Google Chrome - Part I
First of all, I’m writing this post using Chrome, the new browser by Google. If you will able to read it, it will mean that everything would have worked right. 
The user experience on Google Chrome appears to be similar to the other tabbed browsers (like Firefox or IE7), but in a improved way.Google engineers have taken the tab metaphor and have completely based the new broswer on it. Considering “the tab” not just as an element of the interface, but as a structural one.
Every tab, in fact, has its own process, running independently from the others. If one tab crashes, the whole application will not crash (as happens quite often in IE7) and you will be able to end up just that tab/process using the Google Chrome internal task manager.
In other words, Google Chrome behaves like a modern operative system. And after all, it is going to be OS of tomorrow, as soon as the new AJAX-based web applications will completely substitute the most common desktop applications, like the word processor or the spreadsheet.
According to McLuhan’s four laws of media this means retrieving the old architecture based on “dumb” client terminals and huge mainframes, which contained all the applications and the storage space for documents and records. Obviously, the new totally web-based clients are not so “stupid” like the old terminals, and in fact browsers - beside rendering the web page - still execute part of the application (javascript or other client side plug-ins like Adobe Flash).
In any case, in Google’s vision, we will download all the applications from a server and run them in collaboration with it. Moreover, we will use servers to save or documents, that will be so searchable and accessible from virtually any computer (providing a password, of course).
This sound great is we consider that devices conceived in this way would be lighter and small and cheaper and potentially mobile (if you have a mobile connection).But (there is always a “but side” of a thing that looks nice) this also means that our personal computer will no longer be autonomous. If we must use Google Documents instead of Microsoft Office or OpenOffice to write a report, and save it on a Google server instead of our local hard disk drive, it means that we should be always connected to the Internet. And that everything we do passes through the gates of Google (or any other possible competitor provider). Is this a good thing? What do you think?
(to be continued… I want to write something more on the user experience)
