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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!

I was about to help today a younger friend who is at high school and needs to do a little research about operating systems. So we went directly to Google and typed in "Operating Systems". Guess what we got? I was amazed when I saw the first result: www.linux.org.

Not too far behind I got Debian, solaris, FreeBSD and it was then when Windows arrived, just before gnu.org and Apple MacOS X.

There is nothing being implied here, I am just amazed at the results and the order in which they are presented. On the contrary, when I tried in Yahoo! I got very different results. Most were links to definitions and not to particular instances of the concept.

So what do you think is a better result? What would you expect of such a query? I think Yahoo gets the credit this time, instead of PageRank, but hey, that's just my opinion.

No wonder Bill Gates slammed the $100 laptop MIT project backed by Google. Microsoft products are not likely to ever be part of these or future similar projects that aim at globalizing the computing experience in developing nations, because of their close nature and high costs, and this is no good news for the software giant and its chief software architect. He expressed that

hardware is only a small part of the cost of providing computing capabilities, and the big costs typically come from network connectivity, applications and support

Sure, if you use Microsoft products, you'll find yourself paying much more for software applications than for hardware. Nonetheless, I am curious about this project, because the articles referenced above mention a detail I wasn't aware of: these laptops won't have disks. And in this one I agree with Gates. How useful can be a computer with no disk?

I haven't been able to confirm the veracity of this article, but it states that Yahoo! will be rewarding users who primarily search the web via their search engine.

I must admit that the benefits exposed in the article are really tempting. But this sounds like bribing users with side benefits. It is something like "our search engine is good but not the best, but we thought you would sell us your soul in exchange for this bonus features that not everybody else will be enjoying".

• Unlimited mail space? Gmail's 2.5+ gigabytes (3 hopefully coming soon) are more than sufficient for me, almost unlimited. I still barely use 150 megabytes.
• No Yahoo! Mail ads? Gmail has unobtrusive text ads that have even been useful sometimes, but always out of my way.
• Outlook Access to Yahoo! mail? Gmail has POP access for everyone for free, even if you use Yahoo! as your main search engine.

I personally think that Yahoo! is a great web portal, and a great search engine too. But I sincerely hope this is not true. It is simply not their style, not the kind of things that took them to the place they occupy today, and certainly something that will give them a very bad reputation. Google gives most of these features precisely to ensure that you'll prefer them. Yahoo! is trying to ensure your preference for them by precisely and explicitly giving you these benefits.

Guess they'll have to work harder, because preference is about will. And once again, I really hope this is not true.

I was so glad when I read Jeremy Zawodny's personal opinion about all this DoJ vs. Google stuff. In spite of being a Yahoo! employee, he sincerely expresses his opinion on this matter, and he explicitely states that he's speaking for himself, and not on behalf of his employer. I like what he said and I mostly agree with it, as you could figure out by reading my original post about this issue.

Only one thing though: Why is he disappointed in the Government? People are disappointed when they get a response they didn't expect. I would have been disappointed if Google would have given all that information to the Justice Department, and I am disappointed because Yahoo and the others did. I would feel disappointed if my best friend stabs me in the back, but I would not feel that way if my worst enemy does.

So why would someone feel disappointed in the US government? Those kind of things are exactly what I always expect from them, so it's no surprise. No surprise at all.