Slashdot Mirror
Mozilla's Thoughts On Google's Chrome
tandiond writes to tell us that in a recent blog posting, Mozilla CEO John Lily shared his thoughts on Google's new browser project, Chrome, and what that means for Mozilla. "It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they've got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it'll be interesting to see how it evolves." Mozilla's Europe president, Tristan Nitot also chimed in during an interview with PCPro, stating that they don't view this as a direct attack on Firefox, even if it did catch them by surprise. "I'll take another example: just before Microsoft launched Vista, it invited us [to work with it] so that Firefox works better on Windows Vista. Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista. Therefore, it helped us improve Firefox for Vista. That's just the same for Google. It wants Firefox to perform well with its applications, that's for sure. Indeed, it even wants IE to perform well with Gmail and the rest. It's just that it has very limited control over this. That's why Google's been frustrated and it is launching this Chrome browser."
Did I call it, or what? ;-)
For those of you who are interested, Chrome is supposed to be launching later today. Apparently around 11 AM PDT to coincide with the press conference. (Any moment now...) For those of you who can't wait, PCWorld seems to have figured out how to finagle screenshots out of Google's 404 page.
For those of you who didn't get to see it, the comic book is now available for viewing.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
Not a direct attack, but definitely a threat to that Google Search box revenue stream...
I read that support for Linux will be coming out later. I can only hope the schedule is more aggressive that the one they used for Google Earth. It seemed ages before I was able to get that running.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
I will be interested to see how much Firefox code is in Chrome... and down the line, how much Chrome code will be pulled into future versions of Firefox.
The ability to improve your codebase is one of the strengths of open source. This is a great opportunity to display that strength.
You can't talk about Wikipedia's flaws on Wikipedia
Really, Firefox's competitor isn't Chrome, it's diluting standards based browser compatibility. If Google can come in and hammer out some market share and re-establish even further the importance for developers to stick to standards, it might be all that FF/Safari/Opera needs to really muscle over the 30-50% market share, and just enough credibility to keep Microsoft at bay.
This is not a close source browser that Google is shipping (According to their blogs/information), anyone can fork it and run with what they like/dislike.
I for one am very excited at what this means to alternative (to Internet Explorer) browsers.
This isn't a shot fired at Firefox, it's aimed squarely at Redmond.
Indeed. Nobody saw that coming. Google launching its own browser. Who would have thought that!
Yes, I am the one with the legendary sig.
Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista.
I like that pronoun for Microsoft.
Not "them", or "they", and certainly not "he" or "she", but "it".
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
It profits Google nothing to "kill" Firefox. I don't think that is their intended target. Besides, with both chrome and firefox being open source, there's nothing to stop Firefox from incorporating bits and pieces from Chrome wherever it makes sense.
IMHO, the real target is MS Office. Google makes their money from advertising, which means eyeballs and correlated data. Unfortunately for them, many people spend a majority of their day inside MS Word and MS Excel and other apps. Google would love to have those eyeballs and all that data to better shape their profiles and thus better deliver advertising. What better way than to get all those different apps to "occur" inside the browser?
davejenkins.com |
For all that the Mozilla team isn't worried, they've got a long history of developers rejecting Gecko for other engines: first AOL rejected it in preference for IE (and then again on the Mac in preference for WebKit), then Apple (again for WebKit), and now Google (once again for WebKit). In the mobile space it isn't doing all that much better, with developers rejecting it in favor of Opera. In quite a few cases, including AOL and Google, we've even seen this rejection when the company previously had a history of active support for, and even paying developers to work on, the Gecko engine.
I use many browsers, though Firefox is currently my preferred one. But I can't help but pause at things like this. One after another, we've seen companies looking to developing their own browsers, but rejecting Gecko in favor of other engines, sometimes open-source and sometimes not, even when there was every reason to go with Gecko.
Why is this? I'm honestly curious. And what might Mozilla be able to do to counter whatever reasons there are for developers to often not just reject Gecko, but dump it flat after years of strong relationships? Why does Mozilla continue on as though nothing is wrong when the developers are voting with their products that something clearly is?
There is already a well known web browser technology called "chrome". It's an integral part of Mozilla web browsing technology. Confusion in the marketplace anyone?
Why doesn't Google just contribute code to Mozilla for Firefox that works well with Google's apps? It's not "control", but it's how open source projects work instead of control: leadership by coding. Since Google has 200M users who Mozilla's org is supporting rather than at Google's expense, why doesn't Google give back to the Mozilla project?
Is it all really because Google is at war with the Mozilla license?
--
make install -not war
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera. Do we really need a new browser? Moreover, do we really need yet another partial implementation of the web standards?
I for one, do not want to code and test for another browser.
Not to mention that by using google's browser, you will give them unadulterated access to your every movement on the web.
How's Mozilla's finance? What sources of fund for them other than Google? How much does this nudge the relationship balance between Mozilla and Google?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
I have used FireFox almost exclusively for about 2 years. What got me started on FireFox was I wanted the same browser feel despite what OS I was on (Windows or Linux). So it was the cross OS support that got me into FireFox, but what has kept me using it is the vast plugin support. One of my favorite being Foxmarks. (but Foxmarks is coming out for IE eventually, I am now alpha testing on IE). Anyway, so I look at Chrome and wonder will it met these two key needs and if it is as good as FireFox will that be any reason to switch? So I can see that it will be cross OS, but to be better the FireFox, but the next question is will it take it a step further, will it work on my Blackberry or other mobile PDAs? That would be the motivator to get me looking, but to solidify a change, I would need the plugin options the FireFox currently has and others like IE are lacking. Can Google do it? I think they have a great shot.
Respect the Constitution
The web already has four "major" browsers firefox, IE, safari and opera.
More precisely, the web already has four major rendering engines: Gecko (used in Firefox), Trident (used in IE), WebKit (used in Safari), and Presto (used in Opera). Chrome is using WebKit, so it can leverage WebKit's existing standards support and all the pages that already work with Safari.
Scripting is going to be different, but HTML/CSS should (in theory) be pretty similar to Safari.
If you have ever worked with the two engines you would not ask this question. Gecko is a huge mess of "OO in C" object model spaghetti. It is very hard for a new developer to get up to speed on or for development on individual areas to be compartmentalized.
Webkit, due to it's Qt/KDE origins, is very well designed from the ground up to be as API-clean OO as possible. It is therefore much lower barrier of entry for new developers to start up on, which is exactly what you are looking for when you are a company looking to roll out a browser.
"Tin katsame", they said to themselves.
