Google Chrome: No Thanks

I remember reading about Google about a decade ago, when it was still an obscure search engine. Today, my life revolves around it. Google Maps. Gmail. GOOG-411. And, now Blogger.

While I'm somewhat put-off by the rather bland styling of Google properties and privacy concerns, I'm still captivated by their products. For example, I'm looking forward to the Android phones to see how they'll stack up to the Apple and Microsoft offerings. Captivated, that is, until Chrome.

In a surprise about as big as Sarah Palin, out of the blue Google released the beta of Chrome this week, and while there's plenty of coverage on it, I'm not biting. Architectural improvements aside, it exists only to ensure targeted advertising reaches us. And one day, I'm sure that Chrome will be mandatory to use Google services and applications.

Google should get revenue for providing useful services, but I'm not sure a Google sandbox browser is the answer. Viva la Firefox!

Ode to Firefox

Only a few years late to the party, I jumped ship from IE to Firefox when 3.0 was released, and now I'm willing to name my first-born Mozilla (Moe for short).

Having been using browsers for over 15 years now (back to Netscape Navigator on X-Windows), Firefox wasn't unknown to me. But as a religious user of IE7 and Opera as my alternative browser, Firefox 1.x didn't call to me. Then I heard about memory leakage problems with Firefox 2, so it wasn't until the latest generation that I decided to make the leap.

Boy, what I was missing! The killer feature for me is the add-on system, and I've racked up a healthy number of them, which I'll share here over time. Aside from the occasional compatiblity problems, it's my main brower now since Firefox combines the performance of Opera with the mainstream appeal of a browser like IE.

If it gets any better, I might just have to really write some poetry about it. :)