Control of the desktop browser market (or at least a chunk) continues to be a big focus of some of the major players on the Internet: Mozilla (the open source foundation), Microsoft, Google and to a lesser extent Apple, Opera and other smaller % players. The latest salvo has been fired off by Google with the release a few days ago of their Chrome browser. If you’re not familiar with Chrome, I think the comic book introduction actually does a great job of highlighting the differentiators, the architecture and generally why you should care.I’ve been using Chrome for a bit now and have to say that I’m initially impressed. I think Amith (our usability wizard) is a fan as well. I’ve been using Chrome with Trading Grid Online, for example, in advance of qualification testing–they aren’t kidding about client-side javascript performance improvements from what I can tell.
My favorite aspects are:
- Maximum screen real estate, very simple and clean design.
- Render and javascript speed seems quite top notch.
- Each
tab is a process–a bad site which hangs or crashes only affects a
single tab and you get a task manager tool for handling these
situations. - The location bar is useful for a number of
activities: prior sites by address, prior sites by input and keyword
search via Google.
Here’s chrome rendering GXS.com: 
This
last feature, the location bar’s multi-tasking nature, leads me to
another more quietly rolled-out experimental browser feature called Ubiquity.
A plugin for Mozilla’s Firefox browser, Ubiquity provides a
command-line like option with a number of powerful and potentially
useful keyword commands. The effect is more or less like a DOS shell
or an xterm session for the browser. Check out the tutorial for
an example of a command sequence for highlighting text and pasting a
highlighted excerpt in a Gmail message or a highlight and translate
sequence. Chrome doesn’t seem to have a plugin developer option at the
moment or I would be looking for a Ubiquity clone post-haste.All this
competitively driven innovation is good news for us business users who
now access a plethora of web applications every day, many tabs open,
many hours logged on various systems both accomplishing and monitoring
tasks. I think better browser innovation promises greater productivity
on tasks already being asked of you on a daily basis.Here’s an example
of Ubiquity in action:
As
you can see, I can just highlight in the browser, pop up Ubiquity (ctrl
+ space), type email and all the copy/paste work and the task of
opening Gmail has been done for me. Slick. That’s all for this
installment. Let’s hope Web OS innovation continues at a strong clip.