Let me be the first to say FIREFOX IS DEAD, BLOATED AND SMELLY LIKE A DEAD FISH, DEAD! Netcraft says so. No, but seriously, how long until Mozilla's Google Dollars dry up?
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Troll go home. We don't need another anonymous coward making unfounded statements about things that he poorly understands (including poor phonetic substitutes for French phrases whose meaning is likely also beyond his comprehension).
Your brain is not a computer.
If Google can release a lighter browser without all the cruft and bloat of Firefox, I'll definitely give it a chance.
I have used FireFox almost exclusively for about 2 years.
And in all that time, you've never noticed that the second F isn't capitalized?
Perhaps a team that isn't forced to respect ass-backwards coding guidelines can attempt to produce something fast and reasonably safe, instead of spending all their time optimizing code for Visual C++ 1.5.
Seriously, Mozilla has their heads so far up the ass that is an ancient codebase, and is extremely slow at fixing the numerous bugs that have shown up over the ages, that I see little chance for them to be a significant competitor in the future, unless they manage to clean up their act in a major way instead of shoving out incremental updates as major versions.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Some of the ideas for Chrome are good ones. But a lot of them seem to be reinventing the operating system. From Google's perspective the browser is the operating system, but that's not the real world. We used to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Emacs, but soon we're going to have to joke about Linux being a boot loader for Google!
Here's a big shocker: not everything is a web app! No really. There are problems operating systems solved decades ago that Chrome is just now gettng around to fixing, just because some people want their apps to be on the web. You can have distributed apps and ubiquitous data *without* HTML/CSS/ECMA/Ajax/Flash. Back when computers were so expensive no one could afford their own, everything was distributed. Now that computers are cheap enough that everyone has two or three, the industry is wondering how to distribute stuff.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
Oh. Wait...
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
The real reason they probably went with WebKit as opposed to Gecko is because Gecko doesn't work very well on mobile platforms. Google probably wants to compete with Apple's iPhone and it makes sense to have integrated platform for web applications that works exectly the same mobile phones as on desktop PCs.
I feel your pain regarding multi-browser testing. But it seems like implementing standards - and having them clarified where needed - will only become more important as the number of browsers increases.
Also, the more open source browsers we have, the more transparent those implementations become - further fueling the standards conversation.
Maybe one day soon IE will be the only browser that major sites DON'T work on. And then it will have to conform.
How many developers are rooting for this NOT to catch on?
Firefox has done the deed of putting pressure on MS to move their browser forward. The only thing this will cause is more testing time for developers.
http://google.client.shareholder.com/Visitors/event/build2/MediaPresentation.cfm?MediaID=33101&Player=1#
This is the only element of browsers I have found really lacking.. the ability to organize a large amount of bookmarks and find bookmarks in the sea of bookmarks I have stored. I really hope someone addresses this. Another feature I think could be done more with is NOTES. Opera has a nice note feature but it could be a lot better. I like to copy many of the articles I read and save them as notes. But Opera doesn't have a way to bakc this up very well. I worked out a alternative but it's not great.
They were well aware of this for a long time now.
http://thetruthaboutmozilla.wordpress.com
I thought their business was providing search of the web...
or wait, maps of everything...
or pictures of everything...
or hosting of everything...
Oh, and access to everything.
When Google gets in the business of coming up with their own standards, server and scripting languages I'll get back to you on that.
It may be old news, but I just listened to a podcast interview with Jimmy Wales today. He has started Wikia Search, meant to be a free-as-in-speech search engine, with publicly-available web crawls generated by distributed computing using Grub. The algorithms, he said, should be open too.
I have to admit that I'm practically a Google fanboi, but since owning search pretty much means owning the internet, I really like this idea. If you're uncomfortable with Google's power, why not try to help Wikia Search?
Doh. Google Chrome. Checkmate. 10 moves ahead. Open solaris. Everybody switching to Qt including us. Chairs!
http://news.cnet.com/8301-17939_109-10030035-2.html http://google.client.shareholder.com/Visitors/event/build2/MediaPresentation.cfm?MediaID=33101&Player=1#
For anyone who doubts that Âde jure is a French expression, you have it right. De jure is of course a Latin expression and the spelling used by the GP is correct.
While you are right that Anonymous Coward should not be using those little phrases if he does not understand them (he surely meant "de facto", which is, in a way, the exact opposite of "de jure"...), it is not French.
You nailed it sir. I tried lots of other browsers, including lynx. I am home with mozilla, my live bookmarks work fine, and i can afford to use it as i like , with my work specific extensions. get me a cooliris on chorme, then we can begin talking. I would download and install chrome though, just for the fun of it.
http://monkeynesianeconomics.blogspot.com/
I've seen comments on here that WebKit was used? Is this true? Why wasn't gecko considered?
Or is it just a branded version of Firefox with a few tweeks?
Remember what the Debian and GNU folks called theirs Ice Weasel / IceCat.
Reading through the comic it's pretty obvious what Chrome is about. Google clearly feel that web apps have hit something of a wall running on existing browsers, and that they need to take the drastic action of releasing a new browser with a new architecture to move things on. The V8 javascript engine is clearly to enable larger and more complex applications, and the thread-per-tab architecture means larger and more complex apps can be run without risking the whole browser.
Microsoft either got wind of what Google were planning or came to the same conclusions, thus the new architecture in IE8 (and the IE javascript engine is not as bad as it's made out to be, it just underperforms badly with string processing).
Mozilla (and maybe Opera) may well struggle to compete with Microsoft and Google here. Opera have shown that they do have the resources to develop new rendering and javascript engines, but Mozilla are still using a Gecko that has changed little in years apart from tweaking. It may well be the case that in a year or two we'll be seeing much more advanced web apps which Mozilla browsers handle poorly.
Well, it can be. If they're trying to capture users who think about their browser choice already, well, most of those people already ditched IE for FireFox or something else.
However, Google could put Chrome on the Google home page and get a lot of oblivious IE users to take notice.
While possibly unfair, that would be VERY interesting to see.
Tabs above the address bar: check.
Drag tabs around: check.
Omnibox: check.
Run search from the omnibox: check.
New tab page: check.
Per-site privacy: check.
Easy wipe-out of cache and history: check.
Full-screen, no-chrome view: check.
Malware checks: check.
It's nice to see someone's finally gotten around to copying Opera. Here's my list of other things I'd like to see Google copy from Opera:
1. A *customizable* new tab page.
2. Customization in general. Good defaults are good, but Google has continual FAIL at (a) actually giving good defaults, and (b) allowing you to alter the defaults when it makes sense.
