Everybody and his brother has been nattering on about the newest contender in the Internet browser market, Google Chrome, over the last couple days. ZDNet seems to have wrapped up a lot of the best arguments in two articles: Five reasons Chrome will take over the world, and Five reasons why Chrome will crash and burn.
Since I know you guys are expecting to hear my take on its future, here it is: I’m aggressively neutral on it. 🙂 It sounds like an excellent design, but I don’t know whether it will take over the world, or kill off Microsoft’s browser dominance, or kill off Firefox, or anything else. I only know that I’m not planning to use it for now — it’s still lacking in a lot of areas, especially compared to Firefox’s add-ons.
That said, I’m all in favor of the project itself — competition generally improves products, and Google is perfectly situated to know what a browser really needs. More diversity in the browser field also helps frustrate the bad guys, making it harder for them to steal enough money through any particular security hole to be worth the effort. The fact that they’re making it open-source is a pleasant surprise, since it means people can trust it more (there will be lots of source-code scrutiny to ensure that they don’t do anything underhanded in it), and other browsers can adopt anything that sounds like a good idea.
That’s all I can offer on the subject for now. I’ll take another look at it in a few months and see how it comes along.
I like it, it’s too bad it isn’t available for OS X. Firefox is very nice though… I played with a couple of Mac Safari plug-ins which do some of what NoScript does and ABP, there’s no reason to think that someone won’t do that or better for the Google browser. Besides, if it’s really as secure as they say it is, with genuine sandboxing, it might not need NoScript as badly as Firefox does; though that remains to be seen.
NoScript isn’t only for protection from malware (though it’s excellent at that too). It also blocks script-based invasions of your privacy and various other unpleasantness, as well as Flash and other common annoyances. I won’t even consider using Chrome unless and until it supports the same level of script-blocking.
Flash-blocking is probably on the way, it already comes with a greater degree of control over plug-ins out of the box than other browsers. That having been said, yes, NoScript is great stuff!