So, Chrome, the fabled small-footprint open source browser that we all wanted…well I quite liked the idea anyhow, though in my ideal world google would just have partnered with mozilla to make firefox even bigger and better. Or should that be smaller and better?

I don’t know about anyone else, but I’m mighty disappointed. I download, I follow instructions, it fails to load it’s own welcome page. Not to be daunted, I load my personalised google home page, I go off and make tea, I come back and eventually it loads. I load my gmail. Correction, I try to load my gmail. I fail. I try to load google reader (see, I’m a company girl). Ifail. I try again today, but still no joy. Now surely, being google, you’d make sure your own pages load? My machine’s not at all old and crumbly, and just runs XP. I guess I’ll try the next release to see if it improves but I do feel disappointed right now.

What I am loving though, is Ubiquity for firefox. I haven’t heard much buzz about it in the geospatial circles, which is a shame because it has some lovely geeky geo bits. Go and watch the video, and if you’re not blown away by the “select a table full of records on a web page and type ‘map this’ to see them all displayed on a map” then you deserve to be kicked of planet geospatial. As far as I can tell, this is a feature in development and only works with Craigs List or something but surely it’s an app worth putting some time into. And, and, you can insert real live maps into emails. Very cool…

Learning how to use it seemlessly in your every day browsing habits takes time (well it does for me anyhow), but the natural language interface has such a lot of potential. Personally, I can’t wait until the translator module learns latin…