Google — Tag

Today Google released it’s long rumoured, hotly anticipated, entry into the web browser market – Google Chrome.

It is another back-to-the-basics web browser, it provides nothing revolutionary to the layman user, but the insides is a bit of an evolution for your basic web browser. In an essence, Chrome looks at the web as a powerful platform rather than a series of pages. You could be forgiven for completely missing this swing, as it has happened all rather quickly. However the moment Google’s email product Gmail hit the market, we knew the web was going to start turning into something special.

It has gotta be named Chrome for a reason.

Google Chrome is just a web browser, but one that has been completely optimised so the web apps run as if they were on your desktop. The user interface is also optimised – the home page contains your most visited websites, and you have the most minimal toolbars I’ve seen in a browser. It contains back, forward, refresh, an address bar, and two buttons that pop open menus. The tabs are at the very top of the browser window, a place that has always made the most sense to me.

It loads in a snap, the pages wait for no one to draw. Whilst Firefox has a draw delay, even removing this still did not match the performance of Chrome. Some say that Chrome runs slower, but after running one of the selector tests, it wiped the floor with Firefox 3. Stuff just runs fast.

Chrome’s memory management is also a plus, with the task manager loaded, opening Gmail and then closing it again, I was able to regain all the memory Gmail took, it was as if I never opened it.

I think this is a huge kick for web browser makers to get their act into gear and start thinking the same way. Microsoft is already coming up with tab sandboxing for Internet Explorer 8, Mozilla are on their way into making Tamarin work with Javascript 2 (it’s Mozilla’s Javascript Virtual Machine, and it runs code almost as fast as native programs) (Mozilla also have Prism, which I see Chrome takes a page from). I have a feeling that this is Google pulling the best stuff that is incoming and forcing it onto us right now, and boy do we need it!

I have my thoughts about Firefox with this though. Mozilla has no excuses now for its rather sluggish performance and memory guzzling ways. We may see some major changes in this arena with Gecko 2, which will be the base for Firefox 4, but we have over a year before then. This is also true for Internet Explorer, but I’m not in a mood to care about that web browser just yet (although, I do like what they’ve done with the auto-complete).

Two big purchases overnight. Can’t keep up!

Late last night, it was confirmed that Vodafone (NZ) had purchased local ISP iHug for $41 million. iHug is the third largest, and provides telephone, satellite and broadband services. This is an interesting step for Vodafone, as the only way to enter the market with a bang is by buying one of the largest in that market. With the advent of local loop unbundling starting here early next year, I suppose that a co-operative wired and wireless world is brewing in Vodafone’s head.

• Juha has full details.

Well, one giant had been in a certain market for a while, but failed to catch up. It has been confirmed that Google purchased YouTube for US$1.65 billion. Now, we must remember that Google was perhaps one of the first companies to have shared video and searching, but it quickly got overtaken by the start up. Google Video has only recently put YouTube style features in.

It does seem to be that if you want to make a bang in a market, you just buy into the largest company of that market.

Google has come up with a novel way of labelling images - using the mind of the human!

In a quick, 90 second game, you are linked up to another player. The two of you then get shown the same image and have to label them. You score points based on how many labels you match.

• Google Image Labeler

There are flaws in the game though. The images are extraordinarily tiny. You can hardly make out what the image is in some cases, and it also makes it hard to flesh out any applicable labels. Hopefully they’ll fix that up, and quickly.