3. Mouse gestures and keyboard shortcuts.
4. Sessions, not just bookmarks.
5. CSS style overrides. JS scripting overrides.
6. Little view enhancements, like fit-to-screen and zoom.
7. Per-site preferences.
8. Skins, so I can keep the interface out of the way of my browsing, and so my mother can have her puppy themes.
(Also, could Opera please look into adopting the V8 JavaScript engine? That looks like it might be pretty sweet.)
Here's a crucial thing this browser should have: Mozilla-like extensibility, so that I could install the things without which I can't imagine a browser anymore:
1. Ad blocker (AdBlock Plus)
2. Developer extensions
3. Debugger (Firebug)
4. FTP (FireFTP)
5. Javascript extensibility (Greasemonkey)
Of course they'll be called something else, but without this set (and particularly #1), they might as well forget about it.
The only way Google can get a foothold with their Firefox look-alike is to pay PC makers to install their browser. That would provoke a response from Microsoft to do the same. Firefox will get left out in the cold - Google Chrome users won't be coming from IE, they'll be stealing market share from Firefox. End of Firefox. Period. Open source projects can only exist where 1) the technology is mature, with few changes from release to release, and 2) there exists a fair number of folks who just want to be different and go with crap like Linux (which they laughingly claim is a reliable OS). Open source seldom produces anything new - they have all they can handle simply trying to keep up, which they really aren't capable of doing.
Webkit was also the first to pass Acid3 and the first to support all CSS3 selectors. Webkit support for CSS is simply way out in front of other browsers though... It supports gradient, stroke, transform, box shadow, border radius. They've also got an HTML 5 client side database built into the browser. You can check it out in Apple's latest version of safari.
It looks to me like the attitude within Google is that internal engineering resources are infinite and therefore they should work on their own version of anything they think they can improve.
What comes next from a world like that? I predict that they'll announce a project to release Google's own general purpose programming language. I've seen it before. Objective-C anyone? C#? Eiffel?
"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
Indeed. And when they do something new, and it isn't better than what it replaces, that will be news too. :)
Google seem to identify where computing/networking/IT is junk, and then pour great minds on how to make it "awesome". They then do it, and it is. If they came up with some extension to TCP, IP, IPSec, whatever - I'd be a lot less sceptical than if Microsoft suggested an extension - purely because a:, Google are probably doing it to make it better, and b:, Microsoft would be doing it to break things in a way that would disadvantage other software companies.
Maybe it's a naive, rose-tinted view, but it sure looks nice from here.
Get your own free personal location tracker
Microsoft's response from the top involved a chair.
Their developers were a big more receptive.
Ginga no Rekshiya Mata Each page.
Paul Thurrott's coverage of the Google Chrome leak/announcement ends with the remark that "what we've really got here is an example of Google pulling a Microsoft: Creating an unnecessary me-too product that they can use for product tie-ins. All of the features here are present in existing browsers, all of them. So what does Google really bring to the table?" The idea of opening tabs in separate processes has been part of Internet Explorer 8 since March, at least. Web-apps in windows that don't have an address bar or toolbar are not just a decade old in Internet Explorer, they've been a pain in the backside for a decade. Malware writers love them. I used to use Proxomitron to force them to have obvious controls. The thumbnail home-page is basically Opera's Speed Dial, and IE7 has had a thumbnail view for a couple of years (albeit it only shows current tabs). Putting tabs over the address bar is the standard Opera view, and utterly pointless for most people. Chrome's InCognito is already in IE8 as InPrivate Browsing, and was in Safari 3 before that. Omnibar is Firefox's Awesome bar. Auto-completion, anti-phishing and sandboxing features are all pretty old hat by now. Google can't even think up a new name: Microsoft Chrome was an old tool that allowed "Web developers to add multimedia features to HTML using Microsoft's DirectX technology". Additions and corrections are, of course, welcome ;-)
As with Gmail, Chrome may be a big hit if it's brilliantly executed, especially given Firefox's general crashiness and bad memory leaks (which, to be fair, used to be part of IE too). But if it's more like Google Base, Knol, Orkut, Froogle and similar rubbish, it may not catch on....
To add to the parent's post, as a developer, I have found that the vast quantity of Firefox plug-ins/add-ons have been invaluable for development tasks (i.e. the web developer addon, abduction [for saving the page as an image], tamper data, etc...). If I'm going to switch to a different browser, it's going to have to have a community backing which rivals Mozilla's.
Regardless of that though, anything that gets more relatives off IE is good, and that's my hope for this new browser. Again, as a developer, I can't help but loathe IE (yes, that includes 7) and its utter lack of support for many standards, but that's a rant for another day/discussion. ;-)
Will Chrome include a google toolbar???
http://www.google.com/chrome
They could implement it using iframes and AJAX.
Google Chrome has now been released
Hot off the press - page changed in the last couple of minutes.
Interestingly nokia is switching to gecko in maemo http://browser.garage.maemo.org/
rel='nofollow' anyone?
Chrome download is now working.
http://gears.google.com/chrome
except the AC meant du jour (standard of the day) and not de jure (standard from the law). Just because the random scribbles spelled a real word doesn't make it the right word.
http://www.google.com/chrome/
entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem
Now Darl McBride will be suing Google!!!
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I am downloading right now.
Screenshot (new window)
So far I can't get it to load a page. I am running this on a machine with user restrictions (I'm at work), but I did install it with adminstrator priveledges (I'm the admin).
We'll see how this goes.
Now I can view porn without having to go through the trouble of erasing my browser's history????
It definitely feels different, but DOM performance seems pretty poor (testing on DOM heavy internal apps). Poor to the point that an operation that isn't specifically laggy in IE/FF pops up an unresponsive notice in Chrome (though it eventually finishes).
Anecdotal for sure, but to me it doesn't really help to speed up JS if DOM is the bottleneck in the first place (as it is in other browsers as well).
...cuil ? And after the frenzy , the googl.err.s going wild, the adsense fuckin it up, one will be left asking whatever happened to Mozilla...the fire just went off. *sigh*
So where are my Google Bookmarks =(
War isn't about who's right. It's about who's left.
By that logic Sliverlight and Flash are also an Open Standards. It's just impossible for others to implement them correctly due to extreme complexity, and when they get close a new Standard is released (which content providers are ready to employ ASAP).
Google?
HTML5 is done by Google.
...holy BALLS this is fast! I just grabbed it from www.google.com/chrome and dear gods above and below this thing flies. Whatever they did with the scratch-built javascript vm was worth it. Oh. My. God. Not meant to be a slashvertisement, but there you have it. I can't wait for it to come out for Linux. Firefail and IE need to move over - this is going to be big, once people hear about it.
#include <disclaimer.h>
#include <beer.h>
Am I the only one whose Windows computer is now running a service called "Google Update" which I was not asked to have installed?
