It only took me one hour of playing with Google’s new web browser, Chrome, to realize that its just a web browser. I already have 2 web browsers installed on my machine (on good, the other not so much) so why do I need a third? The very short amount of time trialing Chrome was enough to give me a good feel for what Chrome is. To conclude here, I like the browser, but it just doesn’t offer me the same experience I get from Firefox, or the experience I expect from a traditional web browser. Although I have to say, that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

The things I like about Chrome is the way it manages tabs. Each tab is a new process. This is something I wish my main browser had so I can figure out what is causing it to use all my resources on the machine, and also protect the other pages I have open in case one causes a crash. Another thing I like about Chrome is its speed. It works pretty fast, although after importing my bucket loads of Bookmarks and History, it did effect the way Chrome handled, which could be why I have trouble with Firefox at times.

To be honest, I don’t really feel this as a true competitor in the browser space. I feel this is a spec browser which is to force Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and whatever to adopt Google’s features to make the browsers better. Google’s platform is the internet, so pushing out their vision of an ideal browser which enables access to their services makes sense that they want to make it a good experience from both the access program and the web service.

Even though I love Firefox and will continue using it as my primary web browser, I will still keep Chrome on my system. This is a perfect secondary browser for when you just want to quickly access a webpage without waiting for your browser to load and the two dozen tabs that come with it. Just click, wait a second and you’re all ready to zap onto a page. It’s really that fast and simple, which makes it the perfect quick and go browser. Other than that, it’s going to be interesting to see what else they will bring to the table.

The new version of Opera came out a couple of days ago. I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to try and alternative browser that wasn’t Internet Explorer or Firefox. When I saw the news on the Digg front page, one feature really stood out. This was Opera Link. I wanted to see how well it performs and if it, along with other features was enough for me to take Opera as seriously as I do Firefox. Could this play around make me a switcher?

There were a few surprising things I loved about Opera right off the bat. The first one being a feature called Speed Dial. This is a page displayed when you open a new tab, and it gives you access to your 9 favourite websites. You can choose what websites you put there and it had a thumbnail of the site along with the title underneath for quick access to the sites you access the most.

Another great feature of Opera is the tab preview. When you hover your mouse over a tab on the tab bar for a few seconds, a little thumbnail will display of the current page, and when you scroll your cursor over the other tabs, the thumbnail will change to the website tab hovered. This may sound a little useless but when you have quite a few tabs open, its a great way to find the webpage you are looking for in your tab bar.

On the topic of tabs, I also love the way Opera handles the Ctrl+Tab keyboard shortcut for switching tabs. Unlike in other browsers where it would switch you over to the next tab, Opera shows a little menu with all you current tabs and you can keep tabbing through them till you get to the one desired and that page will come up. It is much cleaner than having to focus half a dozen tabs to get to the one you desire. Also if you go into the options, you can incorporate tab thumbnails, so along with the titles in the menu, you also get a visual aide.

The final feature that really appealed to me was Opera Links. This is a service provided by Opera that synchronizes your browser bookmarks, speed dial and the personal bar (known as the bookmarks toolbar in Firefox.) All the information goes to the cloud and can be synchronized across browsers. And as an added bonus, you can also access your bookmarks and speed dial right from the Opera Links website. This is useful if you are using an alternative browser or a mobile browser and allows you to view all your bookmarked sites right from in the browser.

Now, my Opera experience did come with a few annoyances. One thing I did find odd is the search on the speed dial. I don’t think it is necessary to have that there due to there being a Google search tool on the address bar. I believe that it would be much more useful as a bookmarks and history search, instead of another web search. And while we are on Bookmarks, I didn’t find the bookmarks manager anywhere near as powerful as Firefox’s Places. I am so use to having my Bookmarks Toolbar, Bookmark Menu and General Bookmarks all separate, but still together in a unified place. With Opera, the Personal Bar was completely separate from the other general bookmarks, which is the same as the bookmarks menu. This is not Opera’s fault this annoyed me, I’m just so use to the new way Firefox manages bookmarks that I find the old way frustrating.

The default Opera UI is a bit of a mess compared to other browsers. I don’t understand why everyone wants to change things! Internet Explorer removed/hid the File menu, and Opera thinks that they would prefer to have the Address bar and Tab bar switched around. This is a little annoyance and should not be a problem one you get use to and familiar with it.

Being so use to the Firefox way of browsing, the pop-up password notification box is here, and annoying! Its not too bad because the website still logs on in the background and you can wait for it to successfully log in before saving your password, but I would still prefer it out of the way completely. And while we are at password saving, the Wand password manager is a little different from others. When you go to a site with a saved password, other browsers would auto-complete the username and password fields. Opera on the other hand highlights the edges. I have no idea what this means and ended up typing my username and password again. It wasn’t till a few sites later I noticed a wand icon in the address bar and clicked it and the fields filled in with my login details. It would have been nice to have a notification bubble telling me how to use it the first time this happens just so a new user like myself is aware.

