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Google Chrome, Day 2
Seems that almost every story submitted to Slashdot last night in some way involved Google's Chrome that we started talking about yesterday. Dotan Cohen noted that according to Clicky Chrome has hit 3% browser share. Since Google has decided to release Chrome only for Windows, I now share for you 3 reviews written by others: the first comes from alexy2k, the second from mildsiete, and the third from oli4uk. They all seem to feature various opinions, charts, and screenshots demonstrating various exciting points.
I looked at the web logs from a general purpose, non-techy website (Watching Grass Grow) and Chrome accounted for 0.73% of the browser traffic yesterday ... ... and traffic didn't start until after the release at Noon.
The User Agent String is
"Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13"
For comparison, IE was 53.8%, Firefox was 34.6%,
Safari was 3.5% (non-Chrome) , Opera was 0.7%, and there was even
0.05% of traffic from an iPhone.
;-)
That's an impressive bump for day one (actually, half a day) and if you (unrealistically) extrapolated that rate, Chrome would have 100% of the browser market by year end!
I had to modify the Analog source code to account for the Chrome browser (gotta like open-source) but have have other popular programs (such as Google Analytics) been updated to identify this browser?
Hulk SMASH Celiac Disease
You can't seem to change the default new page. For example, open up a new tab and you'll see recently closed tabs and most visited pages. If a collegue wants to use a browser on your computer you might not want him to see a screenshot on your most viewed pages.
The other thing that I personally find a bit annoying is that if you don't put http:/// in front of or / after a url that is within one of your search domains, it automatically assumes that you want to search the web for that, lets say there's a server on your network that you haven't visited before called server1.domain.com and you have domain.com among your search domains, it will go off to google.com and search for server1 if you only type in server1 in the address bar. But then again, maybe that's just me.
-
Posted with Google Chrome
According to NetApplications, Chrome has around 1% usage share. That's pretty good for a browser still only in beta.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
If you're that stupid, you're probably also looking at the word "Mozilla" and wondering why Netscape has like 99% of your user share when it died years ago.
Fix your browser detect: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
One reviewer hadn't even installed the browser yet. Seriously.
I installed Google's browser. It sucked. Didn't ask where I wanted to install it. No adblocker (and probably never will be). Very limited configuration options. Couldn't handle my font colors. Set GoogleUpdate.exe to run every time my computer starts. Took me to a "why are you uninstalling it" web form when I went to uninstall it, and the web form didn't work. Ass sucking from start to finish. Classic Google.
"Choosing to refrain from producing another person demonstrates a profound love for all life" [vhemt.org]
I will shamelessly copy&paste my comment from the other Chrome news today:
I suggest you use the OpenSource version of Chrome , which is BSD licensed and has no EULA you need to agree to.
Builds:
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/
Info:
http://www.chromium.org
It's time to start hacking away at this ;-)
http://www.admuncher.com/. Works with every browser, including Chrome.
It only takes one man to change the Wisdom of the Crowd to Tyranny of the Masses.
Did they use large chunks of other open-source browsers? If so, which ones?
Yes, they chose the WebKit rendering engine, which is the same one you find in browsers like Konqueror, Safari, and Google's own Android platform.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
What struck me about this is that these are people who would never, in a million years, lift a finger to try Safari/Windows - yet here they are drooling over how snappy a WebKit-based browser is.
Because safari on windows is buggy as hell. Apple doesn't care about the windows implementation of Safari nearly as much as it cares about its itunes implementation, and itunes itself runs badly on windows.
I'm not saying that this reflects poorly on apple or anything, of course their software's going to be better on a mac than on windows, but blaming them for not using apple's software seems a little overboard.
http://tech.slashdot.org/help
Click "Sections"
Find "Idle" and tick the radio tab under the 'no' sign.
???
No more idle.slashdot.org on the front page!!!
Is it just me, or does the second review at http://www.monacome.com/2008/08/download-google-chrome-browser-review.html have a ridiculously annoying animated favicon? I'm searching Google now for a way to disable this distracting device. I am definitely not going to read the article with such an annoyance about.
It's not malicious or anything, it's just very, very poor writing and will make you angry.
Your brain is not a computer.
