If you’ve been holding your breath waiting for Google to release Chrome for Mac (or Linux), you can take a breath. It has been a long time coming, but Google finally announced today that they are releasing “developer” builds for Mac and Linux.
Because of its startup speed (dramatically better than any of the other browsers out there), I’ve been using Chrome more and more as my primary browser as of late. Once some critical “Add-ons” become available, I’m pretty sure it will become my only browser – assuming that a few improvements are made to the developer tools.
If you are looking for a solid release of Chrome, you’ll probably want to hold off for awhile, though, as this is an alpha release that is missing a bunch of critical features. If, however, you just want to play around a bit, you might as well go for it. It is definitely solid enough for most of what I do on the web. In fact, I’m writing this post in it.
If the upcoming 3.0 release of the full ExtJS library wasn’t enough to get you excited, yesterday’s announcement of the release of a new lightweight core library, Ext Core, should be enough to get your pulse up. Ext Core looks to fill the void that exists between a full Ext application (basically a desktop class application built in JavaScript) and more traditional web sites with multiple pages and fairly simple needs.
The full Ext library is a bit heavy for basic web sites so, up until now developers have had to go with other JavaScript libraries to fill this need (I’ve generally stuck with jQuery). The release of Ext Core, however, allows developers to utilize their knowledge of and experience with Ext in places where it was otherwise not possible.
And if you are worried about licensing, worry no more:
Ext Core is released under a permissive MIT license – there is no cost to use Ext Core – it’s free for everyone.
And in traditional Ext style, the code is beautifully-written (at least what I’ve been able to peruse so far) and well-documented.
In my opinion, Ext has been overlooked as of late because of the much-publicized licensing debacle. I still consider it the best JavaScript library out there for writing desktop class web application. I hope that this release will get it some much deserved support from the larger web development community.