Google chrome

[sqad617]

Is it worth it?.......big deal or not?

[barry1010]

It's free, so it's worth it.
Download it and give it a try.

[sqad617]

barry ...thanks

[ACtheTROLL]

my line on these "improved" browsers it ... I don't use them
I don't blog, twitter, face, use rss feeds - I couldn't care less what the weather is in Moscow ... and if I need to know the postage coss - I'll visit the website - not use a plugin, and as for saving huge tracts of hints and tips ... everything I've answered in AB ... WHY oh WHY oh WHY? - two minutes with google and I can usually find the latest info on whatever ... not read last year's news.

so IE does what I want. but if you want "extras to enhance your surfing experience ... give it a go (I did just to see) - if it goes on ... it will generally come off again so why not?

[MissNoway]

I use GC most of the time.I find it's the best.

[ACtheTROLL]

MissN
Genuine question ... sell me chrome

you say it's the best ... at what ... what/how do you use it ... and why is it better?

[dr b]

Comparing IE, Firefox, and Chrome, all will surf the web just fine, so it's a matter of which bells & whistles you prefer. Chrome has two nice features - one is that if one tab crashes, your other tabs do not (unlike in Firefox where the whole browser session will shut down). the other is the "incognito" session whereby you can surf anonymously (browser will not accept cookies, nothing is cached or put in your history, etc.), which is nice if you're paranoid.

If you are happy with IE or Firefox there is no real reason to change.

I use all three because I have 3 email addresses and I am too lazy to log out/in, so I just switch between browsers to check different emails.

[barry1010]

GMail collects all my email from different email addresses. Only need one browser for that. Outlook Express does the same thing.

[HillyHugger]

As does Windows live mail . As for the browsers it's a matter of taste , my vote goes to Firefox .

[Everhelpful]

I've tried them all and find Google Chrome by far the best provider.

[sn�gs]

Safari 4 :-)

[ACtheTROLL]

again ... but why????

find Google Chrome by far the best provider.
of what?

I'm genuinely interested why - not taking the p**s

[MissNoway]

ACthe.I find it faster than the rest,FF/ IE /opera,and safari.Have I sold it to you?

[leggysreturn]

ac its fixed his dyslexia so google chrome must be the best .

mustnt it??

[fo3nix]

IE: windows only, lacks great web standards support, lacks many features you can get with other browsers like Opera and Firefox (not important if you don't use these features though). Poor rendering and JavaScript engines, compared to others. Myriad of security issues over the years (largely due to its integration with the rest of Windows).

Opera: Generally good at everything, marred to an extent by not being open source. Tons of features built-in.

Firefox: cross platform, open source, 3.5 has good rendering and JavaScript engines. Tons of add-ons. Let down by high memory usage, and being a bit 'heavy'.

Safari: webkit rendering engine, about the best there is right now. Lots of (perhaps) useful features, Apple touch to detail (Mac OS X especially). Really good speed and standard support.

Chrome: Great rendering and JavaScript engines, great performance. Open source, so will be cross platform. Really nice features that no other browsers have right now (example, each tab is its own process, so if one website crashes, it's just that site and not whole browser), and building up to have a great plugin system like Firefox.

Why is rendering and JavaScript performance important? Because more and more sites are using heavy JavaScript to behave like a traditional desktop app. They're only nice to use if they're responsive.

HTML5 is also becoming more important. Safari 4, Chrome and Firefox 3.5 is getting good support for it, including the video tag, which may be the future for Youtube and similar sites (and we can dump the awful Flash plugin for video), so all browsers should have some focus on this.

[ACtheTROLL]

phew fo3
as usual - comprehensive.

you see the bes ... blah blah ... but people so rarely support their opinions

I used to use netscape (4.7) - I still use it as a news reader - agent etc are good - but .... netscape works
I used opera - but that was in the old days ...

now I need to be familiar with IE ...
and honestly - it does what I need it to do

I have a copy of portable firefox
I'm not overly impressed ... most sites I visit are quite conservative ... so ie never really seems slow or limited

the odd time I visit a supersite ... I put the delay down to traffic or similar

It's becoming a standard question on just about every course I've run this year firefox is mentioned.

Now I can use your answer ;-)

[fo3nix]

I'm not sure it's definitive, but it's my answer.

I personally use Firefox, but don't want to for much longer.

Firefox on the Mac isn't too nice because it doesn't use Cocoa, so doesn't fit in nicely with the rest of the system. It feels odd. It's the same on Windows, but Windows isn't as polished and uniform as Mac OS X, so you don't notice as much. It's also dog slow on Linux, and uses a ton of memory (currently using 207MiB... I have several tabs open (no flash), but come on!).

I'm keeping an eye on Chromium though (open source basis for Google Chrome), and it's promising. Browsing with it is so fast. It's basically alpha or pre-alpha right now though.

What I like about Chrome is that it's done right. The architecture makes sense --- like one process per tab. It's more modular in design that its competitors. Soon they'll be adding more extension support (just written in HTML/JS/CSS), again each to their own process etc.

It all sounds promising.

Oh, and it has Google Gears built in. Basically storage on your own machine to work on stuff offline, then auto-sync to the server when you go online. Useful if you use Gmail or something.