Every once in a while, a rare while, I come across a product that makes me say, “Wow, they actually thought about this.” I’m pleased to announce that today it happened again, thanks to a new web browser called Google Chrome. Read on for my brief review of the browser and some of the cool features that only geeks will appreciate.

My initial impression is that the boys in the backroom at Google really paid attention to how they browse the web. It wasn’t until I saw Chrome for the first time that I realized that our so-called modern browsers are still clinging to a 1998 paradigm of web browsing. It’s like they are focused more on standards compliance and some kind of “performance” metrics than they are on the end user. Chrome takes user experience to the next level. The Chrome team realized a couple key things about your average web browser user that the others just don’t get:

1. When you open a link in a new tab, you ought to open it in a neighboring tab, and not on the end of the list
2. Yes, there are a handful of web sites that I visit the most, and yes a start page with those screens on it is very useful
3. When I type in the address bar “slash”, 9 times out of 10, I really mean “slashdot.org”, not “http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/08/09/03/0119236.shtml” (why would anyone want to auto-complete that?)
4. Fast page loads are back baby!
5. When I have lots of tabs open, and one of those tabs misbehaves (runaway JavaScript, a naughty Applet, etc.), I do not want the rest of my tabs to suffer.
6. Each browser tab is actually a separate process, meaning a crash in one tab no longer affects your whole browsing session.

And the list goes on. I’m writing this from Chrome, and I am very happy. I haven’t had a browser get out of my way and just give me what I want in a long time, and I’ve been a 10-year proponent of Mozilla browsers like Mozilla itself, Galeon, Phoenix, Firebird, Firefox, Seamonkey, etc.

Good job Chrome team!

How about a hit upside the head with a history lesson in telecommunications?

You’re still here?

Okay, buckle up. In the late 1800’s, a paranoid undertaker from Kansas worried that human operators were routing phone calls to his competitors. You see, back in the day an operator (usually female) would manually connect your phone calls for you. No dialing. If you’ve ever watched an episode of “Lassie” where Timmy falls in the well, you’ve seen this in action. So you would pick up the phone and ask the operator lady to connect you to a certain person or business. If you asked for an undertaker, for example, she was free to route your call to whichever undertaker she liked the best. This really torqued off our heroic undertaker, Almon Brown Strowger, who, rather than just blogging about it, set out to solve the problem.

Strowger invented a new kind of relay (which is EE speak for a fancy switch) that could be operated remotely by sending it electrical pulses. The relay could connect phone calls automatically based on what you dialed on your rotary phone. By hooking a bunch of Strowger relays together, you could route calls to any other phone, without the need for a human in the loop.

You’ve probably seen these old phones with rotary dials. That’s why we have ‘em. All because a disgruntled undertaker saw a problem and decided to fix it.

What torques you off? Why don’t you go out and invent something to fix it?

A couple weeks ago I sent my Spektrum AR6000 receiver to Horizon Hobby’s service department because it was losing bind on the ground (especially in cold weather). Oddly, I could never reproduce the problem on the bench. It only happened at the flying field, and only on hand launches. Very weird. I was nervous that I would destroy my plane if it ever lost bind in the air, so I finally decided to send it in for service. I didn’t have much hope that Horizon would be able to see the problem since I could never make it happen on the bench, but they graciously took my word for it and replaced it free of charge. All I paid was the $5 to ship the receiver to them, and they replaced it and shipped the new one back to me free of charge. This was after they failed to reproduce the problem after 15 attempts. Way to go Horizon! I’m now a loyal customer for life.

P.S. Larry Weddle did the service, and decided to send me the new AR6000. Good work Larry!