2008 is a great year for the Internet.
I would say that the first year the internet start to be usable. As a developer, we were waiting all those innovations since the late 90's.
The year started with Safari 3.1, then Firefox 3 and now the amazing Google Chrome.
The current version do not work very well with this server (Mac OS X Server 10.5 and the Wiki Server).
By example my groups served through https://ssl.tibiza.biz/groups/ are not accessible.
Also I cannot login to my public wikis (http://mac-machin.com and http://tibo-cut.com) to edit or create new pages.
It's certainly a glitch which is going to be solved very soon.
Also I thought Google Chrome would have allowed to browse two Google Apps mail accounts (or two different Google dashboards such as adwords or analytics) on two different tabs on the same browser.
Exampli Gratia (e.g.) :
You have two emails through Google Apps/Gmail, say A@yourDomain.ext and B@yourDomain.ext
If you log in in one tab with A you cannot log in on another tab using B credentials.
The only way to do this is to use two different browsers : one for A (say Safari) and a second one for B (say Firefox).
The way Google Chrome behave is inline with other browsers.
This design decision make a lot of sense of course.
However the advantage of being signed with A on one tab and with B on another tab using the same google app domain is important when you have to check several inboxes at once. There is many companies where one person want to check their work inbox and also have to check the group mailbox like sales@yourDomain.ext.
Of course there is other solutions to do that (using an IMAP client for example) but my main point is to use the gmail web interface.
With them you can save a web application as a desktop application.
As iCab’s help says:
«It's possible to save the same Web site as multiple “stand alone Web Applications” with different names. Each of these applications will open the same web site, but because each copy has its own private settings, form data, cookies etc. each copy can be used for different user accounts. And all these copies can be used at the same time, so you can access different user accounts at the same time, which would be impossible with a normal web browser.»
Fluid used to work with me the way described above but not any more. Only iCab works.
They call themselves SSB, Site Specific Browser but really what we’re looking for is User Specific Browser.
On Windows, Prism →… made by the Mozilla team shares the cookies set with Firefox itself. So you cannot log in with A on a Prism saved application and with B on Firefox (or another Prism saved application).
That said, for me, the huge advantages of Google Chrome are :
- Use of Webkit (albeit not a version as powerful as I wished).
- Javascript V8 optimization and processes architecture.
- Google Gear built in.
- Only one big text line on every tab saying “Where I am / Where I want to go” (Omnibar)
As a cartoonist fan the comic book made by Scott McCloud →… completely sold me.
I would love to see an Adblock plugin for Google Chrome but anyways I've already chosen to use privoxy to “kill the ads!” (a huge concern for Google :-)
Thanks for reading.
Thibault.
