ReadWriteWeb

Ben Goodger, who leads the UI team of Google Chrome, presented today at the Webstock conference about browsers. He said that Google decided to build Chrome simply because "browsers suck". Existing browsers were too slow (especially with javascript heavy apps), there are too many crashes, too easy to get pwned (security issues), and UIs were becoming more and more bloated. He said that Google has a history of improving on browsers and creating add-ons - including contributing to Mozilla's Firefox, where Goodger used to work before Google. But Google wanted to re-architect the browser and do something more ambitious than current browsers, including Firefox.

Webstock, a conference for Web professionals, is happening in Wellington New Zealand this week. As usual it's a classy lineup of speakers and a number of international webheads will be jetting in for the event. They include science fiction author Bruce Sterling, Flickr's Heather Champ, Social Web designer Joshua Porter, Dopplr's Matt Biddulph, Institute for the Future's Jane McGonigal, Six Apart's David Recordon, The Guardian's Meg Pickard, NZ Foo Camp's Nat Torkington, Yahoo's Tom Coates, online performance artist Ze Frank, and many more.