The app store gold rush

This isn’t exactly a new story, but since I don’t have anything else to write about and this story makes me pretty happy (as opposed to the economic calamity going on right now), I figured I’d write about it.  Last week the developer of my favorite App Store application was featured in a news story discussing his incredible success based on app store sales in the few months since his application launched.  The application of course is the game Trism, a puzzle game which I did a video review of not too far back.

This is the first prime example of Apple’s app store empowering average-Joe developers to get out there and make solid products.  Apple facilitates all app store purchases, even free applications, by providing the infrastructure (hosting, sales, marketing) free of charge.  Of course in the case of pay-for applications like Steve Demeter’s Trism, Apple takes the 30% cut that I mentioned earlier.  Still I’m sure Steve isn’t complaining about that, after all he’s on track to make $2 million by July 2009.

In the article Steve also goes on to denounce Google’s Android platform.  He says that he’ll stick with Apple because (obviously) he’s “doing just fine” with them.  He then went on to mention that he thinks Google’s approach of having multiple handsets for different carriers will be an annoyance for developers:

“Do I want to be spending 6 months to write the game, and another 6 months making it compatible? If I had Trism available for Android, and there are 50 Android devices and every time one of them crashes (the users) contact me, do I want that?”

- Silicon Alley Insider

His argument makes sense to me.  It’s pretty obvious that it’s easier on a developer if they only have to worry about one platform (the iPhone/iPod Touch) rather than multiple.  Support becomes easier, and coupled with Apple’s hands-on approach to managing the app store everything runs more smoothly.  Sure there have been plently of detractors lately saying that Apple is a little too strict with their certification process, but in the end it provides a much better-managed environment for both users and developers.

In the news story Steve Demeter, a solo developer, discusses how he went from working on Trism as a side project to making $250,000 in two months based on app store sales.  The game went up in the middle of the summer for $4.99, and since then Steve has been able to rake in a ton of cash on a relatively simple application, and that’s after Apple took their cut (30%) and his initial investment is figured into the equation.  Not too bad, huh

280slides.com

Here’s my video post for this week.  This time I did a screencast showing how 280slides.com works.  It’s another shining example of the push towards cloud computing.  Like Buzzword and Google Documents before it, 280slides provides desktop presentation application functionality all from inside your web browser.

Google’s Android takes the stage

On Tuesday, T-Mobile had their event to launch the first Google Android phone on the market.  Coming to the US on October 22nd, the T-Mobile HTC G1 will be available in most T-Mobile stores for $179 ($20 less than the iPhone 3G) and, of course, will feature Google’s Android operating system.  So, what does that mean?  Well, aside from having great compatibility with Google’s applications (they described a normal Gmail experience – labels, email search, even Google Talk) they’re pushing the open sourced nature of the Android operating system.

Most people, whether fair or not, are looking at Google’s Android as a competitor to Apple’s iPhone.  It’s a hard justification to make since Android is just an operating system while the iPhone encapsulates both hardware and software, but given the nature of the two companies it’s an easy conclusion to jump to (both are traditionally tech companies now trying to make a bid in the mobile phone industry).  The only reason I mention this is because, as I said, Android is open source.  That’s a completely different approach than the one Apple took obviously.  Android will have the benefit of having developers making 3rd-party applications from day 1 as opposed to Apple’s delayed delivery of the App Store this year.  My only question is the certification process with Android applications.  Sure Apple’s system is generally a closed one, but that enables certification of applications so the store isn’t filled with garbage that no one wants.  Of course you could assume that Android apps will basically be regulated by users.  If you go to download an application and everyone is saying it’s terrible, chances are you’ll stay away from it.

Anyways, back to the G1 and the T-Mobile event.  When I started watching the stream one of the first things the representative from T-Mobile mentioned was that they were offering a $25 limited data plan and a $35 full data plan.  This news made me very excited.  After all, a $35 phone plan with unlimited data?  What’s not to love?  When Android was first announced there were a lot of musings about Google maybe giving free service with some ad placement, but cheap service was fine for me.  At least it would have been – one of the attendees was smart enough to ask whether their $25/$35 plans were standalone, or if they required a standard voice plan as well.  They require a voice plan.  So then, the T-Mobile plan is only slightly cheaper than the iPhone’s data plans.  That’s too bad, because I think if they had come out with cheap 3G access they could have gained a lot of interest from consumers still on the fence about getting an iPhone.

