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Google Chrome for Mac has finally been released (in beta, but who’s complaining?) and I’ve been testing it as my primary browser. It’s already my top choice on Windows (this development making it all the more sweeter) and I have to say – once you use a combined address/search bar, there’s absolutely no going back.
So far, so good:
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Ars Technica’s review of Snow Leopard may take longer to read than the OS takes to install.
I suggest you begin now.
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And while we’re comparing Safari 4 to its beta, I had also noticed various progress bars that were available in the beta. The final release has gone with none of them, choosing instead a more radically visible indicator:
My immediate reaction is that I preferred the subtlety of the beta indicator (eventually preferring it to the Safari 3 one), but it’s not a bad choice. In the Windows version of Safari, however, I think that the indicator is too bold (it has a darker color than on a Mac) and appears to float above the address bar rather than nestle inside it.
The other big change is that the tabs have moved back down below the address bar, a la Safari 3. Their temporary displacement in the beta was most likely a response to Chrome’s tab placement. One strange side effect is that the tabs appear to run into the address bar, rather than the page itself:
Curious.
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When the Safari 4 beta came out, I observed that having more than one tab open would break any resize bookmarklets. I can confirm that this is still the case in the stable release of Safari 4.
Cody Robbins commented on my original post and noted that the problem has been filed as a WebKit bug. This means it may be indicative of larger problems with WebKit’s JavaScript framework. Which is a shame, because Java screams in Safari 4.
Interestingly, I couldn’t get any resize bookmarklets to work in Google Chrome, which is also based on WebKit, even though I use other bookmarklets in Chrome on a daily basis. The mystery lives on…
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Banners for WWDC are starting to go up at Moscone West. The main banner reads, “One year later. Light years ahead.”
Never mind the implication that Apple travels faster than light (or has a Time Machine). The laws of physics can not contain Steve Jobs!
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Looks like I’m not the only one — All Things D has declared we are on the cusp of Web 3.0:
This year, as we convene the seventh edition of D: All Things Digital, we think something major is happening at the intersection of tech and media, and we think it deserves its own new hyped-up name: Web 3.0. Yes, folks, we are declaring the Web 2.0 era over, because, well, when you run conferences and Web sites, you can say stuff like that.
But, if you read on a bit, you will see that we actually have some real, rational basis for believing that yet another seminal moment has arrived in the never-ending digital revolution that inspired us to launch this gathering.
But their rationale leaves me wanting:
So what’s the seminal development that’s ushering in the era of Web 3.0? It’s the real arrival, after years of false predictions, of the thin client, running clean, simple software, against cloud-based data and services. The poster children for this new era have been the Apple iPhone and iPod Touch….
Essentially, Walt has found Web 3.0 in the “cloud”, the omnipresent buzzword for remote data services. But are we really so desperate for something new we’re looking for software milestones in a hardware paradigm? The fact that people carry thin client computers in their pockets hardly heralds the Next Web; it merely means that hardware design is entering a new epoch. In fact, thin clients are hardly new in professional fields, and their recent inroads in the consumer space are noteworthy but shouldn’t be extrapolated to a new era of internet.
Yes, the knowledge that people have a standardized form of internet access no matter where they are where will strongly shape web application design and function – but Web 3.0 is not about mobile versions of Yelp and Wikipedia; it’s about an entirely new paradigm.
I maintain that Web 3.0 will be heralded by data organization. Web 2.0 has provided a multitude of data collection mechanisms: social, video, informative, text, photographic, etc. But they remain isolated and closed to each other (with the exception of explicitly coded connections like Youtube -> Facebook). Efforts at aggregation fail because they do not allow input and frequently use chronological presentations. Web 3.0 will put that data to good use with advanced manipulations allowing both input and output.
But we’re not quite there yet, iPhone or no iPhone.
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If you type “observe” into Apple’s thesaurus, the helpful app shows the word in a sentence:
Who is this wheelchair dude, and where is his vestibule?
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