ComicsChrome

I'm currently reading my way through Google's online manual/exegesis on their new browser, Chrome (hat tip to James Fallows, who's worth reading as well). It's a pretty great piece of work; I can't actually use Chrome yet because the Mac version is still in development, but reading the manual is interesting to me in that I've retained just enough tech savvy to understand 51% of the content. The combination of graphics and text is also fantastic; Google has the clout (or the money, or even just the idea) to get Scott McCloud to illustrate their text. McCloud is not merely a comics author/artist in his own right with respect in the independent comics world, but he's the author of Understanding Comics, which I've never read and is not without its detractors but is largely acknowledged as the preeminent work of comics theory on the market. Understanding Comics is, of course, written as a comic, and McCloud has written other books of comics theory/evangelism which push for expanding and exploiting the unique possibilities of the medium while simultaneously providing an example in his own use of comics techniques to communicate a non-narrative, intellectual argument of the sort you'd normally encounter in a literary journal.

I haven't finished the guide yet, but one of the things I find interesting and (usually) appealing is that Google does seem to have really re-thought the precepts of using a web browser to better suit the uses and developments of browsers that have taken place over the past decade: tabbed browsing, the use of the internet to handle personal information and life management and the corresponding security concerns, and of course "Web 2.0" [gah]. What follows from this but I'm less immediately taken with is the attempt, which shouldn't surprise me coming from Google, to create a browser that will guess what I want to do. I generally don't like it when technology or people try to guess what I want. I don't mean a music service or Netflix tossing me recommendations, I mean making behind-the-veil decisions which constrain my options and make me workaround to do something else. Some day I'll figure out how to control all the different formatting options in Microsoft Word so that I don't need to keep correcting the computer manually just to get bullet points here and indented text there. Somebody, meaning well, was packing stuff in my dad's home to ship to the condo here, but they included all sorts of stuff that we didn't ask for and in fact didn't want here, and some of this stuff was broken in transit. If you just DID WHAT I FUCKING TOLD YOU then my trinkets would be safe and sound where I wanted them in the first place.

On the other hand, maybe Chrome is smart enough to work around this. One of the designer/characters complained about the aesthetic and practical frustrations of the URL bar autocompleting the addresses he starts to type, and how at first he rebelled against including that feature in Chrome, but in fact in Chrome this feature Works Better! because it will only autofill for things you've actually explicitly type. Which means, since I doubt you typed the URL for a specific story on (to use their example) CNN.com, you won't get that prompt. "Fuckers!" I cried, "I use the autocomplete to find shit like that all the time! I like the fact that if I want my last day or two of browsing is preserved and I can find something that was difficult to navigate to the first time around!" But then I read that Chrome will let you hit the Tab key to search within the website whose address is autocompleting for you. We'll see, I guess; this could be cool, or it could suck, or it could just be a more elegant way of executing the search terms I use in Google anyway (if I'm looking for a story on CNN.com, I'll type my search terms and then add the string "site:cnn.com").

So there's that.