I thought of an easier way to explain the formatting problems y'all see. In the early days, there were only minimal common standards in HTML. Netscape and IE invented their own primitive 'tags' that controlled how your page looked, and gave more control, but that were incompatible with each other's browser. So you would build for one browser, accept that your page wouldn't look completely right in the other, then tell users which browser you wanted them to use. Later, after web standards were more developed, browsers used a common set of tags- but also had to support the old tags so that old pages would still work. But imagine what happens after 15 years of this: you have this whole train of old inefficient methods of doing things that have been replaced with a more efficient and commonly shared way of doing things, and you can never be sure whether a page will contain both old and new tags, and so you don't have control. This has been a big issue for pro web developers for a while now, and finally browsers are no longer supporting the old, heavy and inaccurate methods. I know that from your perspective it seems like the browser's fault, but really it's the way the page is built. Think of it kind of like trying to drive a model T on the freeway- for years you've had a special slow lane, but the highway department is now taking it away for another fast lane. .. Darn, another hashed metaphor. Too late at night, and too long at work. Again, study up or hire a pro (Like me! ;-) )
The Cloud's Chrome Lining
What Google's browser suggests about the way the search giant views the Web
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Chrome is the original bling. Chrome caps, wheels and accessories have been essential elements of the pimped-out ride for decades. Now chrome, or rather Chrome, is preparing to pimp out your desktop. Google's new Web browser puts a high polish of user-friendly style onto the evolving trend toward cloud computing. (And you thought the lining was silver.)
Tuesday, Google launched the beta version of Chrome, formally entering the long-simmering war for browser supremacy. Odds are fairly high that you're reading this story using some iteration of Microsoft Internet Explorer, which dominates the landscape with a 72 percent share, according to Net Applications. (Despite years of taking aim at Microsoft, Mozilla's free, open-source Firefox is a distant second at 19.7 percent; Apple's Safari browser accounts for a mere 6.37 percent.)
Why go up against Microsoft, especially when IE comes installed on every new Windows machine? For starters, it's because Google is intensely interested in making your browser do more. The company treats the Internet like a potentially vast suite of online applications, not just a place to read Newsweek.com (which is, naturally, where you get all of your news--right?). "There's been a lot of renewal of interest in browsers in the last 18 months or so," says Mike Wolf, director of ABI Research. And indeed, Chrome isn't your average browser.
Google already offers a suite of software applications online--in the cloud--for free: You can check your Gmail, type up a memo on Google docs, manage your photos with Picasa, read all your favorite sites with Google Reader, and store it all on Google's servers--allowing you to access it from any computer. Google Chrome takes all those applications and serves them up in one neat package--almost exactly like (watch out, Redmond) an online operating system. "Chrome's a further reflection of the fact that the nature of the Web is changing from a place where we go to read pages of information, to where we go to run software applications," says Nicholas Carr, author of "The Big Switch: Rewiring the World from Edison to Google."
For now, only Windows Vista/XP users can install Chrome. I tried it out for a couple of hours this afternoon (the download process was quick and painless) and sure enough, it looks and feels just like a browser made by Google. 'So what?' you ask? For one thing, with the ability to run several processes at the same time, Chrome gives each application its own dedicated chunk of memory and its own windows. This means that if, say, the Web page you're reading crashes, it won't take every other open tab down with it. (Have you ever lost an e-mail you were typing because some stupid Web page, that you also happened to be on, crashed? Frustrating.) You can even put a shortcut to Google Maps, or your Gmail account, right on your desktop.
There is no home page on Chrome, just a bunch of boxes of the sites you've visited most, or most recently. Unless, that is, you visited them in "incognito" mode--which has already become known by bloggers as "porn mode"--which doesn't record the sites you've visited on your hard drive (though, be warned, your server still records the sites you visit). There is no search bar, just an "Omnibox," which is a streamlined url/search field that understands the differences between searches and Web addresses.
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