Digital Earth Blog

As you’ve probably heard, Google released “Chrome” today, their new web browser.  Thus far, I am very impressed with it — it’s amazingly fast.

However, I can’t get it to work with the Google Earth plug-in.  Considering that the browser is based on Webkit, and Safari didn’t yet work with the plug-in, it’s not a big surprise.  Still, it’s kind of sad that Google’s product can’t work in their own browser.

Anyone found a way to make it work yet?

Update: Google confirms that it doesn’t work, but promises an update is “coming soon”.

Firefox 3 is set to be released tomorrow, and Mozilla is hoping for five million downloads.  My concerns had been two-fold:  Firefox 3 breaks the Google Toolbar and the Google Earth Plug-in.  However, the toolbar has been updated today to work with FF3, but what about the plug-in?

There has been no word from Google about a possible update, so maybe it’s not coming.  However, with Firefox 3 getting rave reviews, I would expect that the adoption rate will be quite high.  I would hate to see the plug-in take a bit step back by suddenly not working on millions of computers…

Here’s another fun game using the Google Earth plug-in, based heavily off of the Monster Milktruck demo.  It has quite a few limitations (the biggest being no altitude adjustment), but it’s another step in the right direction.

The plane simply hugs the ground, and it runs in a pretty small window.  The small window is an attempt to use less bandwidth.  Since the plane can’t stop (or even slow down), the imagery has a hard time keeping up.  The small window helps with that a little bit.

Despite the shortcomings, it’s a fun little app and it has me even more excited about the possibilities for the future.

This sounds great!  Frank Taylor at the Google Earth Blog has just revealed that Google will be releasing a browser plug-in today that will essentially put Google Earth in your browser.

A few notes so far:

• Windows only, but it should work on IE, Firefox and others.
• Mac/Linux support coming later.
• It’s not just Google Earth in a wrapper.  It will likely have fewer features.
• It does include day/night, 3d models, sky mode and layers.
• Google Earth will not need to be installed on the machine for the plug-in to work.
• Current Google Map mashups can use this plug-in with a single line of code.

No link yet (it’s not live), but it should be available later today.

Update: Here it is!  Also, more coverage on the Google LatLong blog and Ogle Earth.