Google's Chrome Browser is Now 4 Years Old
Google's Chrome browser is celebrating its fourth birthday this week.
Google released the first beta version of Chrome on September 2, 2008. The first final release followed on December 11, 2008. Since its launch, Chrome has captured the lead in the market share race and is currently slightly ahead of Microsoft's Internet Explorer, with 33.59 percent versus 32.85 percent share.
The browser has been widely credited with increasing the focus on browser speed and security, and forcing Microsoft and Mozilla to substantially accelerate their JavaScript engines. According to JavaScript benchmarks such as Google's Octane, SunSpider or Mozilla's Kraken, chrome is still ahead in this discipline. Google has also influenced its rivals to adopt a silent update mechanism and a reduced user interface that allows more content to be shown in the browser window. Mozilla has also changed its software release schedule to 6 week time frames to match Google's model.
To review Chrome's milestones, Google posted the Chrome Time Machine, which allows the user to click through all major announcements. My personal favorite is the speed tests video, including a comparison of Chrome page load times against a potato gun. The video was launched when Chrome 5 was current (today were are using Chrome 21 as final version and Chrome 23 as developer version).
Chrome, in my personal experience up to now, is unable to stably handle anything more than 20 tabs. There are also times when it decides to have a crashing fit (with only about 2 or 3 tabs open). The only really horrible time I had was with Firefox 4.0. That was a disaster with memory handling. Firefox has pretty much settled down now and is still my preffered browser.
Plus DownThemAll is the love of my life for downloading regardless of OS.
My firefox loads pages 0.0001s slower but it has noscript and adblock plus.
Choose your destiny.
1. Every download pops up by default on the bottom on the browser.
2. Press Ctrl+J
3. Profit
Not surprising at all, some people don't notice the difference between the web browsers and just use what's given to them by default, the WMP users also falls in this category.
Chrome is meh IMHO. I enjoy the plugin support for FF, but that has nothing to do with chrome. I don't like how chrome is sandboxed (yeah, I understand that's the point), and I HATE HATE HATE how it handles file downloads and print job interfaces (as the default).
I find myself juggling between FF for work, Chrome for play, IE only when absolutely necessary, and Opera as backup. Of all of those, only Opera feels like a completely self contained system that is always ready and waiting for me, as opposed to all the others that feel somewhat detached and session-centric.
I leave Safari on my computer too, but only if every other browser is somehow not working...
Bravo to Chrome for pushing FF and IE to streamline and promote stability, as FF had been flailing for a while between 3.5 and 3.6, and IE was unmitigated disaster after disaster until IE9...
Opera still owns my mobile web completely, only occasionally being supplanted by Dolphin when there is a glitch.