google chrome
Last week Chris Beech blogged about the Google iPhone. Now there is Google Chrome, the new open source browser from Google. I first heard about it on Twitter on Monday, and shortly after it hit the news, ‘Google Chrome’ became a bigger search term than ‘Hurricane Gustav’ – which, on Monday, was at its destructuve zenith.
Is there any area on the web that Google doesn’t want to own?
If you’re interested, check out the comic book explanation of what Google Chrome is all about, here.
At World Wide Creative, we have Paul, who is a big standards compliancy guy. We’ve already had big discussions over whether we should bother about IE6, now that IE8 is here. With Google Chrome, what new challenges will this bring to Paul’s plate?
It’s already a tough challenge keeping a web presence consistent across browsers, now this…?
what i find really interesting is that Google is using their own massive infrastructure to test chrome in terms of rendering web pages.
From Techcrunch: “The company is claiming that its Chrome Bot can test the browser on tens of thousands of different webpages within 20-30 minutes of each build. These webpages are chosen on the basis of their popularity, which has already been determined by Google with the data it collects from its search users. When Google started testing Chrome, it only rendered 23% of those pages correctly (now it apparently renders 99% correctly).”
That’s great news for web developers!
Wow.
I had exactly the same thought, but then I heard that Chrome is based on Webkit, which is the rendering engine of Safari. I’ve always wanted our sites to be compatible with Safari, but I never bothered because testing was a bit of a pain (although the Safari for Windows helped). Now it will seem worth it to kill 2 birds with one stone.
Safari should be a big winner out of this, because their engine will improve as Google improves Webkit, plus more developers will indirectly make their sites will work in Safari, which makes Safari appear like a better browser.