As announced on the official Google Blog, tomorrow will see the initial release of Google Chrome. This is Google’s next step forward on the web. Instead of just creating what you interact with in their web applications, you will now end up using Google’s own web browser to access them instead.

But why would you switch to Chrome when we already have great browsers like Firefox and Safari? Here’s what Google have to say feature set wise, lets go through them shall we…

The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features called “omnibox.”

Well, hopefully this will be much like Firefox’s 3 “awesome bar”, which provides users with a lot more interaction with their search history and their most used web-sites. Especially with the new bookmarking support.

The browser includes an open-source JavaScript Virtual Machine implementation called V8.

Ahh, a new JavaScript engine, hopefully this one has vast improvements in speed, as currently that seems to be the on-going problems with most browsers. We can only but hope!

Chrome has a privacy mode, disabling all logging for a certain window.

It seems everyone has finally reaslised that porn is a big deal on the internet, and that it’s big money, so why not help out the porn sites keep everyone viewing them without being caught? (You could of course use this mode for things like buying presents for people and you don’t want them finding out, but honestly, what do you think its going to get used for most?)

Web applications can be launched in their own browser window without an address bar and toolbar.

This is going to be used quite obviously for Google’s own applications like Google Mail, Documents, Calendar etc, and should be quite useful and be a space saver. Again, its a step from taking the web and putting it on your desktop, rather than it being within your browser.

Chrome includes an automatically updated blacklist for malicious sites.

Ahh the security, hopefully with an actively updated blacklist this could help improve browsers for the overall community, especially for those users without high technical know how. Although, if this isn’t by-passable, and false positives go through which has been seen in Google’s search results. It may annoy some people who class themselves as clever enough to know what they are doing, but does Google know better?

Supports third-party plug-ins.

I think if a new browser didn’t support these, it might as well just stop developement all together. Let’s hope that it’s as easy as Firefox for extension development and that its powerful enough to be useful. If we don’t get things like Firebug (not just the JS in-page version) then it might shoot itself in the foot. Let’s hope not!

Uses the WebKit Rendering Engine.

This is the same rendering engine that Safari uses, and its been proven over time that it’s very good and very compatiable across operating systems. Let’s hope they don’t mess with it too much. This also means that if your site already works in Safari, it’ll work in Google Chrome. Which is always a bonus when there’s already quite a few browsers out there right now.

As much as I love Firefox for development right now, im slowly beginning to shift over to Safari as I like the way it renders pages and makes them look more soft than usual. However, there are some things about both of these browsers which I don’t partiuclarly like, so here’s hoping that Google Chrome gets rid of those for me, and that Chrome can be my new browser for everything, rather than for one specific task.

This is something I have been noticing over time, and has been steadily getting worse over about the past 2-4months. Back in the end of October last year I posted about how Gmail had finally added IMAP support to their giant web mail service, this was of course fantastic news! After various amounts of hacking with Gmail settings to get IMAP on my account I had it delivering my mail through Thunderbird with little to no effort.

Initially, this was fine, had no problems with it, a bit of confusion on how folders/labels worked, but once you get your head round it was ok. But I’ve just noticed that a growing problem is occuring, and it’s that the IMAP server they have, or the code behind it, just can’t keep up with demand anymore.

I find that especially in the mornings Gmail’s IMAP generally becomes completely un-contactable, and even if it is, my login details won’t work and Thunderbird will be constantly asking for them in its attempts to log me in. The length’s of these outages can range anywhere from 5minutes to 5hours, I’ve gone the entire morning without access sometimes. Obviously if I was really desperate to read my mail I would use the website, which I don’t think I have ever had problems with, but that’s not the point, I prefer to read my Gmail in a standard mail client.

Google had to come up with some sort of major hackery to get IMAP working with their product, is it finally showing the flaws now since that I suspect every man, woman and dog are using it? Only time will tell, I’d like to think that it’ll get better and these stability issues will disappear, as quite frankly I love my Gmail account, and it would be a shame and a major pain in the arse if I had to give it up.