Google Chrome - is it the Emperors New Clothes?

So, Google release a new browser called "Chrome" - with all of the competition out there from Mozilla (Firefox), Opera and Microsoft Internet Explorer why should Google release a browser and why should we take any notice?

Well, the answer is more closely related to the way that you use your browser rather than whether you should change for change's sake.

If you simply open your browser and look at web pages sequentially, then there's probably very little benefit in changing - unless you want to have a look at "the new" although pdf documents open significantly faster in Chrome.

Where it comes in to its own is with tabbed browsing. Opening new tabs has been a long term differentiator between Firefox and Opera (both of which have had tabs for a long time) and Internet Explorer - which only gained tabs in its latest update. Tabbed browsing enables you to have multiple web sites (or pages from the same site) open at the same time.

With all other browsers though, a problem with one page in one tab can (and does) freeze the whole browser. Imagine that you have webmail open in one browser and you are half way through composing an email, you have a web based spreadsheet open in another tab and go to a third tab to do a little research for your email. You launch the tab, navigate to the target site and have to wait for Java to load. Your browser is frozen and you wait and wait....until...you realise that the web page you need for research has locked up your browser. No option - crash out of the browser and re-start. You could have lost your email draft AND any unsaved data in your spreadsheet.

This is where Chrome is different. Each browser tab runs like a stand alone program so if a tab has problems, it can be closed WITHOUT AFFECTING the other open tabs!

Chrome has also been designed around web computing - not web browsing so all YouTube aficionados, all of those who use web based applications (Google Docs, Zoho and the like) will all see benefits.

Last but not least of the features that i have found and like is that if you are working on a document and open another tab for research - if you have space on your desktop with a large monitor, a wide screen or you have multiple monitors, you can pull the research tab "away" from your main instance of Chrome and have it open in its new window.

It may just be in "beta" i.e not fully developed, it may not have all of the options available to Firefox (Firefox has thousands of useful ad ons) bit I have to admit that I like Chrome a lot.

And...the way that it works it not too far away from being an operating system in its own right. If you do everything remotely through your web browser (Thin Client Computing - Wikipedia definition) then Chrome may just be the best way to achieve it.