When you first encounter something that has been designed just right - the iPhone, Gmail, the Swedish cheese knife and now Google Chrome, you always find yourself wondering what you were thinking using all those other crappy products (I can’t imagine, for example, going back to a regular cell phone, or using an old-skool email client.) And now, after having only played around with Google’s new and long-awaited browser, I knew immediately that it was a keeper. And it’s not just because of all the widely discussed features like separate processes for each tab, and an overall much more modern system architecture. Maybe what I love most is what is not there, which is very much in line with that greatest of design maxims:
Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. -Antoine de Saint Exupéry
Chrome certainly makes that idea manifest. And sure, maybe somethings were taken away that I’d want, like the ability to have a color theme different from the a-bit-too-dark Bloogle blue, or access to all my favorite FireFox add-ons. Oh, and somewhat ironically, I do miss my Google toolbar, particularly the autofill feature. But I expect that will all come in time.
On the lighter side, I just love how Microsoft came out with a statement today saying they weren’t worried about Chrome competing with IE8 - the only thing preventing that from happening is the default install base on Windows PCs - if IE weren’t installed by default on so many machines, their market share would fade away so fast - IE feels like an old jalopy compared to FireFox, and I hate to say this, but FireFox, while still an amazing browser, just feels slow and tired compared to Chrome (though maybe I should give it some time and open up a gazillion tabs and get umpteen applications running and see if Chrome’s garbage collection really is as great as they sat it is) - and one reason it hurts to say that is because so much of what makes Chrome great is thanks to the sweat and hard work and dedication of the people over at Mozilla - Google even made of point saying so in their super cool comic strip about the new browser. I love how they call it a ‘book’ - hey Googlers, did you know that there also are these books out there with, like, text and stuff :)