Kriston
Comment removed based on user account deletion
It's fast and hasn't crashed yet. I'll give a few days and then I may replace FF as my default.
I'm getting 'missing plugin' pages when I visit any page that incorporates Java applets or Flash. Anyone figured out how to get these up and running?
It is freakin' fast, though.
Here's what the user-agent looks like:
Funnily it's not compatible yet with some of Google's own applications (Lively).
Maybe he really did mean standards "de la jure" (Oh, I swear I'll use the standard) as in MS IE ?
Can't load a page, get a 0xc0000005 error, and the "Oh, Snap!" screen. Reloading it doesn't help. I'm a local admin on the computer, but don't have access to the "Administrator" account. Oh well.
And there you have it. Google dropped their bombshell. Chrome. This is going to send shockwaves throughout the Internet.
And when you go to check it out:
MS-Windows only??? WTF??!?!!
What a perfect way to show openness, platform independence, support for standards, support for Open Systems principles and designs, and independence from Microsoft control.
Yes, we all know it will be "coming soon" for Linux and MacOS, but that is no excuse. If ever there were an important moment to make sure of a simultaneous, multiplatform release, THIS WOULD BE IT. *YOU BLEW IT GOOGLE* Thanks for sending such a positive message.
"It may well be the case that in a year or two we'll be seeing much more advanced web apps which Mozilla browsers handle poorly."
A fact I find interesting when you consider what XUL is suppose to be.
Bah now developers have to QA 4 incorrect implementations of standards instead of 3.
this baby looks nice..
http://www.google.com/chrome
A Windows Beta is available for download. First thought: kinda fast and snappy
I just downloaded from gears.google.com/chrome
It came localized, I am Swedish downloading from Finland using XP english version.
It supports Flash out of the box. Just fired up fantasticcontraption.com
Good luck /R
I'm "live" with Google Chrome.
Got it a few hours ago..(had to tweak the download link)...if you're still having problems, I was able to yank it by going directly to the EULA...
(ironically skipping the JavaScript button for Terms--Chrome is supposed to be all about safe JS, right?)
Anyway, here is the Link:
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html
So far, I'm "under impressed", however
The "version number" is (0.2.149.27)....not even a 1.x....
I've managed to "crash" it once already....(trying to import my FF settings after the fact).....
(and Ironically, I had to come post this through my old browser as for some reason it was not rendering the Spambot Image correctly?? (or I'm just not seeing it right)....
Google has billions of dollars to pour into this project, which ensures it will have a future. Developers get to use the code, because it's open-source. End-users get a reliable, fast browser with an innovative design.
Everybody wins in this case.
As I recall, in the early days of mozilla, when it was pretty stripped down, it was exceptionally fast too. I could be wrong, but I suspect Google Chrome's history will proceed something like this:
* It's fast, it's stable, it's. . . unable to use flash, Java, move networks video player, embedded Windows Media Player, etc. It doesn't support Firefox add-ons.
* As it grows a user-base, said user-base will complain about the above limitations.
* In response, Google will start re-architecting Chrome to support such features, and as a result, will, like Firefox, still be a great browser, and quite fast, but not OMG ZOOMZ LOLZ!!!!11! fast anymore.
Seriously, I have absolutely no complaint about the speed of rendering of any browser, nowadays. Computers are pretty fast, pretty much all the browsers are pretty fast. The bottleneck is most websites which take 10-30 seconds to finish sending me some crappy banner-ad or something before the rest of the page can render, or are just so bogged down they take 30 seconds to respond *at all*.
I really, *really* don't see the point in Google creating yet another browser instead of just contributing to Mozilla or Webkit, and maybe skinning one of those (actually, someone posted the User Agent string for Chrome, which looked like it was probably just a modded Webkit after all, so maybe they aren't re-inventing the wheel).
Well, I'm sure I would chime too if I was on PCPro... oh wait.
If FireFox is any good, it can take a bit of competition, right? Now, if, for example the FireFox developers have an attack of idiocy and force on everyone a feature that is not necessarily loved by everyone (like, say, the stupidbar) then there might be some people switching from FireFox to Chrome.
But I am sure FireFox wouldn't do such a silly thing. At any rate, there's now Chrome to make sure they won't.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
I actually dislike "web apps in windows without an address bar or toolbar"
it's been used as a kind of poor-man's drm for a decade now.
I distinctly remember back when i was on windows and having to jump through hoops and fish through source code on newgrounds to get local copies of the flash files.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
A lot of people complain about where's a linux version when talking about photoshop or something, and in those cases I understand why it's not on linux or at least why the company has no current interest, but of all companies, you'd think google would get, market share of the OS be damned.
How does mozilla release cross-platform the same day, when their codebase is supposedly a huge mess?
Ya I know it's in beta, but FF is released for all platforms, beta or not.
I would just think (or I guess hope) google would 'get it' and release cross-platform, and not 5 months down the line get a feature lacking version, that forever will be behind the windows version.
Mac version isn't out yet, not seeing linux or SRC either.
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: It rubs the lotion on its skin. It does this whenever it is told.
Catherine Martin: Mister... my family will pay cash. Whatever ransom you're askin' for, they pay it.
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: It rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.
[to his dog, Precious]
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: Yes, it will, Precious, won't it? It will get the hose!
Catherine Martin: Okay... okay... okay. Mister, if you let me go, I won't - I won't press charges I promise. See, my mom is a real important woman... I guess you already know that.
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: Now it places the lotion in the basket.
Catherine Martin: Please! Please I wanna go home! I wanna go home please!
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: It places the lotion in the basket.
Catherine Martin: I wanna see my mommy! Please I wanna see my...
Jame "Buffalo Bill" Gumb: Put the fucking lotion in the basket!
Its safe to say it has retained the "hallmark" google qualities of speed through simplicity. And I have read through the comic and was impressed by what was on offer.
I would have to use it for few days or maybe weeks to comment on its performance, hope it delivers what it promises.
Writing this with Chrome, downloaded a few minutes ago. Works fine and is snappy quick. Found a few minor nits (saves photos to the download default each time, not to last place where photos were saved; images look a bit dull...)
The tab system is brilliant, esp. when you open a new folder and you get thumbnail views of last pages visited... (watch that porn guys!).
It's obvious to me that Google are off to a flying start with Chrome.
This should kill Opera as well as dig into IE. Unfortunately, Firefox will take a hit too, I suppose.
Chrome is off to a flying start. Now if only the Mac OS X version was out.
Written from WinXP machine, but I also ran chrome on WinXP running under VMWare Fusion on my Mac. Works fine except for dull colors (images).
