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I was very excited on Monday when I learned that Google was about to release a new web browser of their own, dubbed Google Chrome. It was about time!

But soon after the initial excitement that the announcement comic made me feel, I remembered that for a long time now Google has been blocking all their downloads from Cuba. This includes all their applications (Google Talk, Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Pack, etc.) and every single piece of code available via the Google Code portal. And I did not hesitate a moment before I knew that Chrome was not going to be an exception, not even for the fact that, unlike all other Google applications, Chrome is an open source project. It seems that for Google free software is only for those who are considered to be free by the US state department.

And I wonder how much is Google obliged to treat Cubans this way, when many other companies just as prominent, visible and American as Google is (for instance Yahoo! and Microsoft) are not blocking any of their freeware downloads from this island. And I hope this observations would not lead them to copy Google's policy, but the other way around.

But anyway, I managed to grab a copy of Chrome using unspeakable methods. The simple approach of having someone abroad download it and send it to me via email or something, it won't work. The direct download is just a small program that does the rest of the download itself. And guess what, this program also checks where I am connected from.

But thanks to some hacking (hint: operator) I was able to have it, and test it, and taste it. And as almost anything Google-made (except of course their downloads policy) is delicious. Here are my impressions, trying to focus on the things that have been less visible in most reviews.

An Opera clone?

According to its visual features, yes. Tabs as first-class independent citizens, speeddial-like initial page, UI responsiveness, particularly when switching tabs, are the most prominent features that remind us of Opera. But as Opera's CEO put it, this is flattering for Opera. And it's good indirect publicity too.

But as true as it is that Opera excels Chrome in UI configurability and dinamicity, Chrome has some very good innovations in its inner workings, like separate processes for each tab, javascript-to-native-code, and sandboxing. From a software programmer's perspective I can see that these things are here to stay and even to get into other browsers' design choices in the near future. What's good is good. And maybe someone else (hopefully Opera) can innovate further on these.

Speed-dial, History and Downloads tabs

While not exactly brand new features in the browsers' world, Chrome's implementation of these have the taste of innovation too. Speed-dial incorporates a couple of dynamic components (search boxes and recently closed tabs) and it also has a look that mimics Google websites and pages, making it look like you're already in a website that serves as a gate for other sites. Making it look like you're at Google already.

Similar things can be said of the history and downloads tabs, both having a search box at the top, which mimics those of Google's own web sites. As trivial and simple as this might seem, I find it very important for the overall feeling and taste that this new browser leaves on us.

Minor goodies

I felt amused by the omnibar's highlighting of the domain, leaving the rest of the URL dimmed in a lighter color. For people like me that appreciate knowing in a glimpse where I am standing when watching a page, this is very helpful. I was also worried about the lack of status bar, which lets me know where a link points to before I actually click on it. It turns out that Chrome has a small "status bar" that appears on demand to give us this kind of information, but that silently goes away after a few seconds.

The search feature, the one that lets us search within the text of a loaded page, also works similarly to that of Firefox (but in the top right instead of the bottom). The search box appears when we ask for it (with Ctrl+F) and then it goes away when we're finished. This kind of unobtrusive goodies are some of the things that Opera still lacks.

And I also noticed something that nobody else told me about Chrome in my extensive reviews and reading prior to my own use of it: it has a spell checker! This very post is being spell-checked by it as I write, much in the vein of Firefox's spell checker. Although to be honest, it is still slow, freezing my cursor a fraction of a second just after I finish writing a misspelled word. Sure there's home for improvement here, also allowing bilingual users like me to have more than one dictionary available.

Do's and Dont's

One thing I'd like is something I've been talking about for a long time, and that Opera finally made it real: synchronizing my settings (bookmarks, etc.) with a central store, so that I have my stuff wherever I may use Chrome. This could even be incorporated to Firefox via an extension, so that transition between Chrome and Firefox would be much easier. It would be much better if all major browsers would agree on this, develop a standard for this, and everybody wins (except Microsoft, of course)

On the other hand, among the things I would not like, I would specially hate if they make an extension architecture like Firefox's XUL. It just bloat the whole thing. Remember the KISS principle: Keep It Simple, Stupid!

My overall feeling about it

As a user and crawler of the web myself (albeit a technically inclined one), Chrome is as good as I can expect from a first release, and it already makes me expect new things from other browsers more established in my day-to-day pack of tools. Sure it has some road ahead (which project does not, particularly when it's new) but in the most basic features it is indeed a great new kid on the block.

