Today Google released Chrome a new beta browser that puts Google in direct competition with Microsoft and Mozilla.
My first impression (and consistent with other comments and developers) is just how fast it renders web pages. Now it still has its issues and we are working to identify those across all our properties, but man does it seem to out perform my other browsers in my casual tests.
I can’t wait for more testing to appear online.
1,000,000,000,000 equals one trillion, which of course is quite a lot. Well Google commented today that they have this many active URL’s in their index. Back in 2000 they hit the billion mark and the first index in 1998 had only 26 million pages.
How do we find all those pages? We start at a set of well-connected initial pages and follow each of their links to new pages. Then we follow the links on those new pages to even more pages and so on, until we have a huge list of links. In fact, we found even more than 1 trillion individual links, but not all of them lead to unique web pages. Many pages have multiple URLs with exactly the same content or URLs that are auto-generated copies of each other. Even after removing those exact duplicates, we saw a trillion unique URLs, and the number of individual web pages out there is growing by several billion pages per day.
As someone who carries a laptop around all the time and on every vacation I have never worried too much about keeping everything accessible beyond the local machine I have (currently a MacBook Pro).
Recently I started thinking about migrating to online tools where possible. For example I started using Google Reader over NetNewsWire so that I can check in on my feeds from any machine. So now I can get a quick RSS fix before bed on the iMac at home rather than pulling out my laptop. This was a good example because while NetNewsWire has a sync option with Newsgator Online it isn’t as robust as Google Reader and my goal is to ultimately not depend on the particular machine I am using to get to what I need.
Another move I made recently is leveraging the Gmail storage for my email archive. We use Exchange server at work but with any client these days I can add in the Gmail account via IMAP and use its capacious storage to house my archives. I have run into a few kinks but all in all the process is working for me. Now I can sit at a PC or my MacBook Pro or my iMac at home and have all my email.
The next step will be to move my documents to a similar setup. I have a .Mac account so that is an option and I have started looking at other options to keep an online (and ideally redundant) store that will keep everything in check. While I have a few apps that don’t span platforms most of the files tend to be cross platform (think Excel and Word) so having them available anywhere is another big win.
One reason to start thinking about this is that I have found myself tiring of carrying around a complete mobile office. If I can get a majority of content shared and synchronized across multiple machines I can travel light during the week and even start to consider a lightweight machine to use on trips.
I haven’t quite decided if that is the way this will end, but at least I can downsize my daily bag and hopefully open it less often.
Follow me on Twitter