Some of the specifications of the G1 I noted while watching the stream were that it’s compatible with Microsoft document formats, it does have wifi built-in despite being meant for 3G, and it has a fully-functioning web browser (like Safari) based on webkit.  Webkit is the base for Google Chrome so that’s not entirely unexpected, and the representative from T-Mobile even referred to Android’s web browser as a sort of “Chrome Lite.”  The device also supports most audio file formats, even the default iTunes AAC, but it won’t work with iTunes DRM-locked songs.  There’s built-in GPS, an accelerometer, an application store (called the App Market), a touchscreen, and of course a camera.  So, at a glance, the G1 is comparable in features to the iPhone.

The question really comes down to user interface I think.  I’ll give Google props for not going the obvious route and blatantly copying the iPhone, but instead taking their own approach.  It looks kind of similar to a PC desktop to me…not necessarily a variant of Windows, but it definitely has a ring of “this is your PC desktop on a phone.”  The icons look like standard desktop icons.  The applications don’t have that same uniformity as iPhone applications share with the rest of the phone’s user interface.  Still I can’t comment much on the UI because I haven’t used one, I can only go off of what I’ve seen in videos like this:

So then, is the G1 important?  Yes.  It gives a lot of promise to people looking for an alternative and open source variation of the iPhone.  As I mentioned it shares a lot of the same features, just maybe not in as pretty of a package.  Given the open-source nature of the project there’s no doubt in my mind that many of the issues I have with the Android operating system will be worked out in time, and for an initial release Android and the G1 are looking pretty good.  I’m hoping that Google works on bringing an Android-enabled device to Verizon sometime soon, because who knows – I might just get my own Google Android phone in the future.

Now Playing:
Deftones – If Only Tonight We Could Sleep (The Cure cover)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Clear Sky

Microsoft’s 300 million dollar ad campaign

It’s no secret that Apple’s Mac/PC ads have been eating Microsoft up inside.  Not only do they spread negative information about Windows Vista, but they’re completely effective at doing so.  As any average Joe on the street what he thinks about Vista and chances are he’ll say something along the lines of “I haven’t used it, but from what I’ve heard it’s a nightmare!”  That’s due in no small part to Apple’s commercials (Windows Mojave, anyone?).

So then, when Microsoft announced that they were teaming up with Jerry Seinfeld with their new $300 million dollar ad campaign there was a lot of curiosity about how they’d hit back.  Unfortunately for Microsoft, the initial analysis wasn’t good on their new ads featuring Bill Gates and Seinfeld in normal, everyday and somewhat comical situations.  Truth be told despite there being some comedy to the ads there wasn’t much advertising.  The two that I saw had simple scenarios (one in a shoe store, the other in a typical household) that had absolutely nothing to do with Microsoft let alone Windows Vista.  You’d see this funny little skit and at the end you’d get a Windows logo.  That was about it.  Needless to say, the reception to these ads was about as luke-warm as it gets.

Then this past week Microsoft rolled out phase two of Operation Make-People-Like-Windows-Vista, and this time their strategy is much more clear.  The new ad starts with a John Hodgeman (aka the guy who plays PC in Apple’s commercials) lookalike, and he points out that fact that Apple has basically turned PC users into stereotypes.  From here all sorts of different PC users doing various interesting and mundane activities proclaim that “they are a PC!”  Personally, I think this strategy is brilliant.  It would have been very easy for Microsoft to come back at Apple with an attack that’s similar to the one Apple has used, and that would spell disaster.  After all, aren’t the Apple ads kind of childish?  Are we really to believe that every PC user on Earth wears a brown suit with glasses, and is a total dork?  Instead Microsoft took the high road more or less by basically pointing out how childish the Mac and PC ads are.  As I mentioned, the first line in the new Microsoft ad is something along the lines of “Hello, I’m a PC and I’ve been made into a stereotype.”  Bravo, Microsoft.

