TechnoCloud

My post on the launch of Google Chrome was one of the top 10 posts of 2008, so I should follow up now Chrome is out of beta.

There remains much to admire, but still much to come until this gets nearer to replacing my current browser choices.

The biggest of all remains the lack of an extensions platform that make Firefox such a useful browser. As they said at launch and again coming out of beta, this remains in the pipeline. Given its importance to browser users, it might have been a better time to come out of beta when this platform actually launches - even better when the Mac and Linux versions were ready.

Flash also remains inconsistent in Chrome for some (hardly unique to Chrome though) and given its near 100% penetration is an important consideration, particularly on older versions of Flash which many locked down corporate users are forced to use. Finally, as Google admit, better RSS support and auto-complete for forms would be welcome and is on its way.

Certainly a step forward, but as yet no world-beta (ouch)!

In a sudden rush of originality and inspiration, I’m going to share surely the first ever list of 2008’s most popular posts!

10. Gearing up for something more useful
The awful pun in the title didn’t stop the traffic as this look back at Google Gears’ first year scraped into the top 10.

9. Google will see you now
One of my pet topics, visual search, made it into ninth as Google joined the innovators trying to unlock this most difficult and potentially lucrative of challenges in the search marketplace.

8. Adding Google Adsense on Wordpress.com
The painful move away from hosted Wordpress and then back again, did at least have some benefits. A list of handy advice for those contemplating similar folly and a coveted position in the top 10.

7. Google searches related to
Clearly I wasn’t the only one wondering where that appeared from…

6. Wii want cricket
Well, beach cricket did arrive only to disappoint, leaving one of the big questions unanswered for 2009 - when is the massive cricket diaspora going to get wii cricket?

5. Google plays the April fool
Always a ratings winner, this year’s April fools were mixed in terms of amusement value, but not in traffic value, cracking the top five.

4. BBC News video embed
It may be a post on a woefully out-of-date experiment, but with BBC iPlayer embedding still to appear the Google searches keep delivering the punters to this old post.

3. Build your own supermodel
Can there really be that many fans of Weird Science trying to build their own supermodel? It appears there are, as this old post continues to deliver.

2. Review of Chrome - the good, the bad and the too early
No surprise to see one of the stories of 2008 high up the list, as this not entirely postive review of Google’s Chrome browser made the top 2.

1. Lies, damn lies and social networking statistics
Everyone’s looking for them and Google keeps sending them to Technocloud to find them, helped no doubt by the catchy title. This post bemoaning the lack of decent social networking statistics, while offering up some of my own, pipped even Chrome to the top.

It’s been an interesting, challenging and exciting year. Best wishes to all for 2009.

In my role I give a lot of presentations which involve demoing multiple sites in a browser.

To have all the URLs preloaded when I start the presentation, I’ve experimented with a number of tools:

What I need is a painfully simple and reliable way of opening multiple tabs on any PC.

Step forward URLOpener. You simply paste in a list of URLs, click submit and it will open them as new tabs. Done.

Put any better ideas you may have in the comments section below.

Now the buzz about Google’s launch of their Chrome browser has finally calmed down, I wanted to post some thoughts on the browser.

The good

First up, there is much to like - some of the highlights:

- How to get more people to read your product documentation. Write it as a comic
- It’s fast and uses less memory than my other browsers
- No one tab to rule them all. If one tab crashes, the others live on
- Wonderfully clean, simple design
- The homepage display of recently visited sites and resources

The bad

- It’s blocked by my system administrator at work, hardly unique within the corporate firewall. I can still use it via VM, but obviously it’s a major drawback as I like to have a consistent browser experience at work and at play
- Concern for Firefox in the browser wars. Hopefully the wonderful Firefox community will help keep the product innovating and ahead
- No home button, surely a browser staple? You can activate this, but many won’t see this. Some might see this as a ‘good’

The too early

- No extensions
- Delicious. With much of my brain’s storage outsourced to delicious, I need a delicious extension to function. It’s on the roadmap according to Google and there is a workaround using bookmarklets, but it falls short of the Firefox extension that is so integrated into my workflow when researching.