The Influence of Chrome
I noticed today that Mozilla have made an ‘Aurora‘ (or pre-beta) build of Firefox available, meaning that they now have nightly, pre-beta, beta and release versions of their browser available. I guess this is all part of their plan to increase the release frequency for new versions of Firefox.
Of course, having multiple releases of the browser at varying stages of readiness is an idea that Google Chrome has been using for quite some time now. And as for frequent releases – the dev channel of Chrome is currently on version 12, with major new versions being pushed out every 6 weeks!
There’s no denying the influence that Chrome has had on every other browser. The UI layout is now widely mimicked - as is the technical infrastructure that makes it the quickest and most secure web browser. Also, Chrome has ensured that web standards and infrastructure are moving at the same rapid pace as when I first got an internet connection in the mid 90′s.
This display of affection for Chrome has been inspired by my use of a Cr-48 at work (it still feels awesome that ‘at work’ means ‘at Google’!). Chrome OS is looking good so far and it’s made me realise how rarely I need a desktop operating system while I’m not actually sat at my desk. I no longer have to worry about losing files – everything is stored on the web. The laptop itself is super-light and has a battery that lasts for a whole working day if I need it to. Also – it was kind of magic the first time I signed in to see all my bookmarks and settings already configured, after it seamlessly synced with both my google.com and gmail.com accounts. The only negative so far has been its shoddy response to multitouch scrolling on the trackpad.
Like tablets, I don’t see Chrome OS as a replacement for a ‘main computer’ but for portable computing I am much preferring it to the Xoom. I’ll write a post about my Xoom at some point – I’m a big fan of that, and especially Honeycomb, but I don’t think tablets are laptop-replacements and this post is already too long.
Of course, another thing about both Chrome OS and Android is that they’re open source software. As people fragment away from using Windows on their desktops and laptops, I think it’s awesome that two of their main choices are open source operating systems.
I think Firefox is awesome. I think it paved the way for browsers such as Chrome and showed how there is better way than IE! All that aside, I do think Firefox can learn things from Chrome: I would like to see each tab being a separate instance of the browser in Firefox as well. It is really useful when something (mostly flash) crashes the browser.
Also, it is an interesting point you made about how people are moving away from Windows to open source alternatives like Chrome OS and Android (it is definitely good to see open source taking off more and more). I know that Windows has the lion’s share of users, but I do think Apple are far worse than Windows when it comes to the ethos of open source. It’s just that they have a more fanatical followers. Anyway, I decided to mention Apple because here in the US they are everywhere and have really annoying ad campaigns ;-)
Firefox was awesome when it was released, I just think that they haven’t kept to their original plan to make a stripped-down, fast piece of software – it just feels quite bloated now. Neither MS or Apple have been great open source contributors, I much prefer the Google approach of basing software on open standards and supporting open source.