The reason the new ads are so much better (aside from the fact that they actually have a meaning) is that they’re tailored to a more general audience.  The Gates/Seinfeld ads were filled with jokes that only a true geek would understand, like Bill Gates’ discount shoe membership card having his mugshot on it from his brush with the law many years ago.  Ryan Block (formerly of Engadget and now gdgt) even went so far as to find some hidden meaning in the older commercials.  Little nuggets like the crotchety old Grandma in the second Gates/Seinfeld commercial representing Steve Jobs based on references to her living with the family for 12 years (the same amount of time Jobs has been with Apple since he returned to resurrect the company), but when a commercial has to be analyzed so thoroughly to construe any sort of value…there’s a problem.  The new ads are straight and to the point: PC users aren’t dorks.  PC users do a ton of different things with their computers and they come from all sorts of backgrounds.  Basically, don’t believe Apple’s hype.

So will these new commercials work?  Who knows.  I’m just happy to see that Microsoft is stepping up and fighting back because based on all recent figures Apple keeps eating up market share, especially in the laptop market.  To make things worse the negativity in which Vista is enveloped is spreading like wildfire, so that’s all the more reason for them to put on the boxing gloves to get people thinking about Microsoft positively again.

Now Playing:
Canibus – Genabis
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Clear Sky

Video Review: Heavenly Sword

I decided to switch it up a bit this week and do a game review for my weekly video.  Not sure if I’ll do anymore of these, just trying to think of new things to talk about really.  I’d love to hear comments if you like or dislike it!

Spore’s DRM woes

Nobody likes DRM.  It’s annoying.  Not only is it annoying but it’s ineffective – it only really hurts legitimate users because, let’s be honest, pirates can always circumvent it.  That’s why I was pretty disappointed when I heard about all of the DRM that’s been embedded into one of the most ground-breaking games we’ve seen in a while: Spore.  Spore, for those who don’t know, is the latest creation of Will Wright, the mastermind behind The Sims.  In the game you nurture a creature from the cell stage to the creature stage, right up through the real time strategy-inspired civilization stage and finally space travel.  Basically, Spore gives you a chance to play God, and it does so while integrating a lot of interesting user-generated content for new creatures and items in the game.

So, for instance, if I am playing my game single player I can have Spore pull in creatures from a database which houses all of the creatures that other people are making.  So I can run into your creature on my own planet or even run into their home planet when I’m traveling in space.  The same is true for objects in the game such as buildings.  As a result of its emphasis on very interesting user-generated content Spore has been dubbed a “massively-single player online game.”  That is to say that you interact with a lot of people’s creations all while playing by yourself.

Anyways, this post wasn’t supposed to be an advertisement for Spore.  Instead I wanted to discuss some of the DRM that people have been less then happy with.  First of all, you can only install the game 3 times.  Kind of sounds like an operating system, doesn’t it?  So what happens if your hard drive dies and you lose the game, or if you build a new computer…are you unable to play the game that you paid for then?  Sure it can be argued that you might be able to call up EA and plead your case, then maybe they’ll give you a new CD-key (similar to how Microsoft will sometimes issue a new CD key for Windows or Apple will let you re-download iTunes songs you may have lost) but that doesn’t seem entirely necessary. 

The problem is so bad that Amazon.com saw a flood of negative reviews from people rating Spore 1 out of 5 stars, saying that because of the DRM they wouldn’t purchase the game.  That seems to be a bit of a coordinated attack but there’s no doubt that it hurt sales of the game, at least through that particular retailer.  It should also be noted that Amazon has since deleted all of those reviews, claiming that they were lost due to a bug (not very likely), but they’re back for the most part.  There a 2,300 one star reviews on Spore’s product page as of this writing, you can take a look by clicking here.  Personally, I think the 3 install rule is BS.  I like to go back and play my games every now and then, and I always seem to uninstall a game after I’ve finished it to save hard drive space.  With Spore I would have to keep it installed all the time whether I was playing it or not, and to set such a precedent is bad news.

