Google Fun, Part 2

I have been trying out the new Google browser this week. I'm actually liking it. It has some new features I like — the "Omnibox," the automatic assimilation of search boxes from other sites and the ability to drag and drop tabs, to name a few — and it lacks most of the annoyances that other non-IE browsers have. Namely, that Firefox and Safari take four or five times longer than IE to open (Google Chrome is even faster than IE) and they both have numerous little UI quirks that just make my life harder. Google Chrome is different from IE in big ways, but still keeps enough of the IE-like behavior I prefer — at first glance, the better parts of both worlds.

One potential issue I haven't experimented too much with yet is the fact that Google Chrome is based on the same rendering engine that Safari is based on. Hopefully the Google team have managed to avoid creating the same kind of intellectually challenged rendering I have so much enjoyed coding around for Safari.

As with every new Google product, experimentation turns my mind to thoughts of analytics, and Google Analytics is always good for an hour or so of entertainment. Highlights from the keywords that have brought visitors to my blog in the past month:

• blockbuster movies that were duds (another number one listing)
• nuclear total destruction
• outer space trip report (I'm second, but I'm right above a listing for this blog — which, coincidentally, I just rediscovered a couple days ago when I was digging through old links — by a guy who actually has been to outer space...or at least he played someone who did on TV. Language alert, though.)