Friday, December 12, 2008

Google Chrome is official, Today not April 1st

Some things just baffle the mind. Like how Google's brand new Chrome web browser can already be graduating from "beta" status to "official" version 1 status when Gmail has not managed to achieve the same feat during its 4 YEAR "beta" period. But Gmail still being in beta is not news; Chrome earning it's wings, is. Today Google announced- and released- the first "official" version of Chrome, boasting in a blog post from Sundar Pichai (VP Product Management) that in the last 100 days Chrome has garnered some 10 million active users from all 7 continents. Today's move underscores how aggresively Google is moving in the browser space, and anyone doubting Google's desire to become a big player in the browser world should take note.

I, for one, have been a Chrome fan since day one. The browser is far, far from perfect, but it's getting a lot of things right. Most importantly, it's "cold start" time is unbeatable. It is a reminder of how slow Firefox and IE take to get going and it raises the bar for how a modern Internet browser should perform.
Telerik began unofficially supporting Chrome during its early beta phase, and Telerik was one of the first vendors to provide full Chrome support for its ASP.NET AJAX controls. Now that the browser is official, Telerik will continue to improve its support for Chrome. In fact, Chrome is already an "officially" supported browser, so if you have users or customers actively using Chrome, you're covered if you're using the RadControls for ASP.NET AJAX. And a quick search will verify that Telerik is currently the only major UI vendor for .NET that is offering support for Chrome!

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Any other noteworthy differences between ff and chrome, other then how fast they get started?

Anonymous said...

Lack of RSS is pretty odd for a modern browser... not sure I understand why Google have done that ??

Todd Anglin said...

@Hypnosis- Definitely. Chrome generally runs JavaScript faster than FF (thanks to the modern JS compiler). Chrome does render some things different than FF (remember, Chrome and Safari generally render the same since both are WebKit-based). Chrome doesn't seem to have the memory leaks that FF has!

@Anon- Yeah, that is a little surprising. I guess Google wanted to focus on core features first and get those right before adding "extras." They have said RSS and a plug-in model are coming, though, so I would expect we'll see those features soon.

-Todd

Anonymous said...

Chrome and Safari use the same Webkit rendering engine, but that’s about where the similarities end.

Chrome uses Google’s V8 scripting engine... it uses Google’s SKIA graphics engine... it uses Google’s VIEWS UI framework... and uses Google’s own process manager... there is more that is unique to Google than common with Safari.

For mine, Chrome is a better browser than Safari, but still lacks some features, and obviously the security is yet to be proven.