So what is EA doing about this?  They’ve definitely acknowledged that there’s an issue here.  Here’s just a portion of a letter responding to unhappy Spore fans:

 

We wanted to let you know that we’ve been hearing your concerns about the online authentication mentioned earlier this week. I didn’t want to head into the weekend without getting back to you with some information about how Spore is planning on using this new system.

A few things we wanted you to know:

• We authenticate your game online when you install and launch it the first time.
• We’ll re-authenticate when a player uses online features, downloads new content or a patch for their game.
• The new system means you don’t have to play with the disc in your computer. And if you are like me, always losing discs, this will be a huge benefit.
• You’ll still be able to install and play on multiple computers.
• You can play offline.

 

Now Playing:
Flogging Molly – Devil’s Dance Floor (live on the Complete Control Sessions EP)
S.T.A.L.K.E.R. : Clear Sky (a completely DRM-free and awesome PC game! )
 

Dropbox: The killer app for online storage

I’ve dabbled in a couple online storage solutions, most recently Windows Live Mesh.  Some of the things that these services are able to do (cross-device synchronization, easy sharing and collaboration) never cease to amaze me.  My amazement was only doubled when I saw that Dropbox, a service which was closed beta until just recently, opened the flood gates to the masses.  On September 11th they went live and now anyone can give their service a try, and before I get too far ahead of myself I suggest you go to GetDropbox.com and, at the very least, watch the video they’ve put up displaying some of the features of Dropbox.  Chances are good that you’ll sign up right after seeing the video, but I’ll go ahead and continue the post anyways.

The most important part of Dropbox is that it has accomplished what Windows Live Mesh couldn’t – cross platform compatibility.  Now I recognize that Microsoft probably hasn’t implemented cross platform Mesh yet because of the remote desktop feature (a feature that Dropbox doesn’t have, and a feature cool enough to keep Mesh installed on my Windows boxes).  Still, it’s surprising that I can’t at least sync my files to my Macs.  Dropbox enables that functionality with style…not only can you sync files but it happens extremely fast and it’s all integrated with Finder/Explorer so you don’t have to run any foreign-looking applications. 

So what if you’re using a device that Dropbox isn’t installed on?  Fortunately Dropbox has an excellent website that allows you to access, share, and interact with all of the files you’ve synced.  They even take it a step further by allowing you to restore files you may have accidentally deleted, so you don’t have to worry about ever losing anything.  On top of all of that you get the non-essential “wow, that’s cool!” sort of functionality such as automatic shareable photo galleries, and before you know it you’ve fallen in love.

So is there anything wrong with Dropbox?  Not really.  The only thing I was hoping for was a decent iPhone app/web app, but I just checked and they even have that.  If you visit getdropbox.com from your iPhone/iPod Touch you get a touch-optimized version of the site with a list of your recent activity (uploads, changes to your files etc.) as well as the ability to view everything you’ve uploaded (I tested images, text files and even Word 2007 .docx files, all were viewable!).  I’m not sure if the iPhone/iPod Touch version of their site lets you upload new files, so if that’s the case then that’s the only drawback.  I’m sure eventually they’ll either add that to the site or put out an application for it.  The only other drawback is that you only get 2 gigabytes of storage (Live Mesh comes with 5 gigabytes).  Still, 2 gigs is more than enough for the documents, images and any other miscellaneous files you’ll want to sync – just don’t plan on uploading very many full-length movies or anything.  If they’re looking to monetize Dropbox down the road I’m sure that’s one way they can do it – offer higher capacities.  The service is so good that, if needed, I’m sure a lot of people would pay for the extra storage.

This is a rather short post, but there isn’t much else to say.  Dropbox is the most exciting web application I’ve seen since Live Mesh and, in my opinion, it trumps it easily.  If you haven’t already, head over to GetDropbox.com and watch their demo video.  Like I said in the first paragraph of this post, I’m sure you’ll find yourself signing up and downloading Dropbox almost immediately afterwards!

