Web 2.0 Blog

In early September, the folks at Google quietly unveiled their Google Chrome web browser, intended to make yet another huge impact upon the market.  The fact of the matter is people just aren’t catching on to the hype the folks at Google were obviously banking on.

Certainly, Google has become a regularly used word, ultimately making it a verb in the process that many people use when they mean to search for something.  This is great and all, but Google can’t expect a one-two punch with everything they create, and the beta version of Chrome leaves much to be desired.

Look at the fact that Google Chrome still only has a very small percentage of market share with users, even after being on the market for nearly two months.  Hacks and bugs have plagued the browser since its release, and the Google homepage has even stopped advertising for Google Chrome.

Many in the blogosphere feel it would have benefited the internet behemoth more to have created a plug-in to be used with Firefox, which already has a prolific amount of plug-ins, with more in the pipeline.  Google and Firefox have worked together in the past, which begs the question: why go out and try to reinvent the wheel?

Google Chrome has tried in vain to change the way we use browsers, thinking it would be more intuitive, but ultimately falling short of its aims.  It is a disappointment of great proportions for those who thought Google would certainly not put out a product with so many holes left to be filled.

Then again, it is an open-source work-in-progress, which means someone out there may just be willing to cure Google’s ails.  One just has to wonder—will it be too late when that finally happens?

This post was contributed by Kelly Kilpatrick, who writes on the subject of how to become a travel agent. She invites your feedback at kellykilpatrick24 at gmail dot com

Well they’ve done it, and it was predicted long ago. Yesterday’s launch of Firefox 3 has smashed the Firefox 2 download record by achieving over 8.3 million downloads in 24 hours. That works out at roughly 5,764 downloads per minute worldwide. This record means that Firefox 3 already has 4% of the market share for web browsers despite only being 48 hours old. I have no doubts that Guiness will recognise this acheivement in the next world records book.

From what I’ve seen of Firefox 3 so far it doesn’t appear to have any drastic improvements over Firefox 2. Regardless, this browser still stands head and shoulders above any other available browser simply down to its ease of use, massive amount of cutomisable options and a pretty consistent performance.

Anyway, well done to Mozilla, it was nice to be part of its success.