I have not had a substantial post in quite a while. If any of you are on the edge of your seat waiting for such drivel as I might produce, I do apologize for not delivering. It’s not that nothing’s been happening, it’s just that what’s been happening has either been not terribly exciting or doesn’t belong in a public forum.

I’m writing this post using Google Chrome. Chrome is a very compelling product. If you haven’t already, I would recommend reading their rather long comic book describing the product and the ideas behind it.

I’m particularly impressed by the notion of a separate process for every tab. In a typical scenario this means that it will use more memory than Firefox, but the gain in overall stability is impressive. People running memory-starved systems are already used to things running slowly. They’re likely to be impressed by the ability to find and close the tabs that are hogging their precious RAM without losing the one that contains the blog or forum post they’ve been working on for the past three hours.

Robert X. Cringely, who creates TV content for PBS, wrote a blog post about why Google is entering the so-called “browser wars.”

Like Mr. Cringely and his friend David mentioned in the post, I believe that in the end, Google doesn’t really care whether people use Chrome. It’s much more likely that they are showing the dominant players what they believe is the right way to do things and hoping that their ideas get copied and improved for the benefit of everyone. Although I think the next version of Firefox (3.1) is pretty well set in stone as far as features, the version beyond that is likely to start incorporating these new ideas. That is very exciting.