Now Playing:
Dropkick Murphys – The Green Fields of France
Heavenly Sword

iTunes 8.0 Gridview and Genius Playlists

I wrote a post earlier this week in which I ran through some of the new features in iTunes 8.0, particularly Genius playlists, but I figured today I’d make a couple videos to show what I was talking about a little bit better.  Without further ado:

iTunes 8.0 – Grid View

iTunes 8.0 – Genius

Apple’s “Let’s Rock” iPod and iTunes Event

I was very interested to see what sort of new products would be unveiled by Apple on Tuesday, and I have to say, there’s some interesting news based on what they showed us.  If you were following any speculation leading up to the event then there isn’t much in the way of surprise, but what I’m most interested in is the way they’re trying to market some of their products moving forward.  Let’s start with iTunes.

iTunes 8.0 was officially released Tuesday, as always a free download, and it brings some new functionality to the old standby application which the bulk of people turn to for their music management.  Firstly, you get a new gridview for music that’s very similar to the layout of the stacks gridview.  Really this was sort of already implemented into iTunes with the App Store though.  If you have downloaded any applications for your iPhone or iPod Touch you’ll have noticed that the applications tab basically lists your installed mobile apps in a gridview.  Take that feature and apply it to your music albums and you get the idea.  They also brought NBC back to iTunes so if you’re hankering for some new episodes of The Office this Fall you can get them from iTunes for $1.99 (standard definition) or $2.99 (high definition).  Apple has also figured out how to make the high definition content viewable on your computer so if you don’t have an Apple TV you won’t be left out.

The most important feature added in iTunes 8.0 is Genius.  Genius does its best to create playlists for you based on certain songs in your music collection, similar to how Pandora or Last.fm work.  So for example, if I’m listening to a Deftones song and I would like to make a playlist of 25 songs that Genius thinks is similar to it, I click the Genius bar and bam – all of the songs that are similar to my Deftones track are ready to be played in succession.  The only downside is that, since Genius is only limited to your iTunes library (despite making recommendations from the iTunes store) you won’t get as many accurate matches as you do from Pandora or Last.fm (services which pull from their own, expansive libraries of music).  Right now I’m listening to a Genius playlist based on the song by Deftones called “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event,” a relatively mellow song, and so Genius has pulled in 24 other songs it thinks are similar.  Some matches are spot on like A Perfect Circle’s “Vanishing” or Team Sleep’s “Our Ride to the Rectory,” while others are a little more questionable.  For instance, how is DragonForce’s much heavier “My Spirit Will Go On” or “Storming the Burning Fields” similar to “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event?”  Both are heavy power metal songs where as, like I said, “Anniversary of an Uninteresting Event” is a melodic and atmospheric piano piece for the most part.  Intriguing to say the least.

Still, Apple promises that as more and more users use Genius it will become smarter over time (it makes records of everyone’s iTunes libraries anonymously).  I still wish there was a way to approve or disapprove matches though.  In any case Apple’s event on Tuesday wasn’t all about iTunes – there was plenty of iPod news to go along.  First off, to no one’s surprise, they showed off the new version of the iPod Nano.  Gone is the “iPod Phat” design from last year and now we get a nice tall, skinny version of the tiny player with a nice curved design and widescreen display.  The Nano even has some accelerometer functionality.  Steve Jobs showed how you could shake the Nano in order to initiate a shuffle of your music!  As cool as it sounds I think this feature might suffer from the Nintendo Wii complex; that is it sounds cool in theory but is anyone going to want to shake about their MP3 player in public?  The Nanos come in a plethora of new colors as well, ranging from professional-looking black and aluminum to  the more fun pink, orange and (my personal favorite) green variants.

