Friday 26 September 2008

Why Not Chrome?

I installed and tried Google Chrome recently and my first impression of Chrome as a browser is quite average. As I said before, there is nothing revolutionary about Chrome at the surface. It's really the backend functionality that Google is betting on. For now, my biggest complaint about Chrome is that it installs in user's home directory rather than a shared directory so that all users can use (maybe there is or will be an option to install it in shared mode and I just don't know it).

At the moment, each browser has its niche market: IE is pre-installed on all Windows based machines including Windows Mobile; Firefox has a great plug-in framework so that its functionality and usability can be greatly extended beyond just being a browser; Opera has over 100 million installations on mobile phones; Safari is the browser of choice on Mac...

So far, my favourite browser is Firefox v3 mostly because of the plug-ins. As a blogger, the ScribeFire blogger plug-in for Firefox is a must-have. I use it to do my blogging rather than using the Blogger's own web pages (thanks to Blogger's APIs). Another plug-in I use is the Adblock Plus where you can selectively block advertisement contents by clicking on the 'block' tab that Adblock Plus inserted over them.

IE still remains the widely used browser and I still use it. I only use it because certain plug-ins (ActiveX) are only available on IE. The most popular plug-in is probably the Microsoft Outlook for IE since most companies these days use Outlook as their email solution.

Google is also taking this approach by integrating Chrome with other Google services so that Chrome will be the best browser when it comes to Google (and its partner) provided services. Therefore, I don't see any single browser replacing all others. It will be more of a case of using certain browser for certain use cases.

Related Posts: Why Google Chrome?

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