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Google Chrome lacks polish under the hood
Staff Reporter
Islamabad—Google Inc.’s new Web browser, called Chrome, does much of
what a browser needs to do these days: It presents a sleek
appearance, groups pages into easy-to-manage “tabs” and offers
several ways for people to control their Internet privacy settings.
Yet my initial tests reveal that this “beta,” or preliminary
release, falls short of Google’s goals, and is outdone in an
important measure by the latest version of Microsoft Corp.’s
Internet Explorer. Chrome is a challenge to Microsoft’s browser,
used by about three-quarters of Web surfers. But it could equally be
called a challenge to Microsoft’s Office software suite, because
what Google really wants to do is to make the browser a stable and
flexible platform that can do practically everything we want to do
with a computer, from word processing and e-mail to photo editing.
To strengthen that effort, Chrome was designed to improve on the way
other browsers handle JavaScript, one of the technologies used to
make Web pages more interactive and more like desktop software
applications. Google’s online word processing and spreadsheet
programs use this technology, but it’s also very widely deployed on
Web pages to do less sophisticated things, like drop-down menus.
At first blush, Google’s focus on JavaScript makes sense. JavaScript
can eat up computer processor power, and if poorly used by a Web
site, can bring down the browser. One of the things Chrome promises
is that if one browser tab crashes, it won’t take down the whole
program. Chrome also has some cosmetic differences from Internet
Explorer and Firefox, like putting the tabs at the very top of the
window.—Agencies
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