Next up is the iPod Touch.  Now, I just got an iPod Touch not too long ago so I was sort of hoping in the back of my mind that the updates wouldn’t be too significant.  Needless to say I’m a little disappointed.  Aside from getting a much-needed price drop the Touches were also graced with a bit of a hardware design and new hardware features that I’m envious of.  The most notable features are the new volume rocker and external speaker, two features that I’d honestly love to have on my 1st generation iPod Touch.  The physical volume rocker is kind of obvious – it would be nice to be able to change volume without having to even take the device out of my pocket – but the external speaker is a justified phenomena that you might not understand unless you have an iPod Touch or iPhone.

I’m not sure if the same is true for most iPod Touch users but I find myself carrying mine without headphones.  There’s so much you can do with the iPod Touch that doesn’t require them that I find myself content to just browse the internet, check my email and use applications rather than listen to music or watch videos.  Still, it’s that one time when you’d like to have your headphones with you and you don’t that makes you realize how important the external speaker is.  For example, what if you want to watch a YouTube video?  You don’t really need great sound to watch a YouTube video, just something passable.  However if you’re like me and you tend to leave your headphones behind then you’re kind of stuck.  The external speaker is perfect for that.  Basically what it does is make the iPod Touch more of a portable computer than just an iPod that also has computer-esque features.

I think one important thing to note about the new iPod Touch is how Apple has chosen to market it.  It’s no secret that the App Store is full of a bunch of different games, some of which are free and others that cost money.  Because of this they dedicated an entire portion of their presentation to showing off some upcoming games for the iPod Touch, and have labeled the iPod Touch the “funnest iPod yet!”  Sounds to me like they’re going after some of the portable gaming market.  Maybe they were inspired when John Carmack noted that Apple’s mobile offerings are more powerful than either the Nintendo DS or Sony PSP?  I think the fundamental difference between the iPod Touch and other portable gaming consoles is that Apple wants to sell hardware, not software.  Sony and Nintendo are glad that you’re purchasing their systems but where they really make money is on the games.  Is the same true for Apple?  A lot of the games, as I mentioned, are free or relatively cheap.  I’m not sure how that will figure into their strategy but it may have an impact.

Apple made some other announcements of course, such as that of the iPhone and iPod Touch firmware 2.1 release this week, the iPod Classic moving to just one SKU, a 120GB model.  Neither announcements are really that important I don’t think (the update is mostly bug fixes/Genius integration, and the iPod Classic is probably product phase-out).  So that’s it really.  No huge changes, just some expected news that was leaked by Kevin Rose and others well before the actual event in true Apple style.  There is one last part of the keynote I wanted to share though, and that’s Steve Jobs poking fun at some of the unrest about his health.  After WWDC questions were flying as to whether Mr. Jobs had been stricken with cancer again, and to that he simply replied “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”  Well said, I think.

If you want to watch the keynote you can now view the quicktime version by clicking here.

Now Playing:
DragonForce – My Spirit Will Go On
Crysis

Is Google Chrome better than Firefox?

Like most people interested in the internet or just technology in general, I was very quick to download and try Google’s web browser, out in beta, called Chrome.  It came out last week after a comic introducing it to the public slipped a bit early, and since then it has garnered the at lot of attention from all of the usual suspects in the tech news community.  As a result I figured I’d go ahead and offer up my analysis.

So, as a browser, Chrome rocks.  It churns through pages faster than any of the alternatives (IE, Firefox, and even Safari) and offers up an extremely simple “out-of-your-way” interface that lets you get straight to work.  One of the first things I usually have to do after installing a web browser is re-work the toolbar so that it takes up as little screen real estate as possible, allowing what’s left to be dedicated to the actual pages I’m viewing.  When I installed Chrome I didn’t have to worry about that at all.  The toolbar, including page tabs, takes up around 5% of my vertical screen space, around half of what Firefox uses.  Not a bad start considering Google’s approach to Chrome was to introduce a browser that accentuated the pages and applications we use, not the browser itself.

