New Google Apps

[claidheamhmor]

So 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.

Comments

Re: great review...

[claidheamhmor]

I've liked Maxthon for ages; some very nice features, and they're all "out of the box". IE compatibility is a big plus for me.

[pcb.livejournal.com]

Ah!
Thanks - you beat me too it :-)

[openmindedmale.livejournal.com]

I played with Google Chrome too, and it's neat. It is a beta, and it shows in lack of features, but what is there works very very well.. and as you said, it's fucking fast... though I shouldn't say it like that because the best fucking is actually very slow, but y'know ;)

I do look forward in seeing what stuff comes out of it.

[mysehnsucht.livejournal.com]

I also installed Chrome today, and love it. Great review :)

[argonel.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the quick review. I grabbed Picasa 3, but I'm going to pass on Chrome. I still have to poke at the new features to see if they do more for me than Picasa 2 did. Unfortunately for Chrome the lack of ad blocking completely kills it for me. I don't care how fast it renders, I would rather not see or download the ads.

[claidheamhmor]

Seconded on that. I hope that ad-blocking plugins come along soon.

[pcb.livejournal.com]

It's fixed now, they say, but here's an interesting little something in The Register (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/09/03/google_chrome_eula_sucks/)

[claidheamhmor]

Yeah, I saw that. Google got slightly caught there. :)

[pcb.livejournal.com]

Google: The New Micro$oft