Coffee on the Keyboard

Google has announced a new Chrome-based operating system. Of course, if you read blogs like mine, there’s no way you didn’t already know that.

It amazes me how many people assume Google wants to drive Microsoft out of business. From a ZDNet article: “The Chrome OS is a direct attack against Microsoft’s lucrative – albeit vulnerable – Windows operating system.”

“Lucrative?” Isn’t Google’s OS free? “Vulerable?” Most people don’t know enough to change browsers, let alone operating systems. Most of them want it to “just work,” not to be forced to learn new things.

Maybe, deep inside Google, in the minds of some of its most hardcore decision makers, Microsoft is the evil empire, to be vanquished heroically. But on a more realistic level, I think Google is happier when there’s more competition, not less. If you listen to many of the comments surrounding the release of Chrome and its source code, there is a distinct sense that Google itself is better off if there are a dozens major browsers, all competing and driving standards adoption and development.

So too, I think, with operating systems. Google is designing an open-source system that will, hopefully, lead to the creation of additional platforms and push others to make their user experiences better.

Google isn’t trying to take Microsoft down, but encouraging a more competitive marketplace, in the hope that competition will keep everyone innovative and honest.

I know people who will disagree—vehemently—with this statement, but Google is not the ultimate source of all knowledge in the universe.

Neither is Yahoo, nor Ask, nor Cuil.

What is the point of all this social networking if we are unable to tap that network for information from time to time? Sure, we can say “just fucking google it,” but can we always follow through?

When to Ask

“How do you spell ‘psychologist?’”

“Look it up in the dictionary.”

“If I could do that, I wouldn’t be asking.”

Sometimes you know so little about a subject that you don’t know how to form the question for Google. Dictionaries don’t help you spell.

In general, if you’re near someone who probably knows the answer: ask. If they know, you’ll get a more helpful, faster answer, and you can ask follow up questions.

Say, for example, you’re working on a project and are new to the language. If your colleagues have been around for a while, they probably know more than you. Ask away.

No harm in throwing a question to Twitter, either. You may not get an answer, but maybe you will. I once got a great answer from a follower before I got to page 2 of the Google search result. (Not to mention I was barking up the wrong tree with my search.)

When to Google

What if the person you ask doesn’t know?

Don’t make them do your googling for you.

If they don’t know, or can’t do more than point you in the right direction, you should be just as capable of looking things up for yourself. You’ll have to sort through some things, read a few pages that don’t help, but so would the person you asked. Don’t waste two people’s time.

If you do throw out a question on Twitter, or your prefered social network, don’t sit around and wait for an answer. You should be doing your own research. The network might not come up with anything.

People > Google

Yes, really. (No, not all of them.) Asking your network (people both physically or digitally accessible) will often yield better, faster results. But don’t belabor the point.

How long does it take to say “Anybody know…”?

If you somehow haven’t heard of it, Google’s Chrome is a neat, quick, Acid2-compliant “browser” designed to work with web applications, not web pages.

Chrome certainly looks like a modern browser, with tabs along the top and an address bar and a “Most visited” home screen, it will seem familiar to anyone who’s moved past Internet Explorer 6.

And yet, my Twittersphere has been full of comments like “Nice, but not nice enough to make me drop Firefox/Safari.”

While there are some visual improvements, such as an extremely small “chrome” (the parts of the browser around the page area) footprint, the big changes are “under the hood.” Chrome is built for tabs—each tab is an isolated process; no one tab can take down the whole browser—and is built for JavaScript-heavy “web 2.0″ apps—Chrome’s new V8 JavaScript engine executes a full order of magnitude faster than the current browsers, in my experience.

And all of those “under the hood” changes are open source.

Chrome is not a browser.

Chrome is Google’s way of making a point: modern web browsers have not kept up with the web itself.

More and more, the web is becoming an interactive application, and most browsers are not built for it. They display pages, and running applications is an afterthought. While we’ve seen huge improvements in JavaScript execution in the past few years, speed is still a limitation for developers. Applications are also much more likely to crash than static pages (go ahead, just try to crash a browser with just malformed HTML) and isolating tabs will give necessary boosts to speed, stability, and security.

Kris Abel of CTV.ca said it best: “Google’s entire business takes place throughout the internet itself and so they see their interests served regardless of which company takes web browsing to the next level, in fact they see their interests served if all companies do exactly that.”

I’m not switching to Chrome. I doubt very many people will find it useful as a primary browser. I don’t expect many user-interface improvements, like Firefox’s vast add-on library or the accessibility features of Firefox 3, Opera or IE8.

I do expect any future version to have more “under the hood” improvements, and I hope that the makers of Firefox, Opera, Internet Explorer, and any new browsers that spring from this, will re-evaluate their own products and move in this direction.

Because when the browsers get better, the web gets better.