Dr. Mercola September 23 2008 27,948 views
I have often stated that my favorite search engine is Google. In fact, I was one of the first few thousand people to start using it shortly after it went beta out of Stanford in the late ‘90s! Back then it was obvious that it was far better than anything else out there, and the company has continued to excel and impresses me to this day. Most people barely scratch the surface of Google’s features and capabilities, but I’ve found many of them invaluable as I search and dig for information on a daily basis.
Google is now coming out with a brand new browser, Chrome, which is intended to compete with Explorer, Safari and Firefox. Chrome sharpens Google’s already intense competition with Microsoft, the maker of Internet Explorer. Google hopes that Chrome will loosen Microsoft’s grip on the browser market.
But Google also said Chrome was created in large part to allow users to interact with increasingly powerful programs that run in a browser window, like Gmail, Google Docs and applications created by other companies. The company claims Chrome is the first browser built from scratch with such applications in mind.
Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome's V8 JavaScript engine, said he's confident that Chrome is "many times faster" than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many Web applications. Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks; on each one of these tests, Chrome trounced the competition.
Gmail is still Beta too. How many years is that??
I like the idea of a completely rewritten browser.. but thanks I'll pass on Chrome. For now at least. Yeah I'm not crazy about the Goog knowing my browsing habits, but there are always countermeasures.
I work in IT, focusing a little bit on network and security--and Firefox is all I'll use. With the Adblock and No-Script add-ons, it's about the safest you can get--fastest and most useful, too. It blocks most of those annoying, loud, moving, animated or video ads without me even having to know about them. Combined with a good antivirus (avoid the commercial giants McAffe and Norton, as those are widely known and therefore targeted by viruses to be disabled--I recommend downloading the free antivirus program called avast! which you can find with a quick search online) and antispyware (Ad-Aware and Spybot are great), you can be protected no matter what you do. I started doing this years ago and have not had a single virus. Also, the new computer I bought a year ago has not slowed down in the slightest (in stark contrast to many people's, which quickly get bogged down with various forms of malware and can't perform as well).
I'll get off my nerd soapbox now ;)
You never gave a link to get the new Google browser!
Joe
Click one of the source articles.