the snagsta blog

Fellow Snagsta co-founder and developer extraordinaire Paul Stancer has been staying with me this week. I don’t get to see him much as I live in central London whereas Paul lives in a remote cave in one of Hong Kong’s outlying islands.

At about 7.30 the other morning I stumbled in to him at the breakfast table and saw he was having a play around with Google’s new browser Chrome. We wanted to see if the private beta version of Snagsta worked on it and we were glad to see it did (we would have been pretty shafted if it didn’t).

Later that day I read a review about it from Nick Carr on RoughType via Nic Brisbourne’s Equity Kicker blog.

I’ve just had a test drive and have also read up on some more of its features. Here are a list of eight things I like about it and why it could be better than the latest versions of both IE and Firefox:

1. More stability

Google implies that Chrome is more stable than existing browsers. A major selling point for me. As their little Google’s comic book puts it, “When you’re writing an important email or editing a document a browser crash is a big deal”.

2. More speed

Google claim that sites will download quicker on Chrome; this appears to have something to do with Chrome’s JavaScript Virtual Machine named V8. Google state that Chrome looks at the JavaScript source code and “generates machine code that can run directly on the CPU that’s running the browser”, this apparently helps speed things up.

Brendan Eich (the founder of Mozilla CTO and JavaScript creator) claims a new Firefox’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine outperforms V8 so this particular claim is hard to verify.

3. More secure

I like how they have built Chrome using a sandboxing technique that prevents unwanted software installing itself on your machine and stops what happens on one tab affecting what happens on another.

4. More open

Google have decided to open source the entire browser. This could be of huge benefit to the web community. Yes, I know Google has more money than God so they can afford to do this but they deserve a pat on the back for doing this.

5. More style

Google definitely lacks Apple’s style but what they’ve build here looks really slick. I’m a big fan of the smooth and uncluttered look and feel.

6. A dynamic start page

Chrome have done away with the traditional start page approach used by other browsers to display your 9 most visited pages when you boot it up.

7. More Privacy

Google have included an “Incognito window” in this build. None of your history is saved in the browser when you use this window and when you close it the cookies from that session are wiped out.

8. Better approach to blocking pop ups

Pop ups are confined to stay in the tab they came from unless you want to drag them out in to a new tab. I just tested this out on one of my favourite music sites and it works like a treat.

Nice job Sergey and Larry.

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