Recently, Google have updated their own browser,Google Chrome 5.0 for Linux/Mac users, to a state where it is fully stable. Google first lauched their public stable release for Windows home users back in December of ’08, where it proved to be quite successful. As of April 2010, Google Chrome was the third most widely used web browser, with 6.73% of wordwide usage share of web browsers.
Before Google even thought about releasing Chrome for users outside of the PC dimension, Linux and Mac OS X users had to substitute their desire for Google Chrome, with an open source project, developed by Google themeselves, called Chromium. Chromium is still up for download, for any of you interested. It was originally made for 3rd party developers “to study the underlying source code and help port the browser to Mac OS X and Linux. A Google spokesperson also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt V8 to improve web application performance.”
Now, back to Google Chrome – it is a great web browser, and a fast one at that, with many extensions, themes(!), and a very intuitive user interface. With the URL bar in full frontal view, with dual functions: Google Search and internet browser, it makes surfing the web that much easier. Speed wise, Chrome is at the the top of its league, along with its V8 JavaScript engine, which increases the performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code, before even executing it, rather than interpreting it. Basically makes Chrome a whole load faster, and makes your life a whole load more productive. Maybe this video will give you just an idea of how fast this really is..
And once you’ve finished installing by now; here are some recommended extensions that you should definitely try out
- Google Translate (for all those who need foreign pages translated a.s.a.p)
- Mini Google Maps (for all those too lazy to open up maps.google.com on a new tab)
- Googl URL Shortener (for all those twitter addicts, who love shortening URLs)
- New Tab Redirect! (for those who really wanted chrome to open a custom page up upon opening a new tab)