Goto "Under the Hood" in options and uncheck the anonymous statistics submission. Alternatively you can go to your Services and set the Google Updater Service to Disabled. Easy enough.
believing the big bang requires a certain amount of supernatural faith
Matt Cutts denies that Google spies on your browsing and form submissions in this post on his blog.
Ok, how about this one? I uninstalled Chrome, and GoogleUpdate is still running... Time to kill it, delete it, and remove it from the registry. It's at:
HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run\GoogleUpdate
Yes, I agree that the process separation is a great feature, and I look forward to the release of a version for MacOS X. Interestingly, this isn't what was making the sale here.
And as for the Javascript performance, while V8 is getting awesome benchmarks, it's hard for a user to perceive the difference in normal usage - unless you're running something that animates drawing in a canvas, perhaps.
In our case, we have an internal javascript-heavy application written in GWT that compiles down to 600KB of javascript in obfuscated mode. At least on the XP test box sitting beside my Mac, I couldn't tell the difference between Safari/Win and Chrome. The difference between those and IE is dramatic, of course. And comparing them to FF3 (without tracemonkey) was merely noticable, although not dramatic.
That doesn't stop me from drooling over V8 when I run Sunspider, though. I love that the JavaScript runtime wars are heating up. I'd love to have headroom to do more.
The "cue the foo posts in 3, 2, 1..." posts will commence with no subsequent foo posts in 3, 2, 1...
You can learn a lot more about the technology used here on Google Books.
My other UID is lower than this one.
The Goodle update service program is installed without the choice to avoid running it.
It is a regular background process started from HKCU\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
The files are installed to %HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Update.
By any sensible definition, applications that "phone home" are spyware when they cannot be opted out upon installation.
Google Earth's downloader asks you if you want to install it, but Chrome's downloader just goes ahead and sideloads it without asking. Worse, it's not easy to remove, since you have to edit your registry or use a registry "autorun" hacking tool to remove this "phone home" application.
I don't understand Google's motivation for installing this without prompting the user or providing a removal option.
Kriston
It's not on by default, but check out the options. On the Basics tab "Show home button on toolbar"
Privoxy is your friend. It allows you to block ads using a local proxy, so it'll work with any browser. It isn't as easy to setup as Adblock, but it still works effectively.
And only for Windows....
There are two types of people in the world: Those who crave closure
Read further on Google's privacy policy for Chrome.
# When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
# If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here.
# Google Chrome's SafeBrowsing feature periodically contacts Google's servers to download the most recent list of known phishing and malware sites. In addition, when you visit a site that we think could be a phishing or malware site, your browser will send Google a hashed, partial copy of the site's URL so that we can send more information about the risky URL. Google cannot determine the real URL you are visiting from this information. More information about how this works is here.
# Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers. These numbers and information about your installation of the browser (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when you first install and use it and when Google Chrome automatically checks for updates. If you choose to send usage statistics and crash reports to Google, the browser will send us this information along with a unique application number as well. Crash reports can contain information from files, applications and services that were running at the time of a malfunction. We use crash reports to diagnose and try to fix any problems with the browser.
So they send them the URLs I visit and there's an unique id. And I'm still to lazy to check out the source about how it's used...
Chrome made me discover different methods of ad blocking. Windows "HOSTS" file with every ad server directed to 127.0.0.1 seems to work well. See here.
1. The memory tool that displays per-tab mem usage.
2. Sensible memory management.
3. Fast?
4. Sandboxed tabs.
As far as I'm concerned, point 4 is the killer feature for me of Chrome. I won't use it as my default browser until several of my must-have extensions are availble for it (via Google Gears, I assume), but that's the kind of infrastructure planning that's hurting Firefox in a big way. Adobe's buggy Flash player shouldn't be ABLE to crash the browser, or even temporarily lock it up! The Flash specs are all open now, so hopefully one of the open source projects will soon be able to update everything they couldn't reverse engineer and get something decent out the door, but if not, Chrome will surely mature within a few months to have most of the functionality I need on a MUCH better thought-out platform than FF.
