Google Chrome

I’ve been pouring through the video’s as they’ve been released of the Google-IO conference which happened a few days ago, its really hard to imagine that so much awesome took place over just two days. I think Google’s next step should be to open Google University to teach people how to use all this awesome new crap. First on my list is definitely Google App Engine but I’ll talk more about that another time.

Also I’d like to quickly mention that I stopped by Best Buy to take a look at the new Android phones which just hit the Canadian market for the first time a few days ago, unfortunately they didn’t have a working model on display but it was still interesting to see them. I think the model with the flip screen (HTC Magic) which reveals the keyboard is particularly nice, and tonight I just found out that Android will have python scripting built right in! I can’t wait for my Bell contract to expire, I’ll definitely be making the switch to Rogers unless Bell has Android phones by then.

But regarding a completely separate Google product which was really the reason I’m staying up late to write this; recently one of the Google Chromium developers commented regarding porting Chromium to the Linux platform “This entire situation is a clusterf*ck, I am not happy with the technical constraints imposed by Linux and its assorted UI’s on Chrome’s UI and feature set.”. (original thread)

I have the Linux developer version of Chromium installed and I’ve used it a few times it certainly is an interesting looking application and I sympathize with the developer in question, cross platform development with multiple toolkits no doubt is incredibly painful. However I can’t help but think that in this case it is a self-inflicted pain since there are already existing cross platform toolkits freely available which Google could have used  such as Qt, Swing or even SWT. Using a cross platform toolkit would have alleviated much of the pain and frustration that they are now facing porting Chromium to Linux. If they wanted their product to look the same on all platforms then they would have got that out of the box had they chosen Swing or Qt, however if they wanted a native look across each platform then SWT the toolkit used by Eclipse should have worked just fine.

How stupid is it to completely rebuild the entire UI of an application using separate toolkits when the developers knew from the beginning that being cross platform was an absolute requirement and there are cross platform open source toolkits freely available? Is GTK so much better on Linux than the alternatives? Is the native windows toolkit so much better than the alternatives on Windows? It certainly can’t be that it is easier to develop simultaneously with multiple toolkits, so there must be some other powerful reason they chose to do it this way but it baffles me.

Don’t get me wrong I’m really no expert developer so there may have actually been very good reasons why Google chose not to use Swing, SWT or Qt and although I cant think of what they might be I am open the idea and I’d love to find out if someone else actually  does know.

Thankfully  there will always be Firefox and although it doesn’t use Webkit or V8, which I wish it did, it is still an amazingly good Browser and I highly recommend it. In addition Firefox-3.5 will support the HTML-5 specification just the same as the Webkit based browsers so there is no need to ever worry that Firefox users will be left behind. HTML-5 is really exciting it will give browsers the ability to play online video’s without a plugin (bye-bye Flash). That’s going to be a beautiful day.

Edit: Just wanted to add, there seems to have been a bit of confusion generated by this article so I wanted to clear it up. You can not add a Java (SWT, Swing) interface onto a non-Java application so thats not what I was suggesting although it might have seemed that way to some. I was merely speculating that if Google knew it would need to develop on 3 different platforms from the *beginning* then why didnt they choose a crossplatform toolkit.

So the new Google Browser: Chrome works fine with the Wordpress admin pages which is nice, I’ve been using Chrome all morning and haven’t noticed a single problem.

The browser screen real estate is quite large, no bottom footer, and a very small header section so you really barely even notice the browser which is how it should be.

The tabs are up at the top of the page and I thought it would be strange but its not at all, in fact its nicer because I find it easier to click a tab thats up at the very top of the screen than it is to click a tab thats nested somewhere in the middle-top of the page. So for the record tabs at the top of the screen are full of awesome and very usable.

I find it really amazing just how much of my life is on the web these days, and just how much of my life I can access from any terminal with an internet connection. I think Google really gets it.

My favorite web apps/sites:

1. reader.google.com (stores my feeds for all the blogs/comics/news sites that I read regularly)

2. gmail.com

3. maps.google.com

4. youtube.com

5. combas3d.com

(I would really like to start using the google calender site as well, I’ve used it in the past, but not as regularly as I would like. But to be honest I found it a bit clunky, but maybe Chrome is the ticket.)

So anyway, as you can see from my favoite sites, my life is pretty much as hooked into the web as you can get so whatever browser is more efficient at taking me to those places is the one that I’ll use and those smart cookies at Google know that. Also when you consider that my favorite sites are owned and run by Google it makes sense that they would also make the application that I use to access those sites… and maybe even make those sites even better because of it.

So I’m giving it a shot anyway, in theory I think its a great idea.