Edtechkat

I’ve been playing with google’s new browser, Chrome,  since lunchtime yesterday. I’ve even read the google comic book about it: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/

What is on top feels like any other browser, but more lightweight. This is a Good Thing.  What is underneath makes it more likely to be stable and less likely to hog memory. It is meant to allow more privacy with your browsing too.

It’s reported to work faster on older machines, but I don’t notice much difference. Techcrunch have summarised speed comparisons between Chrome, Firefox and IE8. Chrome seems to come up top: So Is Chrome The Fastest Or What?

You can’t use any Firefox extensions with it (like LibX or Zotero). It allows basic plugins like Flash and pdf, but doesn’t have others.

When I tried to edit a PBwiki document using the “Point and click” editor, PBwiki told me to go get another browser to do it.

The biggest limitation is that Chrome is not yet released for Mac or linux.

The library web pages seem to work OK with it with no problems. The library portal seemed noticeably faster, as was Informit. LIDDAS was fine.

Here’s a screenshot of browser - as you see, very clean. Each new browser opens with screenshots of the most recently visited sites. I didn’t manually create the links on it.