The amazing chrome comic
Oct 1st, 2008 by harijay
First for some disclaimers: I have not yet used chrome since I mostly use Linux and Mac OSX .
Although I believe that forking and straying from the beaten path are great things , my gut reaction to the chrome announcement was that it was definitely going to dull the impact of firefox which google had championned for many years and that this would fragment the developer community and further muddle the browser playing fields. Kinda like Linux where sometime I wish that that we had fewer distros which may result in the surviving distributions being better than any of them are now. But all these feelings changed after I read the chrome comic.
The comic was brilliant. I read all 39 pages of it and it represents a significant enhancement in developer/end-user communication. The comic had the perfect blend of “selling chrome” to the developer and end-users. It did not dumb things down, that comics tend to do often , nor did it get too absorbed with the browser jargon.
Often product launches come in two flavors , lots of PR centric media hype with rather sorry documentation or the opposite kind where the API and documentation are extensive to the point that you immediately reach for the PR hype to make sense of it all. Neither of these were true in the chrome comic case.
In this world where we live in the browser , the attempts the chrome comic made to reach out to everyone are significant. Now if only other launches would take notes .