Overall, very impressive. I'm no Google fanboy, and I disliked their desktop apps previously, but this one looks like it was designed by good UI usability experts. The overall philosophy seems to be close to GNOME in that few things are configurable, but the rest tends to seamlessly work "the right way" (and that coming from a user of Opera, which has hundreds of configuration options, is saying something). Toolbar icon theme is instant classic - very clear and without flashy colors, looking much better than either IE, Firefox or Opera. Some inconspicuous animation effects when opening/closing/dragging around tabs make it very clear what's going on. By the way, have you noticed that the loading indicator on the tab turns counter-clockwise when HTTP request is being sent, and clockwise when HTTP reply is being received, and that its rotation speed indicates up/download speed? Also note the tooltip-like popup at the bottom of the window with full URL when you hover mouse over a link.
Some stuff is less obvious. For example, there are tab groups, even though they're not color-coded as in IE8. To observe them, open 4 tabs from 2 different domains - say, first 2 for kernel.org, the other 2 for slashdot.org. Then try middle-clicking links in the 1st and the 3rd tabs. You'll see that newly created tabs go at the end of the respective tab groups (and not at the end of the tab bar, or immediately after the current tab). This seems to be based on the full domain name of the site though, and not on user interaction like in IE8 (which groups together all tabs opened from within the same "parent" tab), which is mildly annoying on /. which varies domains - so tech.slashdot.org won't group with games.slashdot.org, for example.
Interstingly enough, UI looks better on Vista rather than XP. On Vista Aero, the tab bar itself is glass-translucent underneath (like IE7's tool/address bar), and when maximized, the tabs are interposed right on top of the window title bar, saving screen space. On XP, it emulates Vista's large window decorations to achieve the same effect, but obviously no translucency, which rather spoils the effect. Overall, it looks somewhat out of place on an XP desktop (particularly if you have Windows theme set to Classic, or indeed anything other than the bluish Luna), but fits right in on Vista.
Speed: very impressive. Rendering is very fast. No UI slowdown I can notice under any circumstances. I guess we'll see JS benchmarks soon enough.
That said, it's not without issues. For starters, where's my smooth scrolling? And why is scroll-on-middle-click, which has been available in every single browser since at least IE4 (maybe earlier, I just can't remember now), is gone?
Things about Chrome that rock:
- Blinding speed! WHOA NELLY!
- Tab drag n' drop
- Task manager, memory usage page
- Download manager page
- Incognito windows
Things about Chrome that suck:
- No tab select dropdown button! MAJOR FAILURE!
- Text boxes are kind of buggy
- No way to disable java(script) or image loading
- No customization whatsoever over the Omnibar or New Tab Page.
- No separate settings for Incognito windows (such as disabling auto image loading for them)
Also it's a bit of a memory hog, but I could forgive this for the advantages in stability and security...except I tried to access an FTP site (the UI for this is very primitive, similar to IE) and THE WHOLE THING CRASHED. How's that for process separation.
Looks like it has a lot of potential but it needs more time in the oven. I'm back to Firefox 3 for now.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
and it cost 25 bucks.
You just have to enable it... It's under Options > Basic Tab > Home Page > Check show home page on toolbar option.
Hopefully Firefox will not use V8 given that TraceMonkey in the upcoming Firefox 3.1 is faster - http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/tracemonkey_update.html
Don't forget to delete the scheduled task. Installer adds an administrator task which starts GoogleUpdate whenever the machine is idle.
May not be evil, but it's certainly lame.
I call shenanigans on the parent posting. This is FUD, and mis-informed FUD at that. There's no evidence that Chrome sends anything but the *hash* of the site you type in the address bar, and does not send your browsing history anywhere at all - whether in incognito mode or not.
See Lauren Weinstein's Privacy Forum posting here and here. Quotes:
Yesterday I posted some thoughts on the privacy policy associated with Google's new "Chrome" Web browser, and gave the open-source product -- which has a great deal of potential -- an overall thumbs-up based on current information...
and
I'm afraid that I'm much more concerned about the privacy policy for Microsoft's new "Internet Explorer 8" browser (which of course is not open source). While overall functionality and touted privacy improvements appear to be similar in many ways to Chrome, some of the specific privacy-related decisions in IE8 are very different from Chrome -- and not necessarily in a good way. One in particular is significantly alarming...
This guy does privacy issues and privacy policy for a living. I've been reading his analysis for years, and I give his opinions great weight.
