Tuesday, September 2, 2008

The fruit-shaped elephant in the room

I love Scott McCloud's work (is there someone who doesn't?) and really like how he breaks down the thinking that went into Google Chrome. (Hint to anyone else who uses the conventions of comic books to explain Javascript's strengths and weaknesses in the future: You don't have to include Peanut Butter Jelly Time as Mr. McCloud did, but everyone will like you more if you do.)

But the more I read the more I think it's going to be a long freakin' time before we Mac folk get, um, shiny. Nevermind that Google today -- today, Wednesday 3 Sept -- is so flaky I'm having trouble getting Blogger to cope with this post. This is about the amount of vetting that seems to have gone into making sure stuff works just on the PC side. This is the Web we're talking about, where an entire site can be Mac-useless because the business model they're paid by includes a deal with Microsoft (I'm looking at you, Qwest).

If the Chrome folk really are doing significant vetting of even just the most-trafficked sites, there's a significant subset of those sites that they'll have to revisit for Mac purposes. And how much longer does that put off Chrome for Mac? Not that I don't trust Google to do the work -- if there's one thing we know about Google it's that they're good at taking the long view on such things -- but jeez, it would have been nice to have gone public-beta with a littl emore of the public in mind.

2 comments:

mfheadcase said...

Personally, i kind of wish that they did the beta releases in reverse order of userbase size... not for selfish reasons like my primary use machine being a linux laptop or anything like that...

But because this reduces the potential number of bug reports to more manageable levels while increasing the potential usefullness of those bug reports because of having come from a more educated potential user base as well.

ID Software used this logic for the demos of Quake 3 Arena, and it seemed to have worked out.

Ok.. i admit it, i am just a selfish bastard... time to go see if i can scam the Firefox build under WINE into letting me download Chrome, as the straight Linux version only give me a "get info" link.

mfheadcase said...

(note) i can download, but not run the installer under WINE... **sigh**