The joke is that Steve calls everything shit. Even things that are useful, usable and exceed the quality bar for most shipping software.

As with Steve's other notable traits, Lyons exaggerates it for humor.

Chrome has become my default browser, second place is Firefox. and i've seen increase in chrome share in my site, up from 3% to 7% for the past 6 months.

Against all odds, Chrome is my primary browser also (Windows for both work and home). I'm addicted to the speed and stable memory footprint and I only use FF for Firebug. I tend to leave my systems up for days at a time and I would always end up having to close Firefox daily to gain back the memory it had swallowed.

I use it just for short bursts of web 2.0 and javascript intensive browsing. It slows down my computer a lot, GoogleUpdate all the time touching some files, chrome itself maintaining its database. I don't like my harddisk led to be blinking constantly.

only thing lacking chrome is the plugin support and support for RSS feeds. come on! google, that should have been there from day one!

they held the extension system back possibly because it could have been a bottleneck or because they just didn't want to give you the possibility to use an extension that blocks their ads. however, they are working on the extension system (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...) and you can already start creating your own extensions (http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio... or http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensio...).

Whoa, you're right... they don't want adblock. I don't see any google ads these days. Not even on google search... (occasionally in gmail's webclips).

Could it be... that not having adblock is a major motivation for google chrome/OS? I suspect the market share of adblock is relatively small, but it's the kind of thing that can only grow... and unlike anything else that has been discussed, adblock directly threatens revenue.

I think they are holding back on plugins because this is what causes the various speed bottlenecks that FF is suffering from. Plugins are nice until they slow down the browser.

Yeah. Firefox needs (soft) realtime [1] plugins.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_computing

Chrome is my default browser at work where I run windows.

The toilet paper comment made me laugh hard though.

Interesting that Mozilla spent years to make nice add-ons support, so Chrome will be there only after ~2 years of work, but Mozilla will be far ahead in that time.

I'll just assume the whole SF thing applies to you too on that one. Just like most people don't give a shit about what OS they use, most people don't really care about browsers either.

I have never had issues with Firefox, I don't care one bit about Javascript speed and honestly Chrome is underfeatured to the point where I think I'm using NCSA Mosaic. I gave it a shot. I was back to Firefox before lunch.

I see there is a hype there, but I just don't get it. The post is clearly hyperbole and overly sarcastic, but to me and stuff which matters to me, Chrome actually is shit. I'm not buying it, even though it's free. I might even go for MSIE before Chrome.

For the same reason, a OS where Chrome is the only browser* would be 100% DOA on my hardware.

* Rumour has it that Google wants to ditch X. If that is the case, no other GUIed *nix software will run without a rewrite.

My impression was that it had a faster Javascript engine, and it has spurred on other browsers. It's a market threat (users might switch), and an engineering goad (hey, it's possible - why can't you do it?) That serves Google's purpose as much as getting market share themselves.

Another aspect is blue sky: what webapps would become possible if the installed-based of javascript was an order of magnitude faster? What's good for webapps is good for google.

Rumour has it that Google wants to ditch X. If that is the case, no other GUIed nix software will run without a rewrite.*

Not exactly: few modern GUI applications are written to use Xlib directly. If Google ditched X for a new window system and then ported GTK+, Qt, and a few other widget toolkits to their window system, a lot of software would run with relatively few changes.

"and then ported GTK+, Qt, and a few other widget toolkits to their window system"

Wich is obviously done in an afternoon :)

Of course not. It takes an entire weekend. ;)

Seriously now, is hard but doable. They could start by hiring the SkyOS guy: http://skyos.org/?q=node/650

Yes, and so that everything Just Works :p

I use Chrome to the point that I fire-up FF only when I need certain addons such as web developer, etc. FF is great but it cannot match the speed of Chrome.

Chrome is my main browser and I even switched back to Windows from Linux just so I could enjoy the incredible speed increase. Web browsing is one of my primary computer activities, so an OS that boots up quickly and uses the fastest browser would be greatly welcomed.

"Web browsing is one of my primary computer activities, so an OS that boots up quickly and uses the fastest browser would be greatly welcomed."

This precisely characterizes the intended market for Chrome OS.

All of those criticisms apply to Safari 4, tho.

...which is why Safari is also not very popular in the mainstream.*

* http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/07/05/since-march-internet-ex...

That it lacks features and there's no market for it? ...

Ditching X and breaking legacy support for existing apps does have the added benefit of forcing developers to accept a standardized look & feel and maybe rethink their GUI layouts. If Google imposes some strict UI design guidelines and offers a good UI toolkit they may be able to really raise the bar on OSS UI design for ChromeOS.

hey Fake Steve Jobs, I use Chrome too :(