Google made a big Labour Day announcement that it would launch a beta version of its Google Chrome web browser in more than 100 countries today. As of this writing, it is not yet available for download, but Google has published a 38 pages Google Chrome Comic Book to illustrate its features.

(Updated: Google Chrome beta for Windows is now available for download.)

Launching a new web browser in a crowded market with MS Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari and Opera would be disaster for other company, but not so for Google. “Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”, Google said in its blog post for the announcement.

“All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends — all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build.” — Google

Google Chrome is free and open source, and the first beta will run only on Microsoft Windows operating system. Google said it’s still working on versions for Mac OS X and Linux operating system. And we suppose a version for the Google Android mobile operating system is in the pipeline.

Looking at the feature sets, Google Chrome is indeed looking promising:

• Google Chrome is based on the WebKit open source web browser engine. WebKit was first developed by Apple and is the engine driving Apple’s Safari browser. It is one of the most standard compliant web browser engine.
• Google Chrome sports tab interface as in most other browsers, however the tab is above the address bar, and each tab runs in separate process. If one crashes it will not affect the other tabs. It even comes with a task manager for you to monitor the memory and cpu usage of each tab.
• Google Chrome features a brand new V8 JavaScript Virtual Machine, developed from scratch from a Google team in Denmark, even though WebKit already has a build-in JavaScript engine. V8 promises to be less memory hogging, faster and more stable.
• Google Chrome includes an auto-suggest search feature, there is a section that displays top pages you have visited before, and allows you to do full-text search on your browsing history.
• Google Chrome will have a “incognito” private mode and allow you to browse the web with no history being stored on the computer.

Google Chrome is a strategic move by Google to counter Microsoft Internet Explorer’s dominance (currently at about 75%) in web browser market. There is concern that certain Internet Explorer default settings might diminish traffic to Google’s search engine. A closely knitted Google Chrome with Google Gear (utility for offline access to web application) would make Google’s web applications behave more as desktop application and better compete with Microsoft’s desktop offerings. A step closer in making operating system irrelevant, when running a browser is all a user needs.

How will Google Chrome affect the browser market place is anyone’s guess. Will Google continue to support Firefox and what will become its partnership with Mozilla? (Google recently extended its advertising alliance with Mozilla Firefox through 2011). Google’s name is no guarantee for success. Google however has excited us and the world is now waiting to see if Google can deliver.

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1. Press Command-L to go direct to the address bar. The current web address is selected, and will be erased once you start keying in your new web address.

2. Press Command-Option-F to go direct to the Google search box.

3. For URL link on web page, press Command and click on it to open the URL in a new tab. Press Command-Option and click on it to open the URL in a new window.

4. Press Command-T opens a new tab. You can also open a new tab by double clicking on the empty space on the Tab Bar.
   
   
   

5. Press Command-Shift-] or Command-Shift-Right Arrow to navigate to next tab. Press Command-Shift-[ or Command-Shift-Left Arrow to navigate to previous tab.

6. These are basic window commands that apply to other Mac applications as well: press Command-N to open a new window and Command-` to navigate among windows.

7. Press Command-W to close tab. This will close the window if there is no other tab in the window. Press Command-Option-W to close all tabs but the current selected one.

8. You can move a tab to a different window using drag-and-drop: click and hold on the tab, and drag it to the new window and drop it. To move a tab to a new window, simply click and hold the tab and drag it to the desktop.

9. Press Command and click on a window’s title bar allows you to navigate a web page’s hierarchy.
   
   
   

10. You can grab any image and put it on your desktop by simply dragging it. This applies to pictures formated with the HTML IMG tag.

11. To start a new Google search using the text on a web page, first select the text, right click on the selection for the pop-up menu, and choose ‘Search in Google’. Google search will start from within the same page.
    
    
    
    To display the Google search in a new tab, press Command while you select the ‘Search in Google’ menu option.
    
    To display the Google search in a new window, press Command-Option while you select the ‘Search in Google’ menu option.

12. Press Command-I to embedded the page content in an email ready for you to send out. Press Command-Shift-I to email the URL link of the page instead.

13. You can press Command with a number to quickly launch the bookmarks on your Bookmarks Bar. The number starts with 1 for the leftmost bookmark on your Bookmarks Bar.
    
    In the example pictured below, pressing Command-1 opens reddit, Command-2 for Twitter, Command-3 hits Facebook, Command-4 starts Wikipedia, Command-5 goes to Yahoo! and Command-6 launches Google.
    
    
    

14. If you are reading a web page and want to go back to the last visited site without leaving the current page: press Command and click the Back Button to open the last visited site in a new tab. Press the Command+Option and click the Back Button to open the last visited site in a new window.

15. In Firefox and IE, to navigate to past visited sites, you use the arrow buttons right next to the Back Button/Forward Button to display a drop down menu for the recent visited pages. Safari does away with the additional arrow drop down button, instead click and hold the Back Button/Forward Button to display the drop down list.
    
    
    
    To display the drop-down webpages in URL address instead of name, press Option when you click and hold the Back Button/Forward Button.

16. Press Command-Control-D while hovering your mouse pointer over a word to pop-up the dictionary for the word.

17. You can setup Auto-Click to quickly open all tabs in your Bookmarks Bar folder. This feature only works for folder on your Bookmarks Bar.
    
