Pemaquid Communications

Google’s new Chrome browser could help w/t/universal adoption of Web Standards by browser makers. Google’s browser uses the Webkit rendering engine, the same one used by Apple’s Safari, which also closely applies Web Standards, so Chrome should do the same.

I downloaded Chrome last night and ran pemaquid.com and several other sites that apply Web Standards through it, and they all checked out, even the features fortified w/(Progressively Enhanced) Ajax.

Separately, a CSS bug has been reported by Jeremy Jarratt, in that Google Chrome improperly displays alternate style sheets. This is apparently a bug that has existed in Webkit and Safari for some time. (information via Jeffrey Zeldman).

Because of Google’s high profile, Chrome could have more of an immediate impact than Firefox did when it came on the scene. I’m hoping that’s going to be a good thing.

For example, it might wake up certain IE6-centric developers slumbering blissfully ignorant to the existence of Web Standard design principles, when they wonder why their sites don’t render consistently in a suddenly-popular Chrome.

Still, it remains to be seen if Google Chrome will make a sizeable dent in the browser market. As we’ve seen with the continuing significant market share held by IE6, people don’t easily switch browsers unless they find it compelling to do so.

One thing’s for sure, as Zeldman says, we once again live in interesting times regarding Web Standards, Web content and Web browsers.

Last night I noticed John Resig twittering about a new Web browser from Google, called Chrome. It’s hitting the news in other places; here’s a piece from yesterday’s New York Times.

Reports say Google intends to release the browser for download from its site today at: google.com/chrome but so far nothing’s available.

I haven’t had time to immerse myself the details yet, but here are some of the important details:

• It will be open source
• It will offer a way for people to see how Web sites are consuming system resources
• It will handle tabbed browsing in a slightly different way

This could have a major impact on both Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser as well as the Mozilla Project’s Firefox.

You can find out more about the Google Chrome features at Google Blogscoped, a blog which follows the company; learn more about some of the technical implications of Google Chrome from John Resig on his blog.

As far as the impact on front end Web designers? It remains to be seen, but if you assume that Chrome adheres to Web standards and standard CSS implementations, it shouldn’t change the game all that much. Stay tuned….

More than 8 million people downloaded Firefox 3 in a 24-hour period, setting a world record, and more than 28 million download have taken place since the browser was released June 17.

BBC News »

Today turned out to be an interesting study in usability, the power of Habit, and backwards compatibility. A colleague – she’s an über-geek – casually asked if I was running Firefox 3, the latest (beta) version of the popular open source browser put out by the Mozilla Project and released into the wild last Tuesday. Nope, I said, but I can fix that soon enough (it sounded like something worth doing). I downloaded it.

Alas! My productivity took a detour.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to knock FF3, and it’s got lots of worthy improvements, especially in the area of security. It easily updated my bookmarks and reconfigured my plug-ins. New plug-ins were easier to install and pop ups were easier to deal with. But, as they say, it is the little things that count.

For me, that was things like the browser chrome. Whoever designed FF3 must have loved Netscape 6+ and Safari, because the chrome looks very similar to those browsers. Not a big deal, but it was a “little” detail. It took a split-second longer for me to find my bookmarks and links in the chrome (which were not _quite_ where they used to be), and all those microseconds added up to a usability issue. It reminded me of a basic tenet of usability – Don’t Make Me Think!.

In other words, the more a person has to think about how to complete a task, the less they are thinking about the task itself – and that makes it tough to concentrate. Apps that make you think will ultimately be less successful than those that don’t.

I could have lived w/that. But the clincher for me was the download error I got when I tried to install Firebug 1.1 (the version that is supposed to run on FF3). That did it – I need my Firebug! Back to Firefox 2 – at least for now.

Editor’s Note: Eureka! I found Firebug 1.2, which does in fact work on FF3. So… with that, I can bounce back up to version 3.