Mr. Topp and the Big Bad Blog

For the month of April, I used nothing but Apple’s Safari. It was a mix of freedom and frustration — faster than Firefox or Internet Explorer, but not as satisfying. After writing an article on it last month, I was concerned that when I reached the end of my experimentation period I will have found myself in a dilemma: to use Firefox, a quality browser that is on the slow side; or to use Safari, a browser that was disappointing aside from it’s blazing speed.

Today I am here to tell you that this is a false dichotomy. There is a third road, and its name is Chrome.

On the first of May, I dutifully opened Chrome, installed a week earlier. I set it as my default browser, and got surfing.

Observation one: Still much faster than Firefox. I cannot tell you which is faster, Chrome or Safari. I think that there would have to be proper tests done to determine this, rather than one blogger’s random web surfing. But it is on par with Safari, which was like a breath of fresh air, when I started.

However, where Safari would slowly eat larger and larger amounts of my computer’s memory until everything moved slowly (Safari included), Chrome remains a lean, mean speed machine no matter how long it stays open.

Speed victory: Chrome.

Observation two: Chrome is more universal than Safari. I do not encounter sites where I need to switch back to another browser, despite Chrome having an even smaller market share than Safari does.

Observation three: Chrome is the only browser on the market (to my knowledge) to have a sand box. That is, hackers need to break-in twice: Once, in order to run malicious code on your computer, and a second time to get it out of the “sand box” and into an area where it can actually do some damage. This extra safety wall, combined with not being a big target, makes Chrome one of the more secure browsers to be using — at least until it starts to achieve a significant (Firefox-esque) following.

Drawbacks: The only significant thing that Chrome lacks is plug-ins. Firefox has some excellent plug-ins that made my browsing easier. Chrome is missing these. For me, this is no big deal — a couple of bookmark buttons containing Javascript does a good enough job for me. But I was never a big plug-in user in Firefox.

There are people out there who use a huge number of features that these plug-ins provide. These people will not find their answer in Chrome.

But if you are a low-volume plug-in user — as I was — ask yourself: how much do I use them? How much do I need them? Could I do without?

If the answer is “yes” — or even “maybe” — I challenge you to try Chrome for a month. Chances are you won’t go back.

I say that, of course, because I certainly will not — at least not until a Firefox 4 comes out, and I am duty bound to spend a month with it. Chrome has become the Big Bad Browser of choice.

The question to you, denizens of the Internet. Is there another free browser that I should try, or should I stop now and consider myself a Chrome Man?

Early last week I was considering an article here at the Big Bad Blog bemoaning my inability to browse the Internet on my iPhone using the same types of services I normally use at home. This requires very few elements: the ability to surf through random interesting sites; the ability to bookmark sites; and the ability to easily share discoveries through social networks. I use stumbleupon to surf, delicious to bookmark, and Twitter to share, though each of these services has competitors.

My ideal iPhone application would be a web browser, with the ability to bookmark to delicious (or go to a site bookmarked on delicious), the ability to hit a “random” button, the ability to “approve” a page, and the ability to share a page via Twitter. In all, it could probably be done with a nice clean set-up. Call it “social safari” or something. Have settings on it so that users could output things to Facebook, Digg, or whatever, if they want. Not to complex, is it?

And yet, nothing like it exists for the iPhone. Until last week, randomly surfing the Internet was extremely difficult. Delicious applications can access your delicious bookmarks, but there’s no way to bookmark to the service. Nothing for StumbleUpon, and in order to Twitter you have to remember the url and punch it in (thanks to the lack of a cut-and-paste option on the iPhone). I love the thing, but the closest I could really get to exploring the web was to read blogs on Google reader and “star” anything really good so I could do something interesting with it when I got back onto my laptop.

The post was composed, mentally, and I sat down in front of Google Reader. The news started coming in: first a reddit iPhone app, then one from Yahoo!

With a sudden explosion of these, I can’t just write the article intended. First I must check these out. Why bemoan the lack of something of which there is no lack?

Reddit
Let me begin by saying that reddit is not my favourite social browsing tool. Reddit and digg (which does pretty much the same thing) simply are not ideal. I already had an account on it, from giving it a test run. A quick download, a quick entry of my username and password, and Reddit was up and running on the iPhone.

Reddit’s iPhone application is simply outstanding. It starts at Reddit’s home page, as you would expect, with their annoying lists of “new”, “hot”, and “top” places on the internet. I dislike the coy names that Reddit users give the sites they link to — very rarely are they at all descriptive. But sometimes there are interesting things on this page.

But it makes up for the annoyances with a couple of great features:
1. The ability to use Reddit’s “serendipity” feature to go to a random page. I still don’t think this works as well as Stumbleupon’s — mostly because I like to use StumbleUpon to see the weird and wonderful side of the web, and have things such as “news” turned off. I do not land on news sites with it. Reddit’s version does not seem to have this ability.
2. The ability to save pages to Reddit. Although I cannot do so with things I find through other sources, if I really like a page I find through Reddit, I can put it onto a saved list to do something with later.

In short, Reddit has supplied me with two of the three functionalities I am looking for in social browsing tool: Random surfing and the ability to save what I have found somewhere. Neither of these are perfect — as a social web service, Reddit has not designed itself as either of these things — it’s a way to collect the groupthink browsing habits of the internet in a directed way to point out interesting stories.

That said, after less than a week of having Reddit on my iPhone, it has already become one of the big four social networking tools I use most (Twitter via Tweetie, Google Reader and my blogging application being the others). I am very impressed by it’s usability and the way it makes the internet work the way Reddit users would like it to work. A nod towards the functionality StumbleUpon and Delicious provide are light-years beyond anything else I have found on the iPhone. I have also started using Reddit when away from the iPhone — if I’m going to use a service I might as well use it.

I would still like to see a service-neutral application that can handle those of us who use multiple services, but Reddit is a definite step in the right direction.

Yahoo!
My original plan was to download both of these, and compare them. I expected Yahoo! to win — Yahoo! buzz is, in spirit, identical to those that Reddit and Digg provide. Their added experience as a search engine and web portal made me expect that I was throwing money away at the Reddit application.

Even the application’s name: Yahoo! oneConnect makes it appear as though it intends to be THE internet portal for the iPhone … much as it originally intended to be for the Internet back in Yahoo’s heyday. It appears as though it allows you to plug into various social networks online.

But I cannot test the Yahoo! application, because I am in the UK. For whatever reason, Yahoo! is not comfortable with their application existing on Limey iPhones. I would bitch on about this, but I already intend to do so, more generically, in a later article. I will ask the pertinent question here, though: Do companies not realize, when selling services over the Internet, that users can see the whole Internet. Instead of being excited by Yahoo!’s offering, I am instead disappointed in it. If there is a point or purpose to rolling out only to the US, I would be interested in hearing it.

In any case, Yahoo! has previously thought themselves to be a potential doorway to the Internet — and lost. Will they do any better this time? Time will tell, I suppose. I am guessing not, though — when your first step is to disappoint your non-US (ie, the majority of your) customers by not having the product ready for sale — or in this case, to give away — in their markets, you are probably not prepped for world domination.

The ideal social web browsing application is still out there in the world of forms, waiting to be created. All you iPhone application developers: Go! Create!

No need to credit me. I’ll probably even thank you and give you money.