Tag Archives: webkit

Google Chrome Out Of Beta

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Google announced yesterday by way of the Official Google Blogthat the Google web browser, Chrome is now officially out of beta. Introduced only a few months ago, Google Chromehas had probably the shortest public beta period out of any Google product. Take Google’s GMail for example, it came online in March 2004 and is still in Beta.

Google Chrome is available for Windows XP & Windows Vista only (right now), which is a shame considering it is based on webkit, the same engine used by Apple’s Safari web browser. You’d think they’d be able to release a OS X version fairly easily. Hopefully that’s not to far off now that Google Chrome 1.0 is out.

Will this spice up the browser wars? How will Internet Explorer, Opera, and Firefox handle the Google browser? Things should get interesting as new versions of each are prepared.

Google Chrome – The GBrowser Is Real

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If you haven’t heard yet, you’ve probably not been on the internet lately. Word is (links: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) that today Google will finally announce the anticipated Google Browser, GBrowser, Google Chrome (link not yet active).

According to a number of sources, Google Chrome is based on the open source Webkit Project, which is the same engine used by a number of Apple products including Safari and Mail. The question here is why? They are already pretty tight with the Firefox team, why not use the Gecko engine used by Firefox, Thunderbird, Nvu, and others? Is the Gecko market too crowded? Did the Apple board of directors push Google CEO Eric Schmidt towards webkit?

The same thing could be asked of another product, why webkit and why not Presto? Presto is the engine used by the speedy Opera Web Browser and Adobe Dreamweaver. Of course, Webkit and Gecko offer one advantage here; cost. Though I said it before, and I’ll say it again, Opera’s mail client, M2 would be the perfect GMail Desktop Client. The two are practically identical.

Presto, Gecko, Webkit. It doesn’t really matter, what matters is Google is finally going to release a web browser.

What can we expect from Google Chrome? For that, I’d have to point you to Blogoscoped.com who first broke the news and now has some images of the browser. Let the countdown begin…