Google Chrome – not as polished as we would like
As a vendor of web based applications, we take a very active interest in the development of web browsers.
Over the last couple of years we have seen Microsoft’s dominance of the browser market being challenged by the likes of Firefox, Google’s Chrome browser and Apple’s Safari.
This has been a very good thing indeed. When Microsoft dominated the landscape, little innovation was taking place. In particular IE6 and IE7 had very poor javascript engines. For those of you that don’t know, javascript is the underlying technology that enables us to develop rich User Interfaces (UIs) like Workbooks.com. Because the javascript engine in IE6/7 was slow, it meant that running and rendering more complex richer web pages took more time.
If you have ever used Workbooks CRM in IE7 and compared it with the performance in Google’s Chrome you will see Chrome is 10 – 20 times faster than IE7. The emergence of these new browsers has prompted Microsoft to raise their game and IE8 is a significant step forward, albeit still slower than the others. Competition really is good for the consumer.
So in general we have been a fan of these new browsers and Chrome in particular.
However our enthusiasm has been dented a little over the last week, because of Google’s strategy of automatically updating their browser without letting you know.
Google released Chrome 4 on the 25th of January, unfortunately the release also introduced a bug which stopped our users downloading attachments from Workbooks.com.
So we spent a whole day last week, developing a workaround, testing it and then releasing it to our servers.
As a software vendor I recognize that no software is perfect and dealing with bugs is part of life. However if Google took the same approach as Microsoft and actually asked you to upgrade rather forcing you, at least you could make an informed choice.
Clearly there is downside in allowing people to choose, because you need to support multiple versions for a longer period. However if Google is looking to replace Microsoft as the OS of choice, either their QA needs to get better and their release cycles a little longer, or they should move away from a strategy of automatically updating.
That said – in the round we still much prefer Google’s browsers to Microsoft’s and would still recommend it to customers over IE – until our view changes.
John
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