Having read the comic, it seems that Chrome might be worth looking at after all.

Of course... am I the only one cynical enough to think that, if it's open source, won't the phishers and co. just hack together their OWN version and stick it online, or make plugins or something that'll bypass the protection?

KB, gone.

First journal, and it's a rant because I've got no-where else to vent. I'll likely be shouted down (if anyone ever READS this). So here we go.

All I get from Chrome is "ooo, pretty!". That's all. Everything else is from Opera or Firefox.

Worst part? Everyone considers it to be "novel" and "fresh" because, hey, it's Google doing it! Three cheers for Google, eh?

I will admit: I am a fan of Opera. At this point, I'm beginning to think that I'm a RABID fan. Then again, I tend to get this way about praise ungiven. And Opera certainly deserves some praise.

From what I've read, if Opera had this Incognito thing and resizeable text fields, it would, nay, SHOULD have been deemed as great as Chrome. Everything else Chrome has is from Opera.

I performed a brief experiment, and discovered that Opera has this ripping feature: drag a tab to the desktop, and Opera opens there as well. You can then drag the tab back.

The address bar is below the tab bar, like in Chrome. Not much else I can say about that.

Here's the part that always gets me: FF3's AwesomeBar? Opera had that since 9.24, maybe 9.50. And yet, people claim that it's Mozilla's creation. If it uses algorithms to determine your most-viewed site and brings that up first, then yes, that's Mozilla's innovation, and they deserve ample praise for it. The built-in search feature, though, is Opera's creation. You can even define your own searches. I made one just a few hours ago for searching file extensions. So, in this regard, Google have not innovated at all.

Then we have Google's knock-off of Opera's Speed Dial. Pretty self-explanitory, imo.

OK, there ends the annoyed rant. After some looking around, I'll concede that Chrome has some good ideas. Their "one tab == one browser" idea, while high-overhead, is a pretty decent alternative to "shut down Opera, restart from last location". The anti-phishing and such feature is a good idea, only really obtainable with Spybot running, and even then, not with the kind of protection they're suggesting. And their bookmarking system is yet another way of simplifying bookmarking, and is an improvement from "drag the tab to somewhere on the browser, preferably your Bookmarks tab" that Opera has, which is useful for sticking bookmarks everywhere (and I mean EVERYWHERE. Only place sacrosanct is the File bar).

The one final thing that gets me? How Google pages never work properly with Opera. Never. Opera's CEO commented that, since Google "borrowed" many ideas from Opera (see here), "to 'protect free competition' Google now 'has a new responsibility to make sure all browsers are supported by all its Web services.'" Hopefully, they will.

Now, the flip side. Am I being too self-righteous, too annoyed? Should I not be glad that Google saw the ideas that Opera had, and decided to run with them?

A good question. Since Opera's CEO noticed as well, and seemed... pretty sanguine about it all, I'll wait and see how things pan out.

-KB, gone.