• Fast, WAY fast
• Small
• Lightweight
• One tab wont affect or crash another

So I tried it . To be fair I’ve not had any problems with FireFox, but its always interesting to see healthy competition to help software just move forward. On the surface it’s nice, especially for a new browser and I really haven’t loaded up FF browser with many add-ons so it was a reasonable comparison for me (like for like).

The BIG thing I liked actually had nothing at all to do with the browser, Google Gears. This was unsurprisingly installed and enabled by default in Chrome. I read all my RSS feeds with Google Reader, and again unsurprisingly it has Gears support. This gave me the ability to read all my RSS feeds while I’m at the airport without a WiFi connection – brilliant! So last night I cranked up Chrome and clicked the ‘Use offline’ button in Reader. It was working great up to a couple of minutes ago… I accidentally closed the reader tab. Unfortunately this wasnt the ideal time to remember that Chrome doesnt yet have the ‘re-open closed tab’ feature . Doh! So now I’m writing this blog in the airport! Did I mention I love Gears, WordPress also has Gears support

So I have to really thank Chrome for opening my eyes to Gears, well really showing the benefits of it. However as far as the browsers I regularly use on my system FF is still the king. Chrome is nice but still a little too raw for my liking.

Next I promise it will be about Clouds!

Gareth

Twitter seems to target short thought pattern conversations, and are really ‘immediate’ information rather than useful over time. Obviously that absolutely has its place, in the same way as a telephone or conference call. Blogs appear to have a bit more ‘meat’ on them and they appear intrinsically more informational (perhaps knowledgeable is more accurate) than the tweets.

Both seem to have a really defined use and in turn defined market consumers which hopefully means both can survive. However I have to say the security side in me makes me wonder what interesting inferences can be made with the analysis of the tweets. Word analysis and time analysis may ultimately come back to haunt some of us over time. Its kind of like the ‘Twitters’ are storing our thoughts in near real time, a logical ‘DNA’ of theirthought process – permanently stored digitally on other peoples servers…. seems scary to me!

Something else I’ve been pondering is if it was possible to ‘digitally take our age’. For example when I was growing up my step dad told me in no uncertain terms there would never be a computer in his real estate office – ‘People want the face to face contact, and not want a screen between them and the real estate agent’. It took 5 years for that concept to completely die off, and I suspect it still has a way to go.  Age in the digital world is really a comparison to the norm – irrespective of your actual age you can easily update your age in the digital world. It strikes me as an odd interesting concept! Am I behind the curve on a new ‘process’ with Twitter, or is it a fad that will just burn it self out? I guess time will tell!

Either way, for me Twitter is going to stay an interesting concept – but blogging seems the the best informational medium at this time.

Next is going to be cloud computing, this is definitely a hot and interesting area that will no doubt mature over the next couple of years!
Gareth