My last minor gripe with Opera is Google. Yes, Google. I use a lot of Google’s services and it was a little annoying to not have them work as well as they do in Firefox, and Internet Explorer. Gmail was stripped down and didn’t have a lot of the cool display that it does in Firefox. It seemed a little stripped down. Also I couldn’t be invisible on GTalk inside Gmail and I couldn’t use any of the Gmail Lab features. I also got an error message on Google Notepad. I could still use it perfectly fine and it looks normal to me, but there was an error message there for some reason. That was just odd. My iGoogle page has quite a few gadgets and one of the gadgets didn’t like Opera, so it caused it to keep refreshing the page. This made iGoogle unusable. I am also disappointed that there is no Google Gears for Opera either. I understand that this is not really Opera’s fault, it’s Google’s, but nevertheless, I still found it to be worthwhile to mention.

In conclusion, I feel that Opera is a great browser, and with a few tweaks and a bit of getting use to, Opera could be a perfect browser. Its memory and CPU usage was as good, if not better than Firefox 3 RC1’s, and it was very stable. Did playing around with Opera 9.5 make me want to switch. No, I’m still a Firefox user and will continue to do so for a while now. But in saying that, I am going to keep Opera around. It is an amazing alternative browser, second best, and I will use it when I need to use another browser for certain tasks.

Just a few days ago, a new Mozilla project came to my attention, Prism. Prism is an application that lets you take web applications out of the browser and run them directly on the desktop. You may wonder what is the point of running websites, or web applications if you rather, out of the web browser.  When using it, I mainly concentrated on the Google Suite of web applications, iGoogle, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and Google reader. These ran exactly the same as they normally would in a browser environment.

My first impressions of this were that it is simple to set up and works just as I would have expected it. I eventually questioned the need for having this. I eventually worked out why this is something for me. When using the browser, I always have at least ten to fifteen tabs open at a time, right from when I start the browser, right to the moment I close the browser. My default tabs are always there displaying websites I commonly use. If I am connected to the internet, this application does seem somewhat useless but if you needed to say, view your email and/or calendar without opening a browser and loading a dozen or so tabs, it is much more efficient to just open up the desktop app.

Another thing that this will be aiming for is offline web applications. Using the same conditions as before, instead of opening your browser and having all you tabs come up with the “page not displayed” error or having to even have all your tabs open in your browser, it is easier to access offline capable apps using Prism. I feel that the two main reasons they are developing something like that it to combine those two aspects, having the web application in its own environment out of the browser and to enrich the offline aspect of future web applications.

I can see future potential in this application and can see it being greatly linked with Google’s web applications as well as their Gear’s Offline application. All three of these things linked can make functionality of web applications greatly improve and be more accessible and useful when disconnected from the internet. What I personally would like to see is Google embrace this application to create a Google Web Suite application using Prism with tabs with access, online and offline, to all its web applications in its own environment out of the clutter of the browser and other websites. I can’t wait to see Prism blossom into something great and very useful.

I have been using the Firefox web browser for a long time, from version 1. I remember the days when everyone used Internet Explorer and only web savvy people had Firefox. I remember the days when I would recruit people to join our party, leave the dark side. Real life friends, online friends, random people that we had contacts with, everyone and anyone, we recruited. I love Firefox, it is one of the best things that has happened to the internet.

As you can tell, I am a long time user, but everything I have said so far is irrelevant to the point I am trying to get across here. I believe the search bar is useless. I can’t remember the last time I have used it, could be two months to half a year. You might think that is silly, why would I type google.com or wikipedia.org into the address bar everytime I wanted to search for something, why don’t I just use the search bar. The reason I don’t use the search bar is because there is an easier way to do it.

I suppose most you you have Google as the default search engine in Firefox. Do you switch the search bar to Wikipedia when you want to find something on that? Clicking on the search bar to change the search engine or even type in a query is a waste of time. There is a much more efficient and easier way of doing it. Why wouldn’t you search in half the time it takes you to use the search bar? Why wouldn’t you query Wikipedia in a quarter of the time it takes to use the search bar?

Firefox has something built into it called Quick Searches. This is when you type the search into the address bar and it goes in querys the appropriate page, in the same way it does in the search bar, only its quicker for the user. Typing “google <query>” into the Firefox address bar will do exactly the same as it would if you used Google search in the search bar, just it is much quicker to type that into the address bar of a new window than to click the search bar and type the query. Typing “wp <query>” will do the exact same thing as it would if you searched Wikipedia using the search bar, only much quicker because you don’t have to change the search engine or navigate to the website.

Learning these “shortcuts” will save you a little time searching. But one these shortcuts have become second nature, the search bar becomes useless unless you use a search engine other than Google or search on a different site. For me, I only use Google and Wikipedia, and may others will only use those two sites for searching. I have been trying to find use for the search bar since I no longer need it. I could remove it but then my browser would look odd or I could leave it on Google for aesthetic reasons. I have decided to make it YouTube search. Not that I use YouTube much, let alone search for videos but it gives the search bar a reason to be there, providing functionality I might need that only it can provide. Then again, I can still do without the search bar.