Clearly, the next stage in their evil plan is controlling how you ACCESS it. Yesterday, on the 2nd of September, google released their innovative new web browser, Google Chrome.
Web browsers
Before I launch into a rant about this new release from the masters of the internet, I will first explain what a "Web Browser" IS.
When you want to use the web on your computer, for example, to look on wikipedia or facebook, you will probably either be clicking on an icon called "Internet explorer" or "Firefox" on your desktop. This will then launch a program that will probably take you to your home page. You can then type addresses or navigate to where you want to be, and get the information you want to see. That program, that you are now using, is a web browser.
So what's Chrome?
Google chrome is an example of a browser. A few years ago, when firefox was released, it hailed a revolution in the usability and the safeness of the internet. It was more reliable than internet explorer - more universally intuitive than Safari or Opera, or even its ancester, Netscape. However, firefox does have its weaknesses - simple design issues that arise from the fact that it is such a mature project that still recieves a very large number of new features.
One of the "Problems" that Chrome deals with is the complexity of the Javascript stack.
Javascript
When a website changes its content without loading a new page, it is using a special programming language called javascript. Javascript has been around for a long time - it gave us those menus that appear when you hold your mouse over something, and disappear when you move it away. More recently, it has been used in web pages to grab or send information back to the website without the page being reloaded - you no longer have to wait for everything you change on a web page to have an effect for the next thing to happen. This can be seen on Facebook - where you can type your new status in and save it straight away, or start searching for something and recieve suggestions back immediately. The technique itself is referred to around the internet as AJAX.
The problem is that it only works because it relies on technologies that were very old. When the first lines of code for Firefox were put together, Javascript was something altogether different from what it is now. This means that despite all modification, Firefox is still not running such websites as fast as it should be.
That's where Chrome comes in. It features a whole new Javascript that is as fast as they come.
Concurrency
When you are using the internet, you often browse many web pages at once. These web pages all behave as parts of one program - they can communicate to each other to a limited degree, and if one crashes, they all crash. That's a problem when it comes to security and reliability, in an increasingly dangerous internet. Google solves this problem using an unusual approach - each website you view with Google chrome runs as if it is a seperate program. It all appears within the same Window, with tabs, such as can be seen with Firefox or Internet Explorer 7, but each website is actually seperated - it can not interfere with the others.
First impressions
My first impressions of Chrome are warm. It's not a finished product yet, which is why I don't think it's a Firefox killer in its current state. The colours leave a little to be desired, though the rest of the user interface is rather nice, with space maximised by a simple, intuitive layout - something that's important for a web browser. The lack of any sort of extension at the moment is disappointing, though I don't know if there are any plans to implement this. I have also lately been using something called "Ubiquity", which is a clever little technology that at the moment only works with firefox, so I would miss that.
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