If you mean sites like Delicious, those are usually browser plug-ins or add-ons, the lack of which in the beta stage is to be expected and perhaps meant to spur application developers on to writing those plug-ins.

Not all of Google’s offerings are integrated with the toolbar. I may be going out on a limb here because I stopped using Google toolbar for several reasons, but I recall ‘Analytics’ isn’t part of it either.

I find this discussion fascinating nonetheless. Microsoft, for ages, shipping software that was not ‘perfect’ and all manner of patches and updates were to be downloaded for the rest of the software’s life. But large swathes of consumers rarely had to bother with the issues. Google however plays in a very different territory – the consumer is not just hyper-aware, she is also more demanding and the expectations of minimum standards have also evolved to a higher plane. Merely sticking on the ‘beta’ label no longer is sufficient.

Thanks.

@ Sakhi: FF3 definitely takes much more resource than Chrome so in that respect the latter is better. The user interface (UI) may take some getting used to because the drop-down menus are limited and placed differently from where we expect to see them. Try it and see which works better for you.

@ Poonam: That cartoon explanation of the design process is delightful. I compared FF3 and Chrome with the same number of tabs and the exact same pages being open in tabs. Chrome is much faster than FF3 and uses much less memory. I use Safari only on my Mac, which is lightly configured i.e. not many applications are run on it and has far more memory than my PC. So I think it may be unfair to compare it with Chrome on Win XP, but I observed on side-by-side comparison that Chrome is still faster.

@ Dinesh: Thanks. The add-ons bit is off-putting for many so you have company there. However I think Google may be tempted to do it all in-house. The speed may also be down to the way the pages are served, as my friend Ian (see below) and I were discussing earlier this week. Other browsers need to pull ads from one server and content from another where their relative latencies etc may affect the speed whereas Chrome benefits presumably from the Google cache. What do you think?

@ Atul: Interesting to see your experience of BBC News versus NYTimes is the same as mine! Thanks for the additional links too.

You make a good point re FF3 developers. There is reason to believe that Google aimed at FF3 and Mozilla rather than Microsoft with this salvo. The Chrome team after all can boast of Ben Matthew Goodger, formerly owner of the FF project at Mozilla! The biggest hurdle – despite open source design – might be the resentment towards Google, trying to do things sneakily, such as in their EULA (see late addition link above).

I agree re Ad Blocking although my Safari-on-Mac experience is remarkably ad-free; perhaps I should thank my ISP and my own hub settings!

Alas, I am not sure many are going to read the cartoon strip to discover the magic. For a consumer product the magic has to be in the experience, not in the behind-the-curtains sausage making process.

@ Sandeep R: That ‘trust’ issue with Google affects nearly everything they do. This would be no exception. I don’t think Google cares much about it either.

@ Roop: I am surprised that the Mac release did not happen simultaneously, considering Chrome is open source. And on the ownership issue, they have amended their EULA (see late addition link above).

@ Philip: I agree about the add-ons but I am intrigued that you think Google has products ‘which never become a market leader’.

I am no fan of monopolies on the web but the data points towards something else re Google.

Google’s search engine is a leader in its area, and Gmail continues to grow and lead the capture of market share. Google Maps are growing the fastest by visitor numbers even though the market share is quite small. The market share of Google’s other, niche applications such as Scholar, may be harder to compute. Before its launch, most academic researchers used several different databases to look for materials; but since its launch, at least some have discovered it and found it very useful as a single gateway to locating – if not accessing, which depends on their institutional licences etc – articles and papers.

The question ‘what business is Google in?’ is not resolved. At one time, it was about the algorithm and they pointedly said they were not a Media company. This may be changing, now with growing ownership of content, such as street maps.

What do you think?

@ Nikhil: Finally, a potential fan of Chrome! Thanks for your note.

@ Chris Wright: Under pressure and with a lame excuse relating to cookie cutter agreement templates, they have now altered the EULA. But yes, you make a valid point about potential growth in advertising revenues, which brings us back to the question ‘What business is Google in?’. What do you think?

@ Nita: Thanks for your comment and your complimentary words about the blog. You are a major user of technology so your views on these technology issues would be quite useful I am sure.

@ Ian: Thanks for those additional perspectives on the need for Chrome to be platform agnostic. You know that I use FF3 but I am increasingly fed up with the time it takes to start-up and then the memory it continues to use. After all these years, you may well have convinced me to go to Opera…