Cheers,
Alan
Just downloaded it, noticed the did the tabs correctly at least. Like Opera, each tab has it's 'own' url bar. Unlike IE and Firefox where all the tabs share one URL at the top and the address just switches each time you choose a tab. Though I'm not sure of the utility of it yet in Chrome as the reason for this in Opera is that each tab can be 'detached' and keeps it URL, but I don't see function in Chrome yet, but still exploring.
Would you run a browser built by DoubleClick?
Same thing. What's in a name? Apparently enough for an entire collective of product for advertisers/Slashdot users to use a browser by an ad broker who sells that product to clients. Sirs, Madams, I'm calling you nuts. Get a grip.
I wonder if Google are getting kinda annoyed at Firefox's ability to let their users use Google services and block all the data mining / advertising. More and more people are wising up to the fact that they can do that, and are choosing to do it, giving them a cleaner surfing experience. I wonder if this is Google's real intent with Chrome, it will not have the option to block Google's data mining model, nor will it have the ability to block adverts from Google. If it does turn out to be open source it'll be interesting to see how quick a fork appears with all of Google's nasty stuff ripped out. It does look very simple in a Google style and very appealing but at a time when more and more people are aware of data mining etc it may not be the easy sell that people assume. Even this site has DoubleClick and GoogleAnalytics, although by blocking cookies and scripts you can minimize the data they get.
As Google continues to provide more and more things we use in our daily lives, I'm beginning to fear when this level of integration with the average user is going to begin a cycle of privacy violations.
Google is much more of a fearsome machine than even the behemoth Microsoft. Their web assets and datastores account for way more information they have on people's searching (via their search engine) and browsing habits (via Google Analytics and ads). Not to mention, the ability to link that lot up to personal information (Gmail, calendars, documents). I wonder what they could possibly use their browser for to further their information collection. Maybe browser history being stored online? Seamless favorites integration with their systems?
Seems benign, but I think on a large scale, disturbing.
Just something to think about.
Just a thought, but given Google's goal to run web apps better with Chrome, perhaps this browser should be seen as the Google front end to a de facto operating system we all know as the internet.
The problem is converting IE users to something other than IE (or even IE6 for that matter, god help us all) For the time being I think this browser will only cannibalize Firefox's market share simply because the type of users that will download and use Chrome will be techies.
"During My Service In The United States Congress, I Took The Initiative In Creating The Internet." -Al Gore
This behavior is repeatable, and Chrome prompts to restore previous session.
Other thoughts:
My sig has been answered.
Google wants to 'free' users from specific platforms. They want an environment where webapps are desirable by everyone because the other options incur too much variance. They know how to compete and exploit web hosted services. They don't have a plan to do the same with standalone applications so much. This is their platform aimed to make a user feel secure and have a consistent platform with the features they need to ultimately build a feature-equivalent web based application.
So, from a strategic standpoint, it would have made sense to come out with support for all major players (and source code) out of the gate. It would have made a strong statement about the goal of platform indepedence. As stated above, this isn't about altruism, it's about leveling the playing field to give their web hosted applications a better chance at competing with standalone programs.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
The end of the Soviet browser era is coming. May all the cool plugins be portable to Chrome.
Can we stop pretending open source is better than closed source just because the source code is available.
I'm going to be "that guy," sorry, but the browser's name is "Firefox." Only one capital F. For somebody who's been using it exclusively for about 2 years, you've done a great job of never looking at the browser's actual name.
Comment of the year
He was probably running it on his MAC. Or maybe a LiNUX box.
Like I already mentioned somewhere up in a reply, its fast and snappy. Love the drag&drop features but totally hate the lack of any adbloc.. never mind.
The browser task manager is awesome. I hope the ff dev team picks up on that and adds it to the next release. I just checked the details of the 10 tabs I have open and its showing a total memory usage of ~58 MB (which is not bad although FF3 has more or less the same stats) but what got my attention was that it clearly showed that the one flash site open was gobbling up the major chunk of that memory space. Nice to know which tab/s is/are screwing up.
One honest question though, Will Google even support an adblock type plugin for Chrome?
Politicians and Pedophiles: Two groups of exploitive bastards who are most dangerous when they're thinking of children.
since with all the processes it uses, it'll be hogging all the system resources. IE, Firefox, etc won't have enough resources to run.
Apple released Safari for Windows just months before they released the iPhone (and it was at least 2 years after they released it for the Mac).
Reason: They wanted to test the browser for the iPhone for the web pages. Their primary aim was not browser market share. Their primary aim was public testing and making developers comfortable with the "iPhone Browser"
Same with Google.
This is the "Android Browser" out there...
And it'll be where Mozilla is now, later.
"Going incognito doesn't affect the behaviour of other people, servers or software. Be wary of: Websites that collect or share information about you Internet service providers or employers that track the pages that you visit Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys Surveillance by secret agents People standing behind you" Ok, those last two points are just classic! How would peole think that going incognito would stop people who are standing behind you from seeing what you are doing?
They eliminated the menu and status bars. I think it sucks. Even their own application, IGoogle doesn't work on it. I'm sticking with IE. I've never had something not work on IE.
One of the features of the new browser is an anti-phishing and malware service, which downloads updated lists of "trouble" domains from Google. I would bet that is what the update service you found is doing.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
It's very minimalist, meaning: it doesn't have a lot of features compared to Firefox, and certainly not when compared to Firefox with several extensions as I prefer to run it.
It's certainly very snappy. I've seen one site that did some js benchmarking and found it's around 2x faster than FF, but then again, I've been hearing that FF 3.1 should be 10-20x faster at js than FF 3.0, so we'll see how the speed boost comparison holds up in the end.
My CCS3 rounded corners test page that works with FF2/3/Safari3 doesn't seem to be completely working with Chrome, but I may have done something wrong, so I'll check into that.
Features wise, this is more like a browser I'd expect to see on a mobile platform, not on a desktop machine.
A great first attempt, though. Now let's see some Google Gears-based extensions!
Tabs, History in URL bar, speed dials..
I havn't seen Firefox innovate much recently, they just let Opera do that, then pick out the stuff than works. This seems to be Googles plan too.
If you want to use today, what the others will be doing next year: www.opera.com
11. Content license from you
11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services.
My emphasis. At first glance, this sounds kind of scary to me. I won't be using chrome much unless I find a reasonable explanation to this clause.
On my dual monitor Windows box with multiple desktops, one of my biggest problems with Firefox is window proliferation. I end up with too many Firefox windows open on too many desktops. On most desktops, I like to have one Firefox on the left display, another Firefox on the right display, so that I can reference on one side, compose on the other.
