In case you haven’t heard, Google Chrome is Google’s latest open-source offering: a standards-compliant browser. The reason I’m interested in it is that it runs each tab as its own process. If I’m browsing two sites and one causes a crash, the other one doesn’t go down, as well. It also helps with memory management, theoretically keeping the overall memory use more appropriate after a long session of internet use.The reason Google is interested in developing Chrome is that it wants more control over how its Apps (especially Google Docs/Spreadsheets/etc.) are presented. If a silly flash arcade site crashes your browser while you’re taking a break from writing the next great novel in Google Docs, you’ll be rightly frustrated. The one-process-per-tab approach ensures that this won’t happen, paving the way for Google Docs to attain higher acceptance.Things that currently annoy me about Google Chrome:

•  Quicksearch. I can’t right click in a field and make it a quicksearch option. In Firefox, I can right click in, say, the PHP search field and save that to a keyword, such as “php”. Then, if I want to search for the PHP function ‘asort’, I just type “php asort” in the address bar and it will take me right there. I can’t (yet) do this in Chrome.
• Scrolling. In Firefox, my mouse is properly detected, allowing me to scroll slowly and smoothly, or quickly, depending on how I accelerate the mouse. In Chrome, the scrolling is overly “sensitive”, causing my scrolling to move much too quickly.
• Tabs. When I middle-click on a link for the first time, it opens in a new tab. But when I middle click again on a link, it opens in the same tab that was just opened by my first middle click. Firefox gets this right by default: each new middle click opens up a new tab.

That’s it for now. More to come later.

As of today, when you visit a university’s page on this site, you’ll find a link to its map in the deep blue menu bar running along the top of the page. Fun things are in the works now that we’ve got the Google Maps working. For now, any suggestions? (If your university doesn’t have a map, it’s because we don’t have its address – send it our way and we’ll update the database.)