Chrome

Inside Chrome: The Secret Project to Crush IE and Remake the Web

By Steven Levy

Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google's Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that's been under way for more than two years. The weekly Monday meeting of managers — or "leads," as Google puts it in its nonhierarchical way — will be one of the last before the upcoming launch. Rakowski writes 12 items on the board with a black dry-erase marker. The first is "State of the Release." It's late August, and the release in question is called Chrome, Google's first Web browser. Since a browser is the linchpin of Web activity — the framework for our searching, reading, buying, banking, Facebooking, chatting, video watching, music appreciation, and porn consumption — this is huge for Google, a step that needed to wait until the company had, essentially, come of age. It is an explicit attempt to accelerate the movement of computing off the desktop and into the cloud — where Google holds advantage. And it's an aggressive move destined to put the company even more squarely in the crosshairs of its rival Microsoft, which long ago crushed the most fabled browser of all, Netscape Navigator.

A Google browser has been rumored for so long that most people have stopped talking about it. But the folks in this room know that the talking will soon begin again. Chrome is due to rock the Web just 16 days from this meeting.

It turns out the state of the release is ... not so bad. At Release Build Minus One — ideally, the last version before the public beta hits the streets — there are only five "blocking" bugs, all of which Rakowski and team deem fixable. "Things are looking good," says Mark Larson, one of the tech leads.

Read the rest of the article here.

I've been playing around with Chrome for a little while now and watched a tutorial on how to use it's features and I must say I'm pretty impressed. It really is easy browsing once you get the hang of it. I don't know if people are willing to use this over the beloved Firefox but give it a chance. It's pretty dope. You can download it here.

Also check out the tutorial and get use to it. I've already made Chrome my default browser. I never use Internet Explorer but Firefox is my baby. I'll most likely still use Firefox but Chrome is the truth!

Now just release Android Google!