
It's based on the WebKit rendering engine - my feeling is that it shouldn't be any more difficult to write for Chrome than the Safari browser. Time will tell.