I hadn’t heard much about Google’s new open source browser when I tried searching for it. Obviously searching for a new Google product in their own search engine was going to point me at whatever they wanted it to, so I was surprised to find that instead of the about page for the browser (currently just a Windows beta), the second result after Google News coverage was a beautiful comic explaining the new browser and the various technologies it thinks will be game-changing in the browser market.
While reading it I kept thinking, wow, this reminds me so much of Scott McCloud’s stuff: the blue shading, the way the panels are being used, the whole information heaviness…. The credits were only at the end, so I gave myself a gold star when I was right.
McCloud wrote two mind-blowing books about how comics work and why they are so awesome, Understanding Comics (Wikipedia link) and Reinventing Comics, that really influenced me back when I was feeling the first urges to start making my own comics. He made really solid arguments for using comics as a serious means of conveying information too complicated for written or verbal explanation but with a much lower budget than an ideal film production.
You’ll have to decide for yourself whether this comic about Chrome lives up to the dream of information utopia though sequential art. It’s very complex and actually does explain the core concepts behind their browser programming, so it’s fairly hard to understand everything happening on every page. It’s definitely beautiful though, and makes the programming concepts way more approachable than any text based article ever could have.
Wow, that looks interesting — it could very well be cool enough to lure me away from Safari :)
I’m so addicted to Firebug and Stylish (not to mention adblock) that I couldn’t possibly use anything else for even normal day to day browsing (it’s strange how often the css of sites I’m just reading becomes something I demand the ability to edit). If Chrome presents an api that lets the Firebug etc. people port their code over then it could be a real Mozilla killer.