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New Google Apps
Wednesday, 3 September 2008 11:56So Google has been busy: Picasa 3 and Google Chrome are out.
Google Chrome web browser
I downloaded Google Chrome last night, and gave it a bit of a test run. I like the interface - it's slick and clean, with nice visual effects. Most noticeable feature is the speed though: it's fucking fast. It also loads pages elements as it gets them, rather than waiting till the whole page is downloaded before displaying it; this makes it seem even quicker. I ran it through a bunch of my commonly-used sites, and it worked just fine on virtually all of them; the exception is the Intranet site at work, which breaks at the same place Firefox 3 does; my guess is that our web designers have broken something. One particularly nice feature is the ability to inspect page elements: if you work with CSS a lot, this must be fantastic, as you can see exactly how it all renders.
On the downside, it's like most Google applications: it's stripped down and great for 80-90% of the functionality, but that remaining 10-20% is not available at all, and you need to decide how important it is to you. Also, like other Google apps, it has fairly limited customisability; if you don't like the way some of it works, that's tough. In the case of Chrome, the killer features it doesn't have that I won't give up Maxthon for are being able to open all links in new tabs, ad-blocking, customisable proxy settings, and tab groups.
I suspect that Chrome, being open-source, will be used as a base to add things onto, or as the core for other browsers, and that, I reckon, will be a good thing.
Picasa 3
Picasa 3 Beta was released last night too. I'm a huge fan of Picasa generally, and Picasa 3 builds on Picasa 2's solid features. New things I really like: being able to auto-save screencaps; limited retouching; adding of watermarks; adding of text; web album syncing; and a really fast and spiffy image viewer for Windows.
Google Chrome web browser
I downloaded Google Chrome last night, and gave it a bit of a test run. I like the interface - it's slick and clean, with nice visual effects. Most noticeable feature is the speed though: it's fucking fast. It also loads pages elements as it gets them, rather than waiting till the whole page is downloaded before displaying it; this makes it seem even quicker. I ran it through a bunch of my commonly-used sites, and it worked just fine on virtually all of them; the exception is the Intranet site at work, which breaks at the same place Firefox 3 does; my guess is that our web designers have broken something. One particularly nice feature is the ability to inspect page elements: if you work with CSS a lot, this must be fantastic, as you can see exactly how it all renders.
On the downside, it's like most Google applications: it's stripped down and great for 80-90% of the functionality, but that remaining 10-20% is not available at all, and you need to decide how important it is to you. Also, like other Google apps, it has fairly limited customisability; if you don't like the way some of it works, that's tough. In the case of Chrome, the killer features it doesn't have that I won't give up Maxthon for are being able to open all links in new tabs, ad-blocking, customisable proxy settings, and tab groups.
I suspect that Chrome, being open-source, will be used as a base to add things onto, or as the core for other browsers, and that, I reckon, will be a good thing.
Picasa 3
Picasa 3 Beta was released last night too. I'm a huge fan of Picasa generally, and Picasa 3 builds on Picasa 2's solid features. New things I really like: being able to auto-save screencaps; limited retouching; adding of watermarks; adding of text; web album syncing; and a really fast and spiffy image viewer for Windows.