Google Chrome plus Docs, Apps and Gmail equals one very neat and free rival to Microsoft Office

The release of Google Chrome has got many people a little (too) excited over the past few days. As is often seen with new Apple products, there are those out there who take a very high level, blasé view when a new product is released by Google and regardless of what it is that’s launched, they pretty much wet themselves with joy, even if at the end of the day it is not all that special and is certainly no rival to other, more established products on the market.

I have downloaded and installed Google Chrome to see what it is like and in my opinion it is a very good Internet browser for first time Internet users… first time users such as those you’d find in a junior school or at an over 65’s computer class. Its uncluttered, minimalist interface make getting to grips with the basics of web browsing straight forward, without the distraction of status bars, menu bars, history links and so forth. Users more advanced than those previously mentioned though would be well advised to stick with a more established browser for the time being, at least on the basis of stability, if not for the extremely useful add-ons that are available for browsers such as Firefox.

Whilst one of the main features of Google Chrome being touted is the fact each tab is run independently of others, resulting in more overall stability (as well as security) for remaining tabs if a site should cause one to crash, that doesn’t mean crashes are less likely or any less frustrating when they do happen! Just prior to writing this post I was playing around with a spreadsheet through Google Docs using Google Chrome and in less than a minute one of the tabs had frozen up. Yes Chrome alerts you to the issue and handles it in a nice way, but it was still a crash.

That said, I did think of one really useful reason a small business user might want to consider using Google Chrome right now, even in its current state. With its large viewing area, clean looks and improved JavaScript handling (over other current, mainstream browsers), Google Chrome actually makes a great container application for various Google products and services, namely Google Docs and Gmail. Whilst continuing to use your current preferred, stable choice of browser to carry out your everyday web browsing and development and perhaps (personal) web-based emailing, utilising various Google offerings through Google Chrome effectively gives you a free and easily accessible Microsoft Office / OpenOffice alternative. Add to this the ability to use your own domain for services such as e-mail as part of the Google Apps offering, for a small business or start-up, this set-up could be a great money saving option. Your new Google Office is essentially contained within the Chrome window, each application running independently from each other and not hogging tabs (and memory) in your more serious web browser.

For those not running Windows, Chrome is currently not available, but it will follow shortly - that doesn’t mean you can’t still use the full spectrum of Google offerings in your existing preferred browser.

The benefits as I see them to this set-up are that there is no cost involved (unless you want to use your own domain through Google Apps and don’t as yet have one), there’s very little software required on your own machine and storage space is not something you’d ever really have to worry about again (unless of course you see yourself exceeding the ever increasing Gmail storage space limit which is currently 7GB+), including the backing up. The overall beauty is that your documents and emails are accessible from anywhere, at any time, via your own computer or another, Microsoft Windows based, or on a Mac or any other platform for that matter with a web browser - though those benefits are more to do with the individual products than the Chrome browser itself.

The instability demonstrated at present is a slight concern, but I trust that very soon Google will have released an update (or two or three) to cover these teething issues. In fact, I believe these issues will become a thing of the past before any genuine business operations can even be carried out through the Google Chrome/Docs/Apps/Gmail set-up.

With the launch of Google Chrome though, of course there are the usual concerns of privacy. Far from being just a search engine now, Google is becoming the essence of the web and increasingly a larger part of peoples’ everyday, traditionally non-web based computing in general. I fully support the initiatives set-up by Google, but I can’t help but feel a little dubious about completely entrusting all of my virtual life to them, particularly as they are so huge and powerful. Only the other day I realised that at some point I must have switched on the Google Web History feature and was somewhat horrified to realise every site I had looked at since whenever was logged. Though there would have been nothing dodgy in that list, I do wonder for what other purposes the big G may have used it - I’m sure they didn’t just store it for my own benefit. Whilst I 99% trust that documents and e-mails I store with Google are secure and won’t be accessed or used by anyone else (the automated Google know-it-all bots included), there’s a huge part of me that suspects it is being used in some way to build a profile of me. If that profile is ultimately used to target more personalised adverts my way, then I guess I’m Ok with that because I can easily ignore them, but I have this niggling feeling there could be something more sinister going on. For the time being I shall put that down to paranoia, but it is something definitely worth keeping in mind if dealing with sensitive information.

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