HitChrome

The Browser And Gadget Wars

  • Sep
    12

    Recently Google launched their new browser called Chrome (what a great name). As always Google’s release was surrounded by a lot of buzz and let me tell you now that it was worth it every single bit. Currently the two most popular browsers on the market are Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and the webmaster friendly Mozilla Firefox.

    The expectation of the browser was very high and so it should be as Google are a multi million dollar company, actually the fastest growing company in the world. They have met the expectation and exceeded it by miles. Now we will take a look at the beneficial factors of the new browser.
    The new browser is better, faster and stronger than IE - long the bane of Internet users the world over, many of whom have converted to Mozilla’s Firefox.

    Here’s why:

    * Bye-bye world-ending crashes. Each tab you open in Chrome represents its own computer process. This means that if one tab or window crashes, you won’t be forced to close all of your tabs and windows.
    * It’s pretty! Google prides itself on simplicity and usability. While Chrome has both, it’s a soothing shade of blue with minimal buttons to fuss over.
    * Less memory bloat. One of the problems with Firefox is that if you’ve been using it for too long, it’ll suck up all of your computer’s memory. Each time Chrome goes to a new page, it throws away the last page’s data, reducing its baggage and freeing up your computer’s memory.
    * An address bar with brains. Sure IE will help you fill in a Web address, but it won’t make suggestions based on the most powerful Web search engine and you certainly can’t use it as a Google search box. Chrome does both.
    * It’s open source. Don’t know what that means? Don’t worry! The smarty-pants geeks do. They will be able to tweak and improve upon the original design, fine-tuning it into perfection.
    * Customized welcome page. Whenever you open a new tab in Chrome, it offers users a thumbnail list of their most visited sites.
    Read the rest of this entry »

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  • Sep
    7

    It may sound preposterous with the benefit of hindsight, but only ten years ago, on September 7, 1998, Larry Page and Sergey Brin founded their new company, Google. My new blog’s birthdate coincides with that of Google and also the recent launch of Chrome prompted me to make this as my first post on my new blog. Hence the name HitChrome. Here are some amusing facts about Google.

    1. Google got its name by accident. The founders misspelled the word “googol,” which refers to the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes. The word was chosen to reflect the company’s goal of organizing the massive amound of information that is available on the Internet.

    2. The Google home page is so sparse because the founders did not know HTML and just wanted to create a quick interface.

    3. At first, there was not even a “submit” button. Users had to hit the “return” key to generate a Google search.

    4. Google’s search technology is called PageRank (tm). It assigns an “importance” value to each page on the Web and gives it a rank. But that is not why the technnology is called PageRank. In fact, it is named after Google co-founder Larry page.

    5. Google’s traffic doubled when they introduced their “Did you mean…” feature. This feature was made possible by a much-improved spell checker.

    6. Google users apparently never feel “lucky,” since the “I feel lucky” is almost never used. However, in trials it was discovered that users saw it as a comfort button and did not want it removed.

    7. Brin and Page would hang out at the Stanford computer science department’s loading docks in hopes of borrowing newly-arrived PCs to use in their network.

    8. Google’s first data center was Larry Page’s dorm room.

    9. When Page and Brin tried to find buyers to license their search technology, one portal CEO told them “As long as we’re 80 percent as good as our competitors, that’s good enough. Our users don’t really care about search.”

    10. The first major investor Andy Bechtolsheim one of the founders of Sun Microsystems wrote a check for $100,000 after seeing a quick demo. At first, there was no way to deposit the $100,000 check. It was made out to “Google Inc.,” but there was no legal entity with that name. The check sat in Page’s desk drawer for two weeks while he and Brin rushed to set up a corporation and locate other investors.

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