Despite the idea of "being in Cyberspace" and the power of the Internet to connect us to people all over the world regardless of our location, we often use a browser to find out about people and services close to us. These might be queries such as finding the opening times of a local store, the time of a train or local expertise. Each time we do this it is often necessary to tell the website where we are, typcially by providing a post code, but what if you don't know the postcode? Fortunately browsers and becoming much more clever, and some can even work out where you are.

Back in September, Google Chrome was launched with quite a lot of fanfare, it was a big tech story and received a lot of attention. At the time there was speculation that it could not only threaten Internet Explorer, but even speculation that it could threaten Microsoft Windows itself. Today, with much less attention it was announced that Google Chrome was no longer a beta (test) product and the “goals for stability and performance have been met” but the developers also add “our work is far from done”. The announcement was reported by Reuters in their MediaFile blog pages though, where they posed the question “will you switch from your current browser to Chrome?”. Oddly enough I've been running a poll on this site which asked you the question “Are you planning to use Google Chrome as your default browser?”. The results are in, the poll is closed and the answer is pretty conclusive.

No doubt the big tech story of the week has been the release of the new Google Chrome browser, Google's new entrant into the browser wars. Like many others I downloaded this and gave it a go to see what the fuss was about. So first gripe, the current beta is only for Windows, although we are being promised versions for Linux and the Mac. This is an interesting decision, maybe it was taken as they don't want to aim the product at "geeks"? However, as an old manager of mine used to say, let's "park that thought" for the moment and look at the browser itself. Google came up with a great way to explain their new browser and its features; they did this in the form of a comic book and this can been seen at: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/. I'm not really into comics or graphical novels, but this made a refreshing change from a white paper or a powerpoint-type presentation, although I must admit my attention was starting to stray at the end! This is well worth reading as it explains the whole project and its features very well.