Aside from the standard ‘Faster!’, ‘Simpler!’, ‘Safer!’ claims, it looks like Chrome will make each browser tab a separate process, add offline support through their ‘Gears‘ software, be cross-platform, and make it easier to run as an application without a URL bar. Why should you care? This will potentially allow webapps to behave more like regular applications – sitting on your desktop, and working even when not connected to the internet. If an application or site crashes, you won’t lose your other pages, and you will have a better idea what caused the problem.

On the other hand, some might say it also positions Google to become the new Microsoft, with users using a Google browser to access the growing range of Google applications (gMail, Docs, Talk, Calendar etc) instead of the Outlook and Office. We’ll have to wait and see.

…And in the spirit of unfounded speculation, hype, and tinfoil-hat suspicion, here is a classic story by Cory Doctorow about what might happen if Google really became all-pervasive: Scroogled

Interestingly though, this new release of IE seems to have a couple of snippets of good news for web developers.

The first is being the in-built HTML, CSS and Javascript debugger. Similar to a Firefox extension called HTML Validator that White October use to debug markup, the Internet Explorer 8 program will have a visual-environment-based Developer toolbar for this purpose. The only thing that concerns me with this is that, stereotypically, visitors who use Internet Explorer aren’t always technically-minded so may end up clicking on something when they don’t know what they’re doing; the result of this will be that the user may feel like they’ve got themselves into deep doo-doo. Possibly.

This next point will be a huge relief for web developers but will raise curiosity levels for the cynics like me, so here goes. Microsoft boasts that “many cross-browser inconsistencies will be fixed’. This will hopefully free up so much time which developers spend checking their sites are cross-browser compatible and allow for one design to show on either (IE or Firefox) browsers. My cynical questions however, are, how many inconsistencies will be fixed and will they be fixed properly?

One last thing about IE8, completely unrelated to web development: it’s based on the new-look Office 2007 ‘ribbon’ interface. Yay.