Monkey and Machine

I’ve been in a really good mood lately when it comes to browsers. Since I’m using Linux as my operating system I already have big disadvantage since a lot of websites don’t support alternative browsers.

But since I can only choose from alternative browsers you might as well chose the best one. It’s a close race between Firefox and Opera. Although Firefox has more user, Opera is the browser that made me happy the last two weeks. I started using Opera again as my web browser and I guess I needed to be reminded again how great Opera is!

In the past I found the only advantage Opera had was the mousegestures feature. But since I started using Opera again I can’t go without my Speeddial. The great feature about the opera browser is that you can sync you browsers through the opera website. So I can sync my Speeddial on my laptop with the one on my desktop. And that’s just what I needed!

But the thing that always held me back from using Opera was the lack of webdevelopment tools. But with the introduction of Dragonfly this is finally over! Dragonfly offers the same tools that Firebug offers for Firefox. I do miss features in Dragonfly I find in Firebug, but it’s the other way around too.

I still need to find out how I can quickly get to Dragonfly in Opera. I found the keyboard shortcut but I’m really missing the little icon in the bottom right corner of my browser. One of the great features of Dragonfly is the javascript debugger. Gives you more details on the javascript errors than Firebug or the Webdevelopertoolbar do in Firefox.

Google Chorme

But now there is a new browser, and everybody is talking about it: Google Chrome. They announced it September 1st and launched it September 2nd. Unfortunately I’m in a bad position again with my choice of operating system as Chrome is currently only available on Windows. So I guess I’ll have to fire up my dual boot Vista on my laptop to try it. I’ll come back to my experience on chrome in a later post.

In my Google Reader I came across a nice post on webmonkey.com about Chrome and how it will change the web. I guess I kind of agree the web will change with Chrome as it has some killer features like an uber fast javascript engine and the one-tab-one-process idea.

But I think Chrome is really going to change the web because the browser is engineered from a different perspective. As the first page of the Google Chrome Comic tells us, the browser Google build is based on the needs of today. Websites on today’s Internet are becoming more javascript heavy, especially with AJAX entering the web.

The Mozilla team have been working very hard the last few years to improve the web experience through their browser Firefox and they are really succeeding in this with Firefox 3 and plugins like the newly released Ubiquity (which really rocks!). Firefox is really steering in the same direction as Chrome with a focus on javascript as javascript is really becoming a programming language. I hope the Firefox team will use Chrome to make Firefox even better.

Google’s motives

Every time Google pulls of one of these stunts I can’t help but wonder why. Google is still a commercial company that lives on (and devours) information. So their main motive is getting as much information as possible which they do through their services. All these service are build so their advertising service (which provides about 99% of Google’s income) can thrive of that.

But why give away the sourcecode of your browser for free? Why not protect your work? I guess Google doen’t care about the browser itself, but about people using the internet through their services. And this is exactly what Google wants, as you can read from Larry Page’s reaction in the webmonkey.com article.

I can’t do anything else than encourage these kind of actions from Google, but I can’t help but wonder about it. What will the next stunt from Google be? There are still rumours flying around about Google’s own phone. We’ll see.