At first I wanted to use the MobileMe calendar sharing, but to add her I have to pay $50 for additional accounts. Also, it seemed from what I researched that you cannot sync a calendar for collaboration among several people in your “family”, they can only subscribe read-only. No, thanks.

Since we both have Gmail accounts, I looked into using Google Calendar sharing instead. I didn’t want to because I was under the impression that by doing so you’d wipe your contacts out of your phone in favor of Google’s Exchange settings. It turns out that’s only if you set up your Exchange account to sync your contacts. You don’t have to, you can leave that option off.

By turning off Contacts, you keep your MobileMe contacts on your phone. I personally find this quite unsettling because I’m afraid that one swipe of my finger can wipe out my entire contacts list. I’m too afraid to try it to see if it at least warns you that it’s going to happen.

When you create a calendar on Google, one is created in your name (eg: starman.me@gmail.com). If you’re making a shared calendar, it’s probably best to create a new one with a better name for who you’re sharing it with. Once it’s created, you can add people to have access to the calendar, and set permissions for them. My wife has full read/write access to our family calendar.

However, you’d think that would be all you need to do, right? Unfortunately, no. I couldn’t figure out why the shared calendars weren’t showing up on my iPhone, only my own personal one. After doing a lot of digging, I finally figured out that you have to go to http://m.google.com/sync and there you tell Google which calendars you want Exchange to show you. Note: This should also help non-iPhone users as well.

Now everything’s synced and we have a shared calendar. Apparently I’m going to be very busy next week.

However, as good as these browsers are, they have a few common problems which annoy me to no end. For one thing, if something in one of my Firefox tabs screws up, the entire browser goes down. Most of the time Firefox will restore my session, but there are times when it doesn’t and I find myself trying to remember which sites I had open before the app crashed. I don’t like how I have to cripple new sites with the NoScript plugin for Firefox because I’m worried about malware.

Google seems to be changing that with their Chrome browser. Every tab will have self-contained processes. If the process of one tab crashes, it doesn’t take the entire browser with it, it will just close out the one tab. This also means that malware won’t be able to affect other tabs. Google also dealt with malware by not allowing it to write to the hard drive!

Chrome is also supposed to be faster. I wrote an HTML parser/browser a few years back for work just before CSS became popular and I can tell you that although object placement for a web site can be tricky, it can be done if you work it out on a whiteboard. Adding in all of today’s CSS, XHTML, and other items are far beyond what I did a few years back and I hope that they optimized their object placement code.

The entire project is open source. That’s classy on Google’s part because rather than keep all their code to themselves, they give it away so people can learn from it and hopefully improve it over time.

As of the time I’m writing this, they haven’t released it yet, but I’m anxiously awaiting in. In the meantime, you can click here to read Google’s comic book about how they came to build Chrome and how it works inside.