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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.
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 ;-)
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...
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
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
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...
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?
You just have to enable it... It's under Options > Basic Tab > Home Page > Check show home page on toolbar option.
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.