Chrome 2.0 - Have You Switched?

Have you seen this thing? Have you used it? Have you even heard of it? I'm hoping you can say yes to at least two of those questions. Google's Chrome browser went 2.0 recently and if you haven't upgraded yet...get on it. If you haven't used this thing yet...now is a brilliant time to get it.

Internet Explorer dominates the market, Firefox decided to challenge the beast and continues to enjoy success as the primary alternative to Internet Explorer. While I won't diss Firefox, I won't lie to you about the cold hard facts. Chrome runs, performs, and loads faster than Firefox. It hauls. Google's decision to enter the game was based on what they viewed as "a lack of functionality" and "unnecessary browser crashing." Google aimed to solve this problem by continuing the route of "tabbed" interfaces seen by Firefox and IE7, but making all the tabs seperate processes running independently of one another. Thus, should one of the pages crash, that tab crashes. Not the entire browser/all of your work.

So far I think they've done a brilliant job of fufilling the role of a stable, efficient, and fast browser. Version 1 was fun, but clearly had a lot of bugs left in it. The biggest one being "sooo yeah...you sorta can't use hotmail." The problem has been since fixed within the time period of version 1, but this article is about version 2.

Version 2 is fast, really fast. Still no MacOS release (dissapointing) but Seven is my dominant OS. Thus, I'm not incredibly bothered by this. However when I do bootcamp back over to MacOS I would very much enjoy using Chrome (using Microsoft Live Mesh to sync my preferences between both OS's would rock.) Google has publically declared that due to a recent upgrade in their javascript technology, pages "load 30% faster." However most of us have new computers, if not just decent computers to support internet browser. Which means this specific speed boost is probably going to go unnotitced, unless of course you are such an avid Google user that you use things such as Google Docs (which are entirely javascript based). Let it be said, these apps do seems to have picked up speed.

If you are already running Chrome click on your wrench icon and check for updates. If you aren't running Chrome and curious what this thing does. I highly encourage you to check out the following link for download.

http://www.google.com/chrome