OK, it's using a firefox extension called "Google Update", which is installed by a number of Google applications, and (as demonstrated) it's possible for Google to use it to automatically install software on your computer. Disabling it in Firefox keeps it from running and should hopefully prevent some other Google App from installing it again.
This seems to be the same kind of "trust me" backdoor as the Firefox XPI installer and ActiveX, but unlike ActiveX it's cross-browser (and probably cross-platform), and unlike XPI it DOESN'T require you to explicitly whitelist each site and approve each install. Calling it an updater sort of implies that it is a relatively secure service, like other update services, that only pulls down and updates software that you have explicitly installed. But if it has a mechanism for a web site to explicitly request that a new component be downloaded and installed it's anything but secure.
Googling for it on "site:google.com" has been less than useful. I've got several hits from people in Google's user groups asking what it is and how to remove it, but there doesn't seem to be any documentation on Google's website for its API and security model.
If you carefully read 11.1 (that you posted), you will see that your rights are not taken away. The relevant portion is "You retain copyright and any other rights you hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services". The EULA is limited to essentially giving Google the same rights (but that grant does not change the originator's rights).
If I am understanding correctly, you are also over interpreting the content that these sections apply to; as far as I can tell, it applies to content that the browser submits to Google services (many of Google's services contain similar terminology; presumably, the browser makes use of those services in ways that may not be obvious to the average user, so the EULA for the browser contains ass-covery).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Adblock does not, by default block Google text ads that appear alongside search results.
Adblock does not, by default block anything. It's the libraries that you add to ABP that block things, and the things you add yourself.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
This is all a side issue. Google has promised to back FireFox until 2011. Google Chrome isn't a browser, but a template on how FireFox, Safari, and other browsers should behave. What Google wants:
* More multi-threading in the browser. Browsers shouldn't freeze up.
* More multi-process tasking. Browsers shouldn't crash because of a bad webpage
* Faster JavaScript: How much do you want to bet that V8 will quickly become part of WebKit.
* Standardized Rendering Engine: This will put pressure on FireFox and Opera to switch to the WebKit engine, or at least make sure their browsers are 100% compatible. Thus, standardizing desktop and mobile device browsers on WebKit.
It's not so much that Chrome is Google's candidate in the browser wars as much as a template other browsers should strive for. I love the fast JavaScript engine and the multi-processing approach to webpage rendering. You'll start seeing that adapted by the other browsers in the next year. I also like some of the security features like the complete sandbox approach. Google's idea is that your browser will become infected, and the browser should prevent the infection from spreading.
Uninstall from the Start Menu
Click the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
Select Programs
Select Google Updater.
Select Uninstall Google Updater.
Restart your computer after you uninstall.
Uninstall from the Control Panel
Click the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
Select Control Panel.
Double-click Add or Remove Programs (on XP) or Programs and Features (on Vista).
Select Google Updater in the list of programs.
Click Remove.
Restart your computer after you uninstall.
Uninstall from the command line
Click the Start menu on your computer taskbar.
Select Run.
Enter cmd to open a command prompt.
Type cd C:\Program Files\Google\Google Updater to change directories.
Type GoogleUpdater.exe -uninstall to uninstall.
Restart your computer after you uninstall.
Note: I haven't tried this as I haven't installed anything from Google.
Anonymous statistics.
You can opt in/out by going to the Advanced Preferences in the Options window.
While you've just described what Chrome *can* do, this is not necessarily what it *does* do.
This service is an opt-in service for sending use statistics and crash logs to Google. See: http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=96817&hl=en-US
If you look at the page you linked to, you'll notice that it has a NoDetails mode (which appears to be the default), so that although it will send information that you've requested a URL or successfully loaded a page, it won't include any information about *which* URL.
(Also, see http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/ for discussion of other instances in which Chrome may dial home.)
Regedit -> F3 "MozillaPlugins" -> HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\MozillaPlugins or HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\MozillaPlugins
So-called "google update" will secretly insert an one-click installation addon into firefox, which is neither viewable within addon menu, nor located in default plugin folder.
remove these entries, stop+remove google update service, remove google update from both \program files\google\ and \username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\ (also the default path for Chrome). Chrome(or other google desktop app) can run without them.