Yesterday was a very busy day for Google, with the announcement of two new products and a new version of an existing product:
Perhaps the biggest announcement yesterday was that the famed “gbrowser” does in fact exist. There had been much speculation for a long time that Google was developing its own browser, and yesterday they presented Google Chrome. I downloaded it and used it a bit and I am very impressed. It is lightning fast and you can really tell how fast it is when you visit JavaScript intensive sites such as Gmail, Google Reader, and Google Docs. Unfortunately, it does seem to be lacking full support for proxies. I couldn’t install it at work due to the firewall/proxy and had to install it at home. When I tried running it from work today, it didn’t like the proxy settings. I’m certain it shouldn’t take too long before such issues are resolved.
Google Video for Businesses is a new addition to Google Apps Premier Edition that allows organizations to share videos for training and informational purposes. I believe that this sort of service would probably work better for large organizations than it would small ones.
A new version of Picasa is out with some nice new features. Picasa Web has also gotten a face lift with a few new features as well. I wish that Google would come out with Picasa for Mac. iPhoto is nice and all, but does lack some things that are handled better by Picasa.