Good blog on dog-fooding Chrome OS Laptop

My friend and former co-blogger & co-worker Vlad Cole has started a new blog where he's documenting 99 days of moving to an all-cloud model and using a Chrome OS laptop.

Vlad used to blog for Joystick, and we jointly worked on VGVC.net for a year. He's tech savvy, and definitely a guy that walks his talk, so it'll be a good experiment to follow:

99 Days in the Cloud

Thoughts on Google Chrome

Google launched their browser, which made some (surprisingly little) noise around the blogosphere yesterday. I installed it (this is my first post made from within Chrome) and thought I'd post some thoughts.

First off, kudos for the Comic that kicked off the launch (fans of Scott McCloud will recognize his work here):

Brilliant! What a brilliant way to convey at consumer-level the ideas behind some of the advantages that Chrome offers over competitive offerings. things like Multi-threading, memory management, JVMs, priviledge levels, etc

Secondly, I'm just surprised how little talk there's been about it. First off, it's got to be a HUGE threat to Microsoft. Firefox has made inroads just based on technical advantages and word of mouth, but now here comes Google, with a track record of gaining MSS via a proven business model (look at their toolbar business), and the advantage that comes with being a primary starting point for so many people's web experience. Which brings to mind... why is Chrome not being pitched on the google homepage; nor even in the options at the top; nor on the 'other' pull down menu? Strange. Anyhow, secondly, holy cow this has have Firefox worried. Google's been a major partner for them, and it will be interesting to see just how fickle their users can be, and how many were with them because they just weren't IE.

Finally, the browser itself is pretty slick. I love the 'most visited' and 'most recent bookmarks' in the startup page, The tabs are nice with duplicate features, the drag'n'drop of them feels nice. The treatment of popups is very slick (much better than IE's 'yellow bar'). 

My only complaints so far:

- it'd be nice if History was nested by site. I'm occasionally.searching for a page I found earlier in the day, and this feature makes it easier.

- I'd really like the RSS integration that IE7 has. I know Google has Reader, but I want it baked into my desktop app and I want that app to be the same as my browser.

Anyhow, fantastic product from what I've seen thus far. Nice first effort Google!