google chrome
so, google have gone and released a browser of their own. bonus points for a great interface, awesome geeky features and for using the webkit page rendering engine (webkit is written by some apple developers, so it’s gotta be cool, right?) negative points for not having a mac version as yet .. 
because i’m professionally interested in certificates – it seems that the ssl handling isn’t too bad. great error messages for address mismatches and expired certs; first time since forever that ssl errors are actually in well-formed english! handling of ev certificates is a bit ordinary, the only indication you get is the organisation name appearing at the far right of the address bar – easy to ignore or miss, and i’m sure companies who’ve handed over large amounts of cash for one of these puppies would have preferred a more in-your-face treatment of their special cert by the big g.
the bit i was really keen to see was how this browser handles client certificates (see previous whinge post about safari) and the results are a bit surprising: it doesn’t handle them at all. plain doesn’t work. the error message that shows up when you attempt to load a page that requires a certificate:
This webpage is not available.
outstanding effort! i guess that it’s early days, but still…
the easter eggs are fun too.. if you’re on windows xp, type this in to the address bar:
about:internets
also, for everyone else:
about:crash
about:stats
about:memory
i’m sure there’s more i’ve missed. something to watch out for i guess 
- zac.