My first impression of Chrome is favorable. Middle-click opens up a tab immediately to the right of the current tab, unlike FF3, which loads the new tab at the distal end of the opposite spiral arm (the far end of the tab bar). I submitted negative feedback about this on every FF3 beta release. In Chrome, dragging a tab off the tab bar gets you a new window. Nice.
I've also discovered one can drag FF tabs to Chrome. Also nice. But I can't drag Chrome tabs to FF. Not nice, and almost crippling to my parallel-browser Chrome adoption plan.
I'd love to have Chrome on the left monitor, and FF on my right monitor on most desktops. I could use Chrome to access internal web sites, and FF (with ad-block) to access external sites. The lack of control over ads will limit my use of Chrome for external sites for a long time to come.
I don't like the way that internal DNS CNAMEs are first searched on Google, in all likelihood leaking out the internal CNAMEs over unencrypted http connections. If a name such as "secret" resolves to http://secret.localnetwork/ which instantly redirects to http://secret.localnetwork/double_secret_project_area, which comes back with a working web page, it's extremely untoward my notion of ideal privacy that "secret" was searched on Google before all this happened.
I also noticed that the zoom function on Chrome is not retaining my current scroll position. The older FFs also had this blemish, which made zoom almost unusable in many situations.
Seems solid enough for a new release, but it isn't taking me long to spot the rough edges.
And now is a good time to join it, if you have experience - money and promotions will be thrown at those folks by the bucket load now that there's an actual threat.
The killer feature for me is the built in task manager for the processes.
But I won't be using this browser even for 5 minutes without a flash blocker.
It is a very nice beta, but missing functionality many people won't live without. (flash/ad blocking).
It is more like a tech demo at the moment. I am shutting it down and going back to FF to do some actual browsing. Minus stupid dancing flash adverts. If this takes off and actually gets some features/extensions, I will have another look, but for now, I consider this unusable in its current form.
If the ad is shown using an iframe, then yes, Adblock works fine on that. If the ad is shown right within page HTML, then no. Someone needs to write some Hidden Markov Model code to recognize and bust those as well - they're getting annoying.
I just discovered it is possible to drag tabs from Chrome to FF3 by dragging the star at the right side of the Omnibox, rather than dragging the tab as a whole. Parallel browser, here I come.
Until a few years ago Microsoft had the world in terms of it's install base. They had people believing that their PC was Windows and that the internet is IE. In typical MS fashion their contempt in not giving customers what they want has opened the doors for competition; who in many cases offer a better designed product more suited to the users needs. Until a few years ago any competitor to MS would only ever have a tiny impact; until Firefox.
With Firefox getting mainstream attention it opens people's minds that you don't need to put up with IE to surf the web. That opens users up to how easy it is to install and use a different browser, while Firefox has gained the most disgruntled IE users, Opera has also picked up some.
With Vista being so bad, and Linux maturing as much as it has the same exodus is happening in the OS mindset. People are starting to see that Windows is not their PC. There are other ways a PC can run, with either Linux or Apple. Ubuntu hitting more mainstream press and being sold by some large companies like Dell (albeit half heartedly for now) as well as the ultra mobile market. All these factors are breaking the mindset that MS have had for years.
In the office suite space, OpenOffice has been getting more acceptance for normal users while Google Docs has opened people to the idea of using a browser for that task.
While MS still have a huge market share and are very entrenched their dominance is slipping week by week. Google have seen the browser market open up with Firefox, people are becoming aware of change and opting for it. They are looking for a browser which suits them. Firefox is already entrenched in many users minds, those users will take a lot of convincing to change again. I believe Google have spotted this and want to get in with their own browser while there are plenty of willing converts. Bill Gates worked out many years ago that people don't like change when they get used to something. If Google leave it too late and help Firefox win the browser war they will lose out.
I do like the design of Chrome, it feels like a Google application in that it's deceptively simple looking. I can see it appealing to those who see technology as confusing, or should that be "those who are unaware that every click will be data mined for profit".
You realy should take a look at Opera.
It works pretty well on Windows and Linux, but also works very well on PDAs and cellphones.
I've been using it mostly because it provides all I need without the plugins, which is great since I have the same setup wherever I go.
Which will be first to go out of beta?
- Gmail
- Chrome
- Duke Nukem Forever
- Cowboy Neal
Feedback goes here: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/request.py?contact_type=feedback
I left this comment: "Without extension support, this is a broken browser. Addons! Addons! Addons!"
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
V8 source code is here.
And you'd be wrong. They use NSS and some other bits and pieces for import.
So many posts here saying that they won't use any browser that doesn't have Adblock Plus type functionality. While that particular extension does rock, you can achieve similar results with any browser or app by loving your /etc/hosts or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts file with this http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm or similar solutions. Great success.
I find it interesting that Google all of a sudden released chrome to public and wonder how much similarity chrome carries with browser code in android.
Is it a one big test/feedback cycle for Google before releasing android later this year(as well as stepping into 'nextgen browser' market as others pointed out).
I haven't skimmed all of the comments, so someone may have already pointed this out, but what about privacy? Google has over the years increasingly shown that it doesn't really care about privacy (see its willingness to turn over search results to the police, its upper management's statements about how privacy doesn't exist like it used to, etc.), especially when it is taken away by one of its profitable services. Therefore, WHY would I use a browser that could potentially track every page I visit, every setting I change and when I do it, etc., in some master database somewhere? This says nothing about having to develop for yet ANOTHER browser, etc. Thanks, but NO thanks...
10 minutes with Chrome:
The BAD
- Bookmarks (Imported all my bookmarks from Firefox 3.0.1. ~1350 items)
= When I closed Chrome after the import, a chrome.exe process hanged. I restarted Chrome and all my bookmarks were GONE! As if the import never happened.
= No bookmark organizer. Are you kidding me? 1350 bookmarks and no organizer?????
= No "Open all tabs" in the bookmark menu.
- Search engines (Imported from Firefox 3.0.1)
= No place to type a search and choose the search engine that will handle the search. Apparently, the search engines are called from the address bar where if you type something you will get contextual options to direct searches through the imported search engines. The problem is that if you want to search for www.slashdot.org via the IMDB search engine you will not get that entry in the contextual menu of the address bar because it is not detected as a movie title. Not good.
- Plugins
= No plugins whatsoever.
= Major problems: No anti ads support. No Adblock. No nothing. Do you imagine Google (99.99% income from ads) allowing anti-ads technology to flower in their browser?
