By admin -

Microsoft is apparently shrugging off the big Chrome OS announcement from last week, which seems a bit silly to me. Considering Google is very big on FREE, a school of which Microsoft does attend – and with years of frustrated MS OS users, I would say that a Google offering will be a very welcome option. Especially being a Linux base – so hey, maybe we won’t need some ungainly antivirus/firewall suite bogging down our systems.. mmm, to dream. Anyway – here’s some more reason MS ought to worry -

Googles got a not-so-secret weapon in its bid to convert the world to applications such as Gmail, Google Docs, Google Talk, Google Sites and, soon, Googles Chrome operating system: the 17 million college students on more than 4,000 campuses across the country.

For more than two years, Google has approached colleges and universities with a near-unbeatable offer: provide unlimited hosted e-mail and other applications, all branded by the institution and delivered free of charge.

via Googles 17 Million Built-in Chrome OS Users GOOG.

By pete -

Sure, we’re big into File Transfer here – protocols, applications and all kinds of background tech – however, there’s always the other side of the web.. you know, that front end, which.. well.. IS the web . Much like Search, the Browser game is getting really hot these days. Safari 4 was just announced at WWDC.. Firefox 3.5 in the wings.. Chrome2.. IE8.. its an ever-changing topic these days. Lifehacker posted some really good stuff today – take a peak:

Lifehacker browser speed tests

Safari, Chrome, and Internet Explorer all reached new final versions of recently, while Firefox and Opera pushed their own web browsers into almost-there betas. We pulled out the digital stopwatch and testing kits to see how they measured up.

If you’ve never seen our browser speed test series before, you should know it’s unscientific but, we believe, fairly thorough. We use a millisecond timer (Rob Keir’s timer, to be specific) to manually clock the distance between launching a browser and seeing it fully loaded on a home page, then do the same timer testing while waiting for multiple tabs to load. All of the timing tests are performed three times and averaged, with far-off aberrations excluded and re-tested.

via Lifehacker – Lifehacker Speed Tests: Safari 4, Chrome 2, and More – Browsers.