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 :)

Well, almost. One thing that I find quite strange is the location of the control for jumping back several pages:

I remember the first time I needed to go back several pages and saw this and sort of looked at it like “hmm, seems like you can jump ahead several pages, but how do I jump back several pages?” But after clicking on the little control, it turns out that to go back several pages at once, you click on the control next to the forward link:

Unintuitive indeed. Would it not make sense to have this control be next to the back button, maybe something like this?

Here, the location of the control maps to our mental model of where we want to go, as in backwards.

In a small way, it makes the Web 2.0 idea of the web as platform a bit more manifest, if nothing else just visually. If I were to show the screen to someone who was not familiar with Gmail, they may think they’re looking at a desktop app. I think a natural next step in the browser-as-platform evolution would be for this form of desktop-like view to become more of a default and more integrated into the actual desktop. Right now, if you want to get back to the desktop, you have to first escape out of Fullerscreen. It would be great if, for example, the Dock/Taskbar would appear when hovering over the hot zone, just as if you were viewing an actual desktop app. Nonetheless, I definitely recommend adding Fullerscreen to Firefox .