C Hees . info

I’ve been searching for companies and ideas for my thesis and I ran into cloud computing again. It caught my attention before so it would be cool if I could do something with it for my graduation project. While I was reading up on the subject I couldn’t resist to check out the new browser by Google which is supposed to be good for applications running completely online (as in.. it’s sortof related to cloud computing :P).

I wanted to know if it was just a Mozilla ripoff or that it is actually something new. If I’m to believe the Google Chrome comic/book they really used a lot of new interesting technologies. One of them being another rendering engine (WebKit which is also used in Safari and which came from KHTML which is used in Konqueror which I really loved). I wonder if websites in Chrome look the same as in Safari. Either way, Chrome seems to be really fast. It starts up fast, shows pages quickly and executes Javascript quickly (see some benchmarks at scriptNode). What I also love is that one slow site doesn’t hang your whole browser. For example if you run this raytracer in one tab, your other tabs will get very slow in Firefox while in Chrome you don’t even notice the difference. I think this should also work for slow or hanging plugins like Flash which would be great.

So far Chrome seems to be nice, except for one bug I noticed:

When you hover over the title bar while it’s not maximized, the tooltips for the close, maximize and minimize buttons show up in the wrong places. It’s of course a very minor bug but it reminds me that it’s just a first release and probably still contains many other bugs. I guess I’ll see in the coming days if I actually like Chrome or not.