Linus Upson, engineering director at Google, said there were many discussions before allowing ad-blocking programs “because Google makes all of its money from advertising.”
But he explained that the prevailing thinking was that “it’s unlikely ad blockers are going to get to the level where they imperil the advertising market, because if advertising is so annoying that a large segment of the population wants to block it, then advertising should get less annoying.”
“So I think the market will sort this out,” he said.
Bingo.
Chromium OS User Experience:
A system UI that uses as little screen space as possible by combining apps and standard web pages into a minimal tab strip: While existing operating systems have web tabs and native applications in two separate strips, Chromium OS combines these, giving you access to everything from one strip. The tab is the equivalent of a desktop application’s title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a simple mechanism for managing sets of those applications and pages.
I want to reserve judgment on Google Chrome OS until I try it out, but I have to say that between HTML5, CSS3, WebKit’s takeover of the Web, and now this, right now feels like a pretty cool time to be a web developer and/or designer.
In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.
How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things, you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.
Google Chrome, a week after its release, accounts for 5.15% of my visits. A few other sites I manage, with more mainstream audiences, are getting between 2% and 4% of visits from Chrome users. Not bad; it’s more than I expected a brand-new beta browser, with few features oriented at non-technical users other than “it’s really fast!!”, would get in just a week.
Niall Kennedy takes a look at the history behind Chrome, and the team put together by Google to create it. (Via Daring Fireball.)
Camino is, of course, the native Mac version of Mozilla, built on the Cocoa APIs and well integrated with OS X’s Aqua user interface. The fact that Pinkerton is part of the team bodes well for the Mac version of Google Chrome. (Via Mac User.)
