Danger: Mac and Linux builds available
Thursday, June 04, 2009
In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.
How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.
Meanwhile, we’ll get back to trying to get Google Chrome on these platforms stable enough for a beta release as soon as possible!
By Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, Product Managers
Google Chrome is one of the newest browser platforms that has taken popularity. I think that the focus Google has taken on Chrome is interesting. Instead of trying to supply as many features as possible in their browser, they made their first focus Security, their second speed. The speed of the browser is why so many people like it. More and more people are looking into ways to make their computer programs faster without purchasing new hardware, or paying for new programs. Google Chrome has manged to attract users by keeping their original goals.
I decided to download and try Google Chrome a while ago, after their official release. I found that the browser was very simple, and relatively easy to use. It was very stripped down in the world of features, however this was done on purpose. Overall, I think this is a great program for users who are not very tech-savvy. More advanced computer users that tend to leave their Internet browsers open may want to stick to their current browser, rather than moving from browser to browser.
Google Chrome does not make your Internet faster, but Google Chrome will load much faster than your ordinary browser, and for pages that have large amounts of Javascript, and third-party elements (such as Java Platform, Adobe Flash…) the order and the threading used in loading elements is more efficient.
I expect to see other browsers, such as Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla FireFox, and Opera follow some of the examples Google Chrome has set. Most browsers have been focusing so much on improving the ability to add more, it ends up bogging them down. It seems the new trend in browsing is minimization.
This aged surprisingly well. Chrome is nearly an industry standard. Both Internet Explorer/Edge and FireFox have copied several details from the development of Chrome — and I think we’ve seen better stability across all browsers as a result.
I tend to agree with Tinkering Tom (comments). Although many of us remain skeptical of Chrome due to privacy concerns from Google, the advancements involved in Chrome has pushed other browsers to advance. Even Edge (RIP Internet Explorer) is based on Chromium. FireFox has made strides as well to match with many of Chrome’s features; but, notably, stability of FireFox has been finally set (memory leaks largely fixed, much more efficient).
Chrome literally shaped the web; I am glad others followed.
An item of amazement to me is that as I write this, my browser (which happens to be FireFox for home — Chrome for work) is using 1.8GB of memory and during the uptime of the process I have exchanged 4gb of data with the World Wide Web. Frankly, that’s quite light usage these days (and not one thing streaming). My original article was written in 2009 on a Dell E1505 laptop clocking in at like 1GB of RAM and running Windows Vista. It says a lot about how our technology has changed. The sheer availability of RAM and powerful inexpensive CPUs has also allowed such developments. I tried to stick Linux on a 10 year old laptop as a little media project, it couldn’t handle Youtube without crashing. (But it still managed to run a web server).
Internet is also faster. Way fast. Users in DSL-only areas are considered underserved populations. Even cable manages a good 300MBPS downstream connection with the most basic packages. Oddly, I run on a basic 100/100MBPS fiber (but I don’t have all that many devices and most of my network traffic is internal) and that’s borderline considered slow anymore. (But I have a better ping and upload than my local cable provider, so EAT IT SPECTRUM).
Modern browsers and HTML 5 basically lets us do anything — heck, we can emulate entire computer systems in a browser — without the need for Java or Flash. It is wonderful what we can do inside any browser (FireFox/Chrome/Edge/Opera/Safari) without having a single addon or plugin. Or 3rd party software running in the background. It just works. Experiencing the modern web 10 years ago required at least three programs. What could possibly happen next?
All this aside, security is perhaps the most impressive. “Browsing” the internet used to be a dodgy activity. Websites with code that runs natively on older browser hijacked windows and tabs, malicious automatic downloads, and other exploits feel like an item of the past. Even computer viruses are rare these days — and if you do manage to download one, your PC almost certainly has protection running whether you know it or not.
The shackles have been removed. Can we finally work on notching the advertising down? (And bring back well-curated, non-political social platforms while we’re at it.) I think we all just want to watch Youtube and read the news in peace.