Well, after a few days of using Google Chrome I’ve finally decided to give a post about it.

After years of battle between Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer in regards to which would be the ultimate browser, google finally decided to enter the race.  Their answer to the browser wars was Chrome, released in beta phase a few days ago.

Since it’s still in beta I’ll refrain from judging too harshly.  I have to say its an impressive concept, it has quite a few neat features that I’d love to have in a browser such as tab browsing with individual processing.  The browser has yet to crash on me so I’ve yet to find out how effective this is but theoretically I think its genius.  It also appears to use up a third of the RAM that firefox did which makes it a win in my books.

Another feature that is of questionable purpose is the incognito mode, although it is a clever little feature, the official reason for its implementation is of a controversial nature (you know what I’m talking about).

In terms of interface design, its quite a nice look, with some smooth effects for opening new tabs.  It does however take some getting used to as it disposes of the conventional menu bars at the top of the window making the tabs the uppermost element of the interface.  The options for the browser are placed elsewhere next to the address bar and it took a while to work out what they meant.  Other than the transition time I’m enjoying the new interface quite a bit.

My only qualms with this browser is that it still needs some work in the standards departments.  Websites that have shown up perfectly on both IE and Firefox are turning up mis-aligned text, strangely placed menu elements and other funky and unintentional effects.  I have also been having problems with certain sites in the past few days although whether or not this is chrome’s fault or just my ISP i have yet to determine.

Overall the browser’s concept is an excellent one and in its current state it quite usable if you don’t mind switching back to firefox occassionally.  Again since its in beta that is a forgivable issue, for now I’d say give a go and see if you like it, if you do stick with it so that when it becomes as stable and solid as Firefox you won’t have to transition into it.

Here’s a download link, give it a shot:

Download Here

We’ve all seen how beautiful Mac OS X’s dock is, who can resist the nice smooth zoom effects and the auto-hiding ability of this little apple invention.  It defeats the windows taskbar hands-down.  This being the case it was only natural for windows users to start wanting the ability to use this invention on thier own machines.  Thus was born the third-party dock applications, two of which (out of the many) are Rocket Dock and Object Dock.

One would expect that Object Dock, being a software you have to pay for would have an array of features that sets it apart from its freeware counterparts.  Now, although it does exhibit quite a number of extra features that rocket dock does not have, admittingly these features are next to useless.  My personal experience is that I have been able to do everything I did with Object dock on my desktop computer with Rocket Dock on my laptop.  In terms of resource eating, both these applications will consume ram (as does any application) but whether it is noticeable or not is a different story.  With 2gb and 3gb of ram on my desktop and laptop respectively I noticed no difference in performance and speed and so the rate of resource consumption is at worst neglligible.

Overall, I’d use RocketDock simply because its FREE and it offers most of the features any average user would need (as average as a user who wants a dock can be).

RocketDock:

http://rocketdock.com/

ObjectDock:

http://www.stardock.com/products/objectdock/