G-chrome - its implication for learning

The 800-pound G has launched its browser, albeit beta 0.2 and has attracted a lot of attention.

First, the bad news. For learning technology developers, we have one more browser to check in order to ensure that our products are compatible with. Can we test against Google Chrome in lieu of Safari? Probably not!

The potential good news.

Google Chrome has built in Prism functionality. By a single click, a shortcut is created on the desktop for the current web application. This is useful for courses if such application, when created, can also store the user credentials. If yes, students access to courses will be greatly simplified. At the time of writing, Google Chrome does not store any user credential.

Google is also working on a technology called Google Gears which makes a web application into an offline application by storing data locally at the client's harddisk. When such application is installed, the access of some local resources by javascript have been relaxed to allow much smoother and streamline interaction with the application. Again, at this point in time, I don't see signs that Google Gears has been integrated into Google Chrome.

The real good news.

This is a recognition of the importance of Javascript as a significant programming language and that the current Javascript virtual machine is not fast enough. While Google is not the first to do that, (Apple is making significant advances on which Google Chrome is based and Mozilla organisation is also implementing significantly faster virtual machine for its Firefox 3.1 browser), the emphasis on speed in Google Chrome's launch did throw some weight behind such an important issue.

After some preliminary reading, the improvement makes to the virtual machine by these open source effects (Apple, Mozilla and Google) are complementary and not mutually exclusive. Hopefully, someone will pull them together to give us a really fast and robust Javascript virtual machine.