By now you all should have heard about Google’s new browser, Chrome. If you aren’t familiar with why Google would want to enter the browser party there is an excellent tutorial about why Google made a browser and what they hope will happen to it in the future. By the way, I’m impressed Google was able to keep something this monumental a complete secret for the two years it has been in development. 

About a 6 weeks ago I was asked to be the manager of the developer group. This has been an interesting change, one which probably deserves its own post, but the release of Chrome was quickly noticed by everyone on the team and the downloading started.

But what does this mean for IT?

Chrome already has a 3% browser share, surpassing Opera in as little as one day. I have no doubt that adoption of Chrome will be widespread, espeically among Firefox users, given the superior architecture and more robust process and threading capabilities. I think within a month we’ll see the Firefox install base numbers canablized by Chrome.

All my my developers have already switched to Chrome for accessing internal sites. They still use Firefox for Internet sites only because Firefox has Ad Block Plus. As soon as Chrome has that, they will switch to use Chrome exclusively.

So again, what does this mean for IT? It means we have another 4th browser to use in testing our sites (IE, Firefox, Safari and Chrome) and a new recommended browser for our internally developed applications. We recommend it because of its super-fast javascript support. Some of our better web applications are heavy on AJAX and javascript for web 2.0 features and nothing is faster for these than Chrome (at least that was the conclusion that we all came to independantly).

I would hope that the Firefox people are going to use the Chrome engine in Firefox 4, which will bring together the great and extensible XUI features of Firefox and the stability and speed of Chrome and provide a real alternative to killing IE. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a Microsoft hater, but IE has always added proprietary support for their own functions and they are terribly slow to react to security issues and typically lag in features. 

Don’t think that Chrome is a silver bullet. It has bugs in it and some of them are significant. But the bugs that exist don’t even come close to outweighing the benefits of the Chrome architecture and the improved user experience. 

I think Chrome is going to be with us for a long time and I’m already changing some development efforts to implement some web features that, until now, didn’t work fast enough for users to tolerate. 

I belive that organizations will have to ensure their websites work with Chrome as well as the other top browsers. There are still a few sites that require IE only but no one takes them seriously and they deserve to loose business because of their unwillingness to adapt (this includes YOU, Microsoft, and your stupid Sharepoint and Exchange Web Client). 

So keep your flame comments to a minimum. And thanks for listening.

Have you ever had a boss that watches you like a hawk and always thinks you are screwing around? Even during your lunch break which is YOUR time?

What if you want to read while at work? Well the good people at New Zealand Book Council have a website for you: www.readatwork.com. Here you will find a web page that looks like a Windows XP desktop and the books and other literature are disguised as PowerPoint presentations. It takes a little getting used to but I quickly found that the format was more intuitive that I would have thought. Good reading, too.

What if you want to surf and make it look like you are doing work? Then I have the site for you: www.workfriendly.net. It will make it look like you are working on a Microsoft Word document when you are really browsing the Internet. It doesn’t have graphics, however, which would be a dead giveaway.

eCalc might be the best online calculator I’ve found. It’s certainly better than Google (which is what I currently use). One nice thing about Google, though, is the built in conversion support.

On the desktop I like Calculator.net and prefer to use it over Calc or a spreadsheet. I think it is the Reverse Polish Notation (RPN) support.

I prefer the scientific version of the calculator they have, but to each his own.

I’m not quite sure what tipped this off but lately my kids and I have been playing LEGOs a lot. Last Sunday we spent an entire afternoon building a space complex with ships, support personel, buildings and a princess pony coral (which my youngest daughter insisted on).

Sitting there with all three kids was fun and I enjoyed the creative play as much as they did. I decided we need more LEGOs.

Not to long ago my mother (bless her hoarding heart) gave me back my LEGOs from when I was a kid. It included set 6980 Galaxy Commander in the box with all the instructions. I was thrilled. I loved that set and played with it for a very long time. Sometimes I would dismantle it and built other ships but I always came back to my love: the Galaxy Commander.

I came home from work the next day to discover that my son (6 years old) had completely dismantled it, destroyed the box and lost many of the pages from the instruction manual. I wasn’t happy. I’m STILL not happy about it as I see small assembled parts all over my son’s bedroom floor and I recognize them as being from that ship. I already tried to re-assemble the pieces but only got half of them back. It’s a lost cause.

On an unrelated note I found a couple of websites where people are actively creating new sets and scenes. They are of such creativity and quality that it truly blows my mind. The Brothers Brick is one such site. I spent an hour this evening just looking at the differnt things people have created. I’m blown away.

I am definitely buying more LEGOs.

It is coming! See the videos! Visit the site!

I almost peed my pants when I saw this game is coming out. I had a bunch of friends also call me to let me know about it. (Thanks, everyone!)

I’m a huge Diablo fan. It is only second to Tomb Raider as my favorite game of all time. I can’t even tell you how many hours I spent playing Diablo. I know for a fact that with Diabo II I played every single day for a year putting in hundreds of hours. To this day I still have incredibly cool characters that I break out and play from time to time.

I’m so excited to play Diablo III that I would be willing to take time off work AND buy a new computer if needed just to run the graphics.

Did I mention I’m excited?