I'm just about done with my daily use experiment of Chrome, and am back to using Firefox right now. Firefox seems quicker, crashes less [for me], and, well, I'm probably just more used to the browser. Strangely, FF can activate Blogger markup shortcuts (like ctrl-i for italics) and Chrome, in my use, can't. (That said, on my G4 running OS X, FF 3 is too slow for me to use daily. There, I use Safari.)

So why would I use Chrome again? Seems obvious: Gears, although now that I look at it, Google has Gears for IE and FF! Gears is the interface that lets browsers go offline, for example, as in my post on Google Reader offering to make itself accessible offline. That's nice, and I'll bet that Chrome does Gears better than any other browser. It's designed to be a Gears host from the start.

Anybody, iirc, can code up a Gears application, yet I still have to think it's going to be Google first and Google best. This means Google went for Embrace and Extend, embracing the browser, and making an extension that ensures that your browser does a superset of everyone else's. That there's Gears for FF and IE and that anyone who learns can code for Gears makes it appear like Google's being altruistic, but the fact is that Google's not just dealing the cards, they're deciding which ones to print as well.

Google's continually more evil, imo, and it seems to be an evil born of success coupled with a desire to expand. Many of the things they do are Good Things (unobtrusive, almost useful ads, POP and IMAP Gmail access, making Gears accessible, if not Open and Free), but the bloom is off the rose for me.

By the way, the KHTML project now seems to be the most interesting Open-Corporate encounter in the software world. There's Safari, Chrome, OmniWeb, the vaporware that is Sun's JWebPane, and, of course, Konq all sharing the same parental codebase. What exactly is the sweetspot that makes KHTML so attractive, and so attractive versus Mozilla code or internally written code? (And let's remember that IE comes from Mosaic, even if MS is idiot enough to say that IE 7 has no Mosaic code (look, if you started with a codebase that large, unless you start over from scratch, the traces of the original are always going to be with you... Always.) I know some of it is obvious: Smaller codebase, good license, etc. But is the code particularly well written? Commented? What specifically makes it so much better than the alternatives that the last two major corporations (three if we count Sun, which we won't, yet) that released popular browsers have all used it?

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