    First create a folder (right click on the Bookmarks Bar and select ‘New Folder’) on the Bookmarks Bar and bookmark the web pages under this folder. In the example below, a ‘Daily’ folder is created with 3 sites under the folder. Click on the ‘Bookmarks’ icon on the left of the Bookmarks Bar to display the Bookmarks setup page. Select the ‘Auto-Click’ tick box, notice that the icon for the folder on the Bookmarks Bar change from an arrow to a square box.
    
    
    
    Click on the ‘Bookmarks’ icon to toggle back to normal web page. You can now click on the folder on the Bookmark Bars to open all webpages under it all at once.

18. Press Command-R to refresh the web page. This is frequently asked by IE users who are accustomed to pressing ‘F5′ for web page refresh.

We hope you find new useful information here. Please feel free to leave comment if you have additional tips to share.

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Fluid creates native Mac OS X application that wraps around Apple Safari’s WebKit web rendering engine. The created OS X application is normally referred to as a Site Specific Browser (SSB), which is basically an instance of the browser engine running a specific website URL. This SSB instance runs the web application separately and not from within the web browser. So crashing your browser such as Safari won’t take down your SSB instance.

This idea is similar to Mozilla’s Prism project, which aims to integrate web application to the desktop experience. Prism is available for Windows, Linux and Mac, and uses the Firefox’s Gecko rendering engine. Fluid is for Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard only, and Fluid created web applications have the Mac look and feel due to the Safari Webkit rendering engine.

Fluid is a small 3.5MB Mac OS X 10.5 application, it is a free download but is not open source. Fluid software displays a dialog window that prompts you for:

          <ul>
          <li><b>URL:</b> the URL of the web application you would like Fluid to create as Site Specific Browser. </li>
          <li><b>Name:</b> the name of the Fluid application.  </li>
          <li><b>Location:</b> the folder location to put the generated .app file.</li>
          <li><b>Icon:</b> the icon file for the Fluid application. You can let Fluid retrieve the favicon.ico file provided by most web applications, or you can choose your own icon file. Visit <a href="http://www.flickr.com/groups/fluid_icons/">Fluid icons group at Flickr</a> and <a href="http://csi.nfshost.com/goodies/">Fluid icons from Chris Ivarson</a>for high resolution and quality icons that fit an Mac OS X desktop. </li>
          </ul>

Click the ‘Create’ button to let Fluid creates the Mac OS X .app file in the specified location. You will have the option to launch the new native Mac application after it is successfully created.

You can choose to run your Fluid created app in a so called “MenuExtra SSB” mode. Under this mode, your Fluid created app will appear only as icon in your OS X system status bar next to the clock and Spotlight. You can not Command-Tab to switch to it, just like other applications on the status bar. When you click the icon, the web application will appear as a drop down window. Your web application is non-obstructive running this way and is great for sites that you access multiple times per day such as GMail and Twitter. You can easily toggle between the “MenuExtra SSB” and “Normal Application/Embedded SSB” mode via options in the application menu.

Fluid is developed by Todd Ditchendorf who used to work for Apple developing Dashboard and Dashboard Widgets for Leopard. Fluid is scriptable, customizable and has a user community developing scripts, tutorials and screencasts for it.

If you have too many tabs running in your browser that makes searching for your opened web application a chore, use Fluid to your rescue, and run your web application as an OS X app for easier access and a more OS X like experience. Beside, you do not have to worry if any random site crashing your browser will bring down your web applications.

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Mozilla on Tuesday released Firefox 3, a major update to the popular free open source browser that is “two to three times faster” and uses less memory than its predecessor. As part of the launch on 17 June 2008, Mozilla kicked off a “Download Day” campaign in a bid to set a Guinness World Record for the greatest number of software downloads in 24 hours. Mozilla Firefox 3 is available in approximately 50 languages and on Mac OS X, Windows and Linux platforms. Download Mozilla Firefox 3.

If you are a Mac user like we do, you might ponder if there is a need to switch to using Firefox with all the hype around it. Shouldn’t the standard Apple Safari browser be good enough? If you are questioning and not downloading Firefox now, the answer is ‘Yes’. With the recent release of Safari 3.1, Apple has made Safari one of the best browsers in the market and Safari is gaining market share.

If you are a recent switcher to Mac and were using Firefox on Windows, then you will feel more at home with Firefox. Mozilla Firefox is not completely Mac like in its user interface, long time Firefox users probably do not care or have no other choice if they have gotten dependent on the many Firefox add-ons. These are Firefox plugins, utilities or extensions that enhance the Firefox features and experience.

For us Mac users at Sanziro, Safari is our default browser. And we run Firefox to test browser compatibility to ensure our web pages can run on all major browsers. Talking about major web browser, where and when is the long overdue Internet Explorer 8? Mozilla already is talking about Firefox 3.1 and Apple is working now on Safari 4. We hope Microsoft is paying attention. Competition is good.

Updated: Well, Mozilla has claimed that over 8 million copies of the software were downloaded on “Download Day” 17 June 2008, and is in the process of being certified by Guinness World Records for the most downloaded software in a single day.

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