Google Chrome exits beta
In what might be some sort of record for Google, Chrome, their webkit based browser, has gone 1.0 today.
In our survey of web developers and designers, we asked what browsers people use, and what they test for, and we’ll be interested to see whether early adopter web types are using and or testing for Chrome.
Does the world need a new browser? Can’t ever be too any? What do you folks think?
Yes. But only if it improves upon what already exists. Chrome shows potential for being sufficiently worth it, but I’ll suspend judgement until I use it a bit more (and they release it for Mac OS X).
We were talking about this in the office earlier today. And I just can’t see where Chrome fits in. People who are likely to leave IE will tend to move to Firefox I believe — and as a developer the extensions in Firefox make it invaluable.
What’s Chrome’s point of difference? In practical terms it just doesn’t offer any real incentive to switch.
I did download Chrome when it was first released and used it for a few days, and then though, “what’s the point?”. Back to Firefox for me.
Do we need another browser? Probably not.
To me, all in all, it’s a pain in the ass.
Another browser to test on?
As we used to say when I was growing up in Brooklyn, NY, “Gedoudaheah!”.
On the other hand, I can’t make it go away and it’s based on WebKit and I’m hoping that it’s a reliable testing substitute for Safari/Windows.
Most Mac users might never have had the displeasure — but Safari’s font-rendering in Windows is absolutely horrendous.
And then also, there’s a lot of talent at Google and maybe they’ll come up with some novel extensions or additional functionality that might prove useful accross the whole browser board.
It’s just another test bed. I too still can’t see how marketing wise Chrome fits in the big picture. Is it an extension for the Google apps and docs suite that is developing. Or is it just a standalone project that was a nice re-skinning around webkit.