The GOOD
- The UI is good. It supports very little customization but it is good in it's original form. If Google Talk tought us anything is that Google is not capable and/or willing to upgrade any application any earlier than 5-10 years since it's original version so you will need to assume Chrome's UI will remain as it is for a long long long time. Even so, the UI is ok. Looking at Firefox 3.0.1 after Chrome... well... this makes FF look like a turd. I had ~50 extensions in FF 2 and about ~30 were related to UI customization. The UI extension list went down to about 20 with FF 3.
- The developer tools seem embedded in the browser and they are very good from the get go. Just imagine having Firebug in Netscape 3. It's nice.
That's it. Solid effort from Google but not a real threat for Firefox. Huge threat for IE though.
P.S: It's ironic++ that Google tried so hard to build a browser that looks nothing like a standard Windows application and yet, it only runs on Windows. Way to spend those millions of billions Google.
Hi - although i agree with you at least they are doing a Linux version...
Also the mac has the same treatment...
That plugins are big and hungry monsters
Why do you think they need their own browser? Because the apps they want to write won't run on anyone else's. Right now it's because the competition can't run the code fast enough. So the only browser that will run google code will be their own. At that point, why not break the standards? I'm not saying they have done this, I am saying they will do this. Mark my words. Code is law.
As for the hairless fetishists who apparently can't parse either latin or french, your cleverness is underwhelming, n'est-Ãe pas?
I guess I'll be running it when it shows up in Debian testing...
In section 1.1, first they define their browser as a "Service":
1.1
Your use of Google's products, software, [...] (referred to collectively as the "Services" [...])
Next in section 11.1, they claim a license on anything you post through it:
11.1
By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.
Scary!
"This webpage is not available.
The webpage at https://www.myprivatesite.com/share might be temporarily down or it may have moved permanently to a new web address.
More information on this error
Below is the original error message
Error 110 (net::ERR_SSL_CLIENT_AUTH_CERT_NEEDED): Unknown error.
"
ok, so I found the cert had expired.... But FF and IE will let me still use the cert, but Google does not...
Sorry google--looks like an ALPHA.
Gee I keep seeing this comment come up every 3-4 years. Is it just me?
Vista isn't bad has tons of improvements that linux can only dream of, and linux is nowhere close to maturing. get out of your basement, the FUD has damaged your brain.
Even operating systems that are no longer being sold for years .. have more market share than linux. it must be fucking embarassing. pumping 1 billion into linux and nobody gives a shit about it. gnewsense? LOL what a joke.
I'll come back in 3-4 years to see this same post, and laugh again and go back to the real world.
The Mozilla Foundation has a contract with Google to make Google search its default search engine in FireFox. They got 85% of their funding from them in 2006 (according to Wikipedia - see below). Guess when the contract is set to expire... November 2008!
The foundation has an ongoing deal with Google to make Google search the default in the Firefox browser search bar and hence send it search referrals; a Firefox themed Google search site has also been made the default home page of Firefox. A footnote in Mozilla's 2006 financial report states "Mozilla has a contract with a search engine provider for royalties. The contract originally expired in November 2006 but was renewed for two years and expires in November 2008. Approximately 85% of Mozillaâ(TM)s revenue for 2006 was derived from this contract."; this equates to approximately US$56.8 million
finally they started to be evil,with changing web standards, lock you in a custom cage ( aka Google Chrome ), new evil signs coming soon. they have plan to launch satellite too!!!
WTF.. linux and iphone are in a tough battle over market share. The iphone already has 1/3 of the linux market share. who is going to win?? let me know,
kthxbai.
Just installed Chrome. I honestly like it a lot. I think it is very fast and it looks great. My quirks with it are that there is no Home button and no easy way to edit bookmarks that I can tell. And also, could someone explain to me whether or not it is efficient to have multiple chrome.exe processes running depending on how many tabs you have opened in the browser? I was stoked at first because I saw that chrome was only using 8,000k of memory. But then I noticed that there were 3 chrome.exe's running. With Internet Explorer, there is only one process, but it sky-rockets in to the 70,000k range when you have a few tabs opened.. just curious if anyone knows the pros and cons about this major difference in process structure.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Google created Chrome because of AdBlockPlus and NoScript.
Of all the firefox users out there, most run both addin's. I'm willing to bet that of all the users running NoScript that 90% of them block the Google tracking scripts most websites run. Chrome wouldn't have been created had it not been for those two Firefox addins and my guess is they will make sure chrome can never run them. ABP and NoScript hurt revenues and tracking, both prime revenue generators for Google.
The reason they supported Firefox so early on was to break MS's control and to have a browser they had a say in. When Firefox added the ability for users to create Addin's and ABP and NoScript were created they decided they needed a browser they could control to make sure ABP and NoScript never make it to their browser.
Ever since I downloaded Firefox 3, pages have been taking forever to load. Has nobody else noticed this? I've had to turn off automatic image loading to make it borderline bearable. So maybe this is a good time to change browsers.
Great men are almost always bad men--Lord Acton's Corollary
First, under Vista they store the program in the user's appdata folder when it clearly should be stored in the program files folder. Also, it appears to be too small to be anything more than just a front end to Microsoft's browser engine.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
I think that Google learned this from the Microsoft Playbook.
Crap! I just kissed my karma good-bye.
I find it funny how this new innovative application is getting attacked like its intent to to topple any particular browser, even your precious Firefox. Frankly speaking, Google most likely developed this for themselves because no developer's browser was doing it the way they wanted to use internally. They allude to this multiple times in their comic. Offering it to the public is mostly a publicity stunt for them and a way to get more people to use their apps which quite frankly don't always work in traditional browsers because of their reliance on AJAX and javascript in general. Their browser runs them as they intended which is great for them and their innovation here can hopefully provide some insight to other developers on how to make a better browser.
You illiterate dickknuckle.
I am pretty sure that MS won't help Google perfect their browser. But they have already helped Mozilla, and the results of that collaboration is now open source, no? So Google can just pinch it to make Chrome go like greased lightning on Vista. Have MS just shot themselves in the foot? Ouch!
Interestingly enough I've just noticed this in the EULA
"10.2 You may not (and you may not permit anyone else to) copy, modify, create a derivative work of, reverse engineer, decompile or otherwise attempt to extract the source code of the Software or any part thereof, unless this is expressly permitted or required by law, or unless you have been specifically told that you may do so by Google, in writing."
Yet (from the 2 minutes I spent looking) portions of WebKit are released under the LGPL.
I realize that this is probably some default boiler plate EULA that Google use for everything else but it seems a fairly serious oversight given the fact they made such a big deal of the open-ness in the comic-book release announcement.
Still I'm hanging out for the Linux version
This is a fourteen inch shot across the bow taking out the bowsprit or the radar. It is fast. It falls in the category of strategic surprise.
