When I saw this panel, I just couldn’t resist…
I’ll certainly check out Chrome on Windows, though the key will be how it goes on a Mac for me. Today I use Safari because of the OS integration and speed, though I occasionally miss an extension or two that I will run Firefox for. Both Firefox and Safari will crash or hang from time to time (particularly on Google mail and calendar!), so if the browser can live up to its claims here it could be a winner. They’ve certainly set the bar of expectations pretty high, though, and I’ve been disappointed by Google’s native apps in the past – primarily Google desktop which while useful was not very stable for me.
One of the more compelling things from my perspective is the fact that it will be entirely open source (presumably from the comic this is going to be Apache License 2.0 – though I haven’t seen that stated anywhere yet).
From a user’s perspective, this seems to be more of the "best bits" of other browsers – as I browsed through I recognised features from Opera, Firefox, IE, Firefox, Opera,… having them all rolled into one browser without the other fluff is useful, but perhaps not compelling enough to switch on its own. Then again, Google will have the avenues to promote this to users well beyond any of the other browser vendors other than Microsoft.
This is certainly interesting… given the rumours have been around for years now, I wonder just how long they’ve actually been cooking this up.
Brett Porter 