Niels R. » Google Chrome

Google Chrome 1.0 Stable is released!

Niels R. — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:57:57 +0000

Indeed, Google Chrome is out of beta! You can download the 1.0 release by updating your current installed version or by downloading it!

Not all users are convinced that Chrome is ready to be called “stable”.

Check out the official statement on the Google Chrome Releases blog. Don’t forget to read the comments!

New Google Chrome release: version 0.3.154.9

Niels R. — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:00:20 +0000

The devs of Google Chrome released a new version: 0.3.154.9.

Seems that they have fixed the performance issues with plugins… Gonna test the Flash plugin on GarageTV for my daily portion of Terzake.

Google Chrome is still in beta, though :o)

Full list of changes and fixes can be found here on the official Chrome release blog.

Google’s Chrome declining in popularity

Niels R. — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 08:38:57 +0000

A post on Slashdot states that Google Chrome is losing users. It started with a 4% market share and is now just above 1.5%.

Seems logical to me. The browser was announced with a lot of attention by the media (it was even on the Belgian VRT news), so everyone goes out and tries it.
After a day, you notice that it’s fast and sleek, but that it feels like a beta (because it is a beta). I’m still using it at work (Windows environment), but when I need to set a bookmark I fire up Mozilla Firefox because of the superb add-on Foxmarks.
Foxmarks is not the only add-on I miss when using Chrome. What about Adblock Plus, Firebug, Web Developer extension, IE Tab and ChatZilla?
Chrome has a basic DOM inspector, but it lacks a lot of stuff that Firebug has to offer us.
Besides that, I notice a lot of stuttering when using the Flash player on e.g. GarageTV (which I have to use daily for professional reasons).
And last but not least (I think) is the fact that it is mostly a Windows-only browser. The codebase (Chromium) is available for download, but builds for Linux and Mac OS X aren’t very stable.

The things I really like about Chrome (and what most of the user probably will): speed, clean interface and the startup tab with screenshots of most visited websites.

I honestly have to say that I didn’t try out a lot of Chrome add-ons yet. You’ll find some on:

So, let’s give Google some time to improve Chrome and it might become my standard browser.

Chromium on Linux/Mac OS X using Wine: