Google OS is a browser

.. well, well, well

Today, the world was shook up by Google in almost Apple style. There was a leak a day or maybe hours earlier than it would officially be announced. Or was it on puropse? Anyhow, the blog hive was alive with buzz-buzz-buzz. Google Chrome was announced.

There has been persistent rumors about the secret Google Operating System and any self respecting Google watcher was certain that one day that would become official. And today it has, sort of.

Well, maybe not. The OS is not an OS, it's a browser. A completely new browser. Designed by today's standards and today's demands. Not building on parts of the past.

Image by l0ckergn0me via Flickr

Well a pleasant shock

This is a pleasant shock and I am really looking forward to this and how this browser will behave on my various sites I built. Will they still render as intended. I think so, since the browser uses the WebKit rendering engine.

Much greater is the anticipation about what the general public will think of it. Will they adopt it now there is browser with a really big name out there. There is big reputation at stake here. And will it nibble away more share from Google or will Firefox lose share? Will it become another tech toy for nerds and proffesionals?

Uhm and then this

Also today I came across this article explaining how IE8 behaves on a Windows system. How much memory it grabs and how much processor power it needs. Astonishing! Compare that with the story of Google Chrome and you can only shake your head.

Watching the official announcement

Doing some live blogging ;-)

• It surely does look sexy.
• The Omni Box seems more versatile than the Smart Bar, good name.
• Web application becoming very much like desktop applications
• There is a Porno Switch as well!
• Crashing a browser will only crash tab, that's cool. I have seen and still see crashes of Firefox and IE and those ARE annoying!
• WebKit is blistering fast!
• Who wouldn't want a V8 under the hood? And what about a V8 running your JavaScript?
• Built on Danish Virtual Machine expertise. Hidden classes, hmm, interesting.
• Ha! I am already downloading!
• Downloading and installing takes less than two minutes to get started as well! Again blistering fast!
• 20:58 local time I am now editing this blog post in Google Chrome! I might be one of the first in the World!!!
• LOL ".. based on my extensive testing for the last three minutes"
• LOL Statistics for nerds
• I am really impressed, but will still hold on to Firefox for the time being, but also will be using Google Chrome!

So, I had a quick look at one the statistics that run on my site to see what the Chrome browser is identfied as and .. Lo and behold! It's being recognized as Safari 1.3! This will no doubt be fixed pretty soon. But there is also a mention of Chrome there.

Blog log

Safari 1.3 Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Fun!

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