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Comment by charliepark | Hacker News Reader

I think it's an interesting site, but I'm not totally sure why Google made it. There are plenty of other "upgrade" sites already out there. Maybe they felt that none were simple enough? I also wonder about the placement of the "under the hood" section. If I were them, I'd make that a little more hidden. Seems like it could intimidate and drive away Mom and Dad.

Out of curiosity, when you click on the "try a new browser" button at the bottom, do you get Opera, Firefox, and Safari? In the source code, IE and Chrome are both display:none'd.

I'm using Firefox 3.5, on a Mac.

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IE6 and IE7 are a major roadblock to Google's vision of the future web, since next-gen Google applications can't work well in those browsers, ie. Google Wave and Javascript-rich apps. Ultimately they want to get people away from IE and into a different browser, preferably Chrome, so they can increase their web dominance.

I know that IE6 and 7, and even 8, act as roadblocks. I'm dealing with that right now on a new site that I hadn't cross-browser-tested, and am now finding all kinds of headaches ... in IE8.

But what's surprising about Google's site is that it really doesn't seem to be pushing Chrome, or even Firefox.

I speculated years ago that Microsoft's long-term vision was to eliminate the browser. I think they wanted a world where people ran fat .NET clients delivered via one-click deployment.

Interesting to see now that the browser continues to be the application "container" and javascript the implementation language for applications. And the alternatives and challenges to IE have continued to grow.

Wonder if Microsoft regrets not maintaining IE for the Mac, and their even older *nix port.

It looks like the "Try a new browser" options are set based on browsers that are available for your OS. Since IE and Chrome aren't available for Mac (Chrome for Mac's not officially ready), those aren't shown to Mac users.

I used the development version of Chrome for Mac but it has bugs and shortcomings still. I will be glad when they finally finish it.

I just tested it against Safari 4 on Snow Leopard on my old 2Ghz Core Duo MacBook, and it smokes Safari in SunSpider and V8's tests (the latter unsurprising as Google obviously deems their tests important performance points). I didn't do Dromeo.

I'm thinking about switching to it for day to day use.

It seems odd that it shows Linux users IE then. Of course, you CAN get it to run on Wine, but it's not exactly supported.

Then again, if you're on Linux, you're not really part of the problem, now are you?