JoeyBahr.com

Who would have imagined that after the great Netscape Navigator versus Internet Explorer war of the late 90s, there would be more browsers around now than just IE?

I know that many of you just use Internet Explorer because that’s what comes up when you click on the “Internet” icon on your Windows PC.

Shame on you.

Yes, I know that the new version of IE has more features than IE 6. And, yes, the security on it is a million times better. But, the user interface that Microsoft came up with is, well, total ass.

IE now hides many of the important menus, not to mention where some of the buttons are seems asinine. (I know, I know; again with the anal fixation.)

I could go on and on, but I won’t.

Instead I want to mention the newest kid on the block, Google’s Chrome. (I’m linking to a news story about it because Google hasn’t even turned their site for it yet.)

What’s cool about this web browser is that it will be totally open source. That means the code is available for everyone to look at and even to improve. Firefox is an open source browser while Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari are closed source, meaning only the developers see the code.

Now Google is big enough to develop a browser on their own, but to make it in a way that anyone can take the code and make it their own is cool.

Something interesting though lies in the fact that Google decided to use Apple’s WebKit engine instead of the Firefox Foundation’s Gecko engine. The engine in this case is the code that renders the web page. Apple’s WebKit is actually an open source product. One of the reasons for this choice could be that with the iPhone, more and more users now see what WebKit can do with the mobile version of Safari.

If you are interested in more, check out this 38 page comic book from Google on their new web browser. We’ll have to see how it works.