As a web developer, it's good to have something handy to test my stuff with webkit, since I do not own a Mac but although Chrome has some basic developer tools, it is still light-years behind Firebug. Even Dragonfly is behind Firebug.

Overall, I am happy to have a new contender that re-ignites an already active browsers war. Competition and innovation in the end are good for us internet users. Let them compete to gain our preference. Sit back and watch the fight!

Yes, after a long while, I am back. And more human because I have found my ideal computing environment in the most human of all Linux distributions, Ubuntu, and the most human of all browsers, Opera.

There are numerous new softwares and web applications that have appeared or been upgraded during this weeks that I've been off. I will try to talk about all these in the next days, emphasizing on Opera, which arrived to its ninth version last Tuesday, and is better than ever. I will emphasize also on the use of Linux and Ubuntu Dapper Drake in particular.

Also, I wanted to note that on next Monday, June 26, it will be a year since my first post, which was originally made when my blog was blogger-based.

I recall that some days ago I was searching for information about VLANs and I got a considerable amount of different pages open in Opera at the same time, all related to this subject. But then I had to stop working on it. I don't remember if I was at work and was time to leave home, or if I was already at home and had to stop for some other reason. The thing is that I saved the configuration of all open tabs in a browser session.

A few minutes ago I was ready to continue working on it, because I desperately need to set up some CISCO switches to work out some VLANs. Our network is rapidly growing and bringing some order into it is now more than a mere whim for us here in the IT department. But guess what: my sessions do not include the session on VLANs that I perfectly remember. The problem is that I have four Opera instances of my own. I work on two computers regularly: one at work and one at home, and to worsen the scenario, each with both Windows and Linux installed. It is to drive anyone crazy, believe me.

I've written before about the idea of storing Opera configuration files online, as part of the user's profiles in the Opera Community. These might include layout configuration (toolbar, menus, panels), user information (sessions, bookmarks, notes, contacts) and maybe wand, history or other pieces of sensitive data with the inevitable security and privacy concerns being appropriately addressed.

To this crazy quadruple setup you should add that I re-install Windows every six months at most, and every time I do this I have to work out my layout again, which is by the way very different from the default Opera layout (a single top toolbar, status bar on, panels on right, menu bar off, custom panels, custom search engines and more). Also, with the advent of the yet-to-come Opera 9, per-site configurations will become a real headache to maintain.

There's this principle in programming called the DRY principle: Don't Repeat Yourself. And I feel like I'm repeating myself every time I have to re-work my Opera environment to fit my needs again. The idea of integration between My Opera user profiles and the browser is not new and it's not mine, but it's great. What do you think?

It's always sad when a web site explicitly states that it doesn't support a certain browser. Phrases like "this page is best viewed in Internet Explorer 5 or above" always annoy me a little. And now with all this Firefox hype, the same thing happens with this alternative web browser. Firefox fan-boys are now populating the web with "Best viewed in Firefox 1+" kind of pages. I guess this is an attempt to fight IE back, after all these years, but they're also hurting the rest of the browsers, and they're doing exactly what most of this advocates criticized.

I would love Opera becoming mainstream in the desktop browser market, but if this ever happens, I wouldn't like web sites developing pages that are "best viewed" in Opera. Browser choice should be something about browser features, speed, stability, security and the like. It shouldn't be a matter of compatibility with web sites. But anyway, there are so many things wrong in this world, that asking for some justice in browser-land is definitely not a priority.

Why all this rant? you may wonder. Well, I was intending to visit Gap Online, and I didn't find what I expected. Instead, this is what I got
The relevant part of the message literally says

We're sorry, but we do not support the version of the browser you are using.
Our site works best with the following browsers:

PC users
Internet Explorer 5.5 and above. Click here to download the latest browser.
Netscape 7 and above. Click here to download the latest browser.
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above. Click here to download the latest browser.

Mac users
Netscape 7 and above. Click here to download the latest browser.
Mozilla (including Firefox) 1.0 and above. Click here to download the latest browser.
Safari 2.0.3* and above. Click here to update your browser.

And what did I do? I do have Firefox installed, and I have access to a Windows box where I could have used the brand old ever-buggy and platform-dependent Internet Explorer 6. But I didn't. I restrained myself from visiting this site.

Update
I reported this problem with Gap Online in the "Open the Web" forum.