As far as features go there’s definitely some interesting stuff going on.  The first feature you’ll notice when you try out Google Chrome is a bit of a revolution – new tabs that are actually useful.  In Firefox or Safari if you open a blank tab you get just that, a blank tab ready to go to whichever address you specify.  With Chrome you get a page that shows some tiles for pages you visit frequently – not just links.  So if I go to Kotaku a lot I’ll see a small snapshot on my new tab of Kotaku’s homepage (along with my other frequently-visited sites).  From there I can just click one of the tiles and away I go.  I wish that you could get a little bit larger preview of the website, but just being able to see everything at once is pretty handy.  From what I can tell the preview is live from the site, not cached, so if there’s new content on the page you’ll know.

Another one of the more obvious features is Incognito Mode.  By opening a new window in Incognito Mode you’re initiating activity that is entirely ignored by the history and cookies.  This poses a deep philosophical question I think – if a web browser pings google.com and there’s no history of the request, did it really ever happen?  All that aside this is a pretty cool feature, and I’m surprised it hasn’t worked its way into a web browser yet.  It should be said that you can replicate this sort of functionality using Firefox extensions, but having the feature native opens it up to much more general use I think.

I’m sure I missed a lot of features as I’ve only just begun using the browser, but I wanted to step into some more technical aspects of why Google Chrome is important.  Firstly, it makes each tab in your browser a separate node.  What that means is if one of your tabs crashes you don’t lose everything else, just that one tab.  As a blogger who has turned to WordPress’ browser editor for writing posts as of late I value this feature immensely.  There’s nothing worse than losing a bunch of work in one tab because something else got hung up on some chunk of Java that it couldn’t handle and, since a lot of the websites we use today are really individual web applications, it makes sense to integrate cross-tab stability.  After all, in the desktop environment it’s not acceptable anymore to have a system crash because your word processor died on you, is it?

Part of the reason that Google Chrome is so much faster than browsers before it has to do with the application threading.  In your more classic web browsers the application is single threaded.  So then, if a web page has some flash on it, some javascript, and of course some HTML you have to wait for each step of the thread to complete before you move on to the next.  Google Chrome is multi-threaded, with each thread designated to a certain function (a javascript thread which ONLY runs javascript, an HTML thread which ONLY renders HTML, etc).  This means that you don’t have to wait for the HTML to be rendered before you can move on to executing javascript on the page, and because there’s less waiting it makes sense that the pages load faster.

So then, I guess I have a lot of positive things to say about Google Chrome.  Still, there are some negatives.  First off the biggest reason I see for people not wanting to move to Chrome as their default browser is the lack of extensions.  I’m sort of guilty of the same.  For the most part I haven’t been a sucker for extensions, and found them to add somewhat trivial functionality to my browsing while simultaneously taking up more system resources and slowing things down.  Then I found the Remember the Milk extension for Gmail.  This extension is very simple and yet it has changed the way I’ve worked – all it does is add my task list next to my email.  Because a lot of my tasks come from email it’s made it easier to manage them as they come.  I think I would really miss that extension if I were to move to Chrome because it’s become almost integrated with Gmail to me at this point.  If I go to Gmail in Safari or Chrome my initial reaction is “Wait, where are my tasks?  Is something broken?” before realizing that’s a Firefox-only feature.  I’m sure given the nature of Google Chrome and the fact that it’s open source we’ll see extension eventually, but until then the lack there-of will keep at least some people away.

There’s also the “evil corporation” concern.  Google makes their money with advertising, right?  And if they have a browser whose address bar doubles as a search bar it wouldn’t take much for them to start monitoring your searches to better place ads.  It’s happened with Google search and even their web applications.  How long before they plant that sort of bug in Chrome?  Is it already there?  I’m not sure, like most people I didn’t read the EULA.  Still, the concern is always there.

Overall I’d say Google Chrome is, at very least, worth the download.  I’ve set it as the default browser on one of my windows machines and I have to say – lack of extension(s) aside – I’m liking it.  Plus it’s only a beta (given the track record of Google’s applications it could be for a very, very long time) so I’m sure there will be many improvements down the road.  I couldn’t have asked for a better offering with their first attempt.  For now Google Chrome is for Windows only, but they’ve assured us they’re working on Mac and Linux versions as well.

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