We’ve got a lot of people wondering why Google recently renewed the search deal with Firefox when they had plans to release their own browser. Why the answer to isn’t obvious is beyond me but hey I’ll take my own shot at the obvious answer anyway. So how do I put this simple, let’s see. How about, urm, because it makes damn business sense. Firefox drives a lot of traffic through Google. If Google were to decide to not extend the deal, it would lose anywhere between 15-30% - depends on what continent and service you’re looking at - of the browser share market.

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So Google Chrome has finally arrived; merely a day after it’s announcement. I’ve been excited for the product from the first moment I laid my eyes on the webcomic. As any self respecting geek would, I downloaded and installed the browser as soon as possible.

It seems fairly stable. Having launched more than 25tabs in lesser number of seconds seems to have had no effect on the browser. From the limited testing I’ve given it , it has worked quite smoothly and fluidly. The version of the browser is 0.2.149.27, but no beta tag anywhere. Tabs being on top only bother you for the first few seconds after which I didn’t have any problems getting used to it.

A lot of the shortcuts were supported out of the box including Shift + Ctrl + T (reopen last closed tab) and Alt + D (highlight the address bar). These shortcuts exist in Firefox so this makes migration a lot easier. I don’t have benchmarks but gmail opened up in roughly the same time as it does in Firefox 3.0.1

Downloads are shown in a bar below, which looks quite good. A blue arrow animation is displayed when a download begins. I captured a screenshot just in time for your viewing pleasure.

Ctrl + J (another Firefox native shortcut) brings up a nice little list of downloads which looks quite good in my opinion with pie chart style completion icons.

I tried running a few javascript annoyances on java-scripts.net. The browser has a box which ‘prevents this page from creating additional dialogs’ for websites which keep on throwing boxes at you not letting you switch tabs or close the browser without assistance from the task manager. The tick box didn’t work on the first time always and a second hit of the ‘ok’ button was needed sometimes. But it’s only 0.2 so the behaviour is forgiveable.

There is one major bug though; upward scrolling on touchpads doesn’t work. This is the case on many notebooks, not just mine. So Google take note.

Chrome needs a lot of work before it replaces your full time browser yet. But with Google’s hands in it I only salivate at the possibilities. More on that later.

Skyfire is bringing PC like browsing to the mobile devices. This means content needn’t be changed in any way for the smaller screen, nor will existing content look like shit. While the video looks promising, it’s only available as a closed beta to US customers, so I won’t be getting a chance to review it for a long time. Right now support is included for Windows Mobile devices, but a Symbian version is in the works.

But a very important part of their Privacy policy is that they will be tracking usage “anonymously” but a user’s identitiy may very well be disclosed by the website(s) they visit.

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