I suspect that all our operating systems belong to google.
All your database are belong to U.S.
Two points:
1. SWEET! and thank you! <3.
2. While a firefox extension that does this is definitely a boon, it's a long way from being "supported by default" in the browsers that I spend the most time in - Safari and Firefox, across a total of some four or five machines. When you have a lot of different installs to deal with, extensions become cumbersome to deal with, especially if they don't work with a new build of FF.
C. Finally. I've wanted a feature like this since I browsed my first porn site gallery of thumbnails in 1996.
Since Google Docs gotten more complicated/more features, I noticed more issue in IE6/7, FF2/3, Safari, and Opera. For one the "Loading" red message on upper right corner gets stuck, covering the "Sign Out" link permanently (on purpose?). In Chrome, no problem. I suspect Google simply needed a browser that they can better control to promote their own apps to make them run well on all platforms (desktop to mobile, like Safari does for Mac to iPhone), and sine they are already developing it for Android, why not make a desktop version too. What comes next will depend on how big Android and Chrome project get. To that extend the users can exert a lot of influence on such initiative still in its early stage (for example, don't use unless it's a Linux version).
When Google starts at least putting any kind of DOCTYPE declaration into their HTML - you know, as per specification - I'll get back to you on that...
Because it's a huge cross-platform mess. Firefox/Mozilla/Netscape has been cross-platform for more than a decade, so they just need to keep going. Meanwhile, Chrome is brand new.
Also, I really don't understand those complains. It's not like a final Windows version was released ahead of a final Linux version; no, all we have now is a beta, which is only available for Windows. My guess would be that Linux and OS X betas has not gotten past the internal QA yet, and it doesn't make sense to delay Windows beta release because of that.
Oh, and why Google shouldn't care about market share when prioritizing?
If thats so, why the fuck does safari scroll like shit? Perhaps the same reason Itunes scrolls like shit?
How does mozilla release cross-platform the same day, when their codebase is supposedly a huge mess?
Simple: by not releasing a Windows version until the Mac and Linux versions are ready.
Also, it's a huge mess, but it's a huge cross-platform mess. Mozilla's predecessor, Netscape, was cross-platform from the beginning, and Mozilla has upheld that tradition.
Ya I know it's in beta, but FF is released for all platforms, beta or not.
I would just think (or I guess hope) google would 'get it' and release cross-platform, and not 5 months down the line get a feature lacking version, that forever will be behind the windows version.
I don't see why the Linux and Mac versions should lack features, when they finally ship. Why do you believe they will? What features do you expect to be missing?
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
IE still benefits from a large number of websites that reject non-IE browsers. Usually, this is because clueless management tolerates this. After all, it works with the big name they know - Microsoft.
However, with Chrome, the developer can say "our site doesn't work in Google". Management will recognize Google as an even bigger Web player. Hence, not working in Google will be perceived as a real threat to their business.
I dunno what V8 or the other parts of Chrome are licensed.
V8 isn't something that Mozilla desperately needs : They already have a nice agreement with Adobe over the new Tamarin javascript engine.
(And by the way, speaking of new feature, they too already have the "awesome bar" as an upgrade of the ages-old URL-bar. Except that in Chrome everything is new, so they don't have a crowd whineboys complaining that the previous was better).
What Mozilla could take as an inspiration from Google's Chrome for some future version of FireFox is the multi-process architecture.
FireFox has grown out of an application which wanted back then to be small and lean - it began life as Pheonix a Mozilla based browser stripped to the minimum required to display pages.
Back then multi process didn't make sense both from the hardware point of view (3x and 4x multicores on desktop computer are a recent innovation) and from the point of view of Phoenix' mission (complex multi procession isn't exactly the target for a browser which wants to be stripped to the bare minimum).
Currently Firefox has a legacy design that is still a huge mono-process bloc, and that cause several problems, among which dealing with plugins which run in the same thread (Adobe Flash on Linux is just a nightmare of unstability and memory leaks), freezing on some blocking operations (antivirus activity can be really bothersome), or memory leaks persistance (once memory has leaked, it remains leaked because the same single process of FireFox is still running).
Multi-process could help for a lot of those problems by isolating badly behaving plugins in their own process (like most of the current open source plugins do - the plugins is really just a thin layer designed to launch an external executable and embed it. It's just that the current situation requires such collaboration from plugins whereas the Google model handles it itself), by letting other parts of the browser continue to work even if some are waiting for a virus scan to complete, and by having lots of separate processes starting and stoping as needed (and thus if a leak happens it will only leave as long as the process which caused it. Once the process closes and frees its ressource, the leak is gone too).
Also, as reported by the launch comic, it would help better know who is to blame for problems (just by knowing which process goes suddenly mad for ressoruces) unlike the current situation where mozilla developers are shifting the blame for leaks to plugins developers.
(Probably rightly so, given the impact of some plugins, but current situation has no way to prove it).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
The trouble with multi-process is that it's going to be slightly hairy - since JavaScript in one tab can interact both with plugins and with content in another tab or window, there'll be all sorts of fun inter-process communication and synchronisation issues. I've no idea what effect it'll have on performance, either.
To add to the parent's post, as a developer, I have found that the vast quantity of Firefox plug-ins/add-ons have been invaluable for development tasks (i.e. the web developer addon, abduction [for saving the page as an image], tamper data, etc...).
I agree, but I use Firefox specifically for webdevelopment. For private browsing I use Opera because if its greater stability and performance.
(Although Firefox 3 is rumoured to be a huge improvement over Firefox 2 there.)
I wish I had references, but I remember the reason behind all the rejections of Gecko in favor of Webkit (Apple, Nokia, Google, Epiphany, Adobe) had to do with the code itself.
The Gecko source apparently is a tangled mess compared to Webkit, which has managed to keep things relatively simple and modular. The Google comic book alludes to this.
I am currently downloading this web browser and i also made a post in my blog Now available for download is Google Chrome web browser I hope this will help also
just going by google's past. google earth was always behind the windows version in features (not sure if they are currently/finally in sync).
It reminds of john carmack with id, he does cross-platform not because it's profitable, but because 'it's a good thing'. Now his games might not have linux binaries day 1, but it's damn quick, usually a matter of days, or a week or two tops. But google is saying months, so obviously cross-platform isn't a top priority. And I've read other comments of others who have looked through the code and they mention that there are some very specific windows things in there that, from a coding perspective, does not lend itself to being cross platform, so no I don't think google 'gets it'.
Boy, these overly politicated browser-wars are getting on my nerves. Thinks code and design, not license and brand name.