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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 tried it out on my XP box yesterday and I was very impressed with it, especially its speed, but a quick look through the options revealed that DNS prefetching is enabled by default.
The show-stopper is(as of now) no NoScript/AdBlock! I've become spoiled with ad-free pages and seeing that first obnoxious flash ad was enough to convince me to keep FF as my browser of choice -- at least until a few plug-ins are made for Chrome.
Interesting to see whether it tails off in the next week or so though. I installed Chrome, had a quick test on a few websites then uninstalled it as I'm happy using Opera. I'll probably try it again a few months down the line when it has been improved/bugfixed etc. How many of that initial percentage will do the same as me I wonder?
Really, I still don't see why I'd have to switch from FF3 to this new browser, free or not. I mean, once you get rid of IE's security hole and MS lock-in web technology, a browser's a browser, right?
I understand that Google want to have their own, but the established base of Firefox, with its plugins and extensions beats all for now, from a desktop user perspective.
I'll let the hype pass before I have a look.
-- Home is where you eat your heart out.
I'm using Chrome right now, and so far, no issues. Actually, I really like it. When plugins are developed for Chrome, I can see myself using this as my primary browser. I did notice that gmail runs faster in Chrome. Also, the comic is quite entertaining for a geek...
I'll start using Chrome the instant they have a plugin that blocks annoying flashing multi-colour favicons.
[for those who haven't read the links, just go to the second so-called 'review' link, which is really a review of reviews...]
What does this part mean?
(KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome doesn't use KHTML or Gecko, it uses WebKit (which is admittedly based on KHTML). But why are KHTML and Gecko mentioned in the user agent?
Let me guess? Opera user right?
Seriously take 5 minutes to read about what they did under the hood. It's interesting and possible very helpful for many web users who want a very fast and safe browser. For me it is probably a bit too limiting compared to Firefox but Google Chrome still has some merit no matter how you measure value.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Does it matter how good or bad it is, when you type in:
about:plugins
and the first thing you see is:
ActiveX Plug-in
File name: activex-shim
ActiveX Plug-in provides a shim to support ActiveX controls
Come on, web browsers are among the biggest pieces of software going, and Google is a major player. This is big news. There've been three browsers (and Opera!) for a long time now.
This is news.
In Capitalist America, bank robs you!
For me, it's not about WebKit at all. Chrome has two features I've wanted for ages: One, separate tabs are separate processes, which means that alert windows and that kind of crap are all tab-modal instead of application-modal. That way one little alert window can't tie up five tabs. The other thing is the JavaScript execution speed, which is nice.
That said, I'm not 100% sold on it. I like Firefox, and there are big JavaScript improvements coming down the pipe in the near future. Hopefully the tab feature will be picked up by Firefox in the near future as well, but we'll see... it may require a major rewrite.
Gmail running faster must be the JavaScript. From test results it seems that is the strongest point of the browser: JavaScript performance. Plus some other interesting features such as each tab it's own process. But JavaScript performance is of course what they are after: then Google Docs will run much much better, making it more attractive for people to start using.
I'm using Chrome right now and I find it to be easily the fastest browser I've ever used. Slashdot's Javascript is slow on my machine but that compiler Chrome has seems to make even this plodding page load up almost instantly.
Suddenly, the thought of Google challenging MS-Office with JavaScript makes a great deal of sense.
This is my sig.
It all started when idiotic websites started testing for 'Mozilla' in the User-agent string to make their sites break when you weren't using Netscape. So to keep compatibility, Microsoft decided to put 'Mozilla (compatible; blah blah)' in their User-agent string. The mess used by Chrome is the apex of User-agent stupidity, so far. All those strings are in there so that badly configured webservers won't serve the wrong content. The next browser that replaces Chrome will no doubt include this string and add even more words.
I wonder if Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple and others could get together to declare a User-agent flag day when, on the first of January 2009, all User-agent strings would remove the historic cruft and just tell you the browser and version. Sadly this has no chance of happening.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
No, it's not just you. Crossing DNS and HTTP is historically a very, very bad idea. Unfortunately though, it does improve ease of use for Joe "PEBKAC" Sixpack. Therefore, it'll probably end up being the more popularly desired behavior...
That said though, when I'm creating static links for use in a shortcut, document, nslookup or whatnot, I tend to use FQDN's myself. It's pretty much only in the browser that I cheat like that.
I speculate, however, that this conflict of interests is simply a result of the underlying technologies (dns/http) simply being used today for purposes beyond the scope of their original design.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
It's not just you. I also find this "intelligence" in browsers annoying as hell. In Firefox, there's a search field right next to the address bar - don't they think I'd use that if I wanted to do a search?
I'm sure a large part of the /. audience uses hostnames only. That's why we have domains in the DNS system, don't we? So I can put my home machine in there, too, and it knows that by "mail" I mean mail.lemuria.org and not mail.google.com
And I most certainly don't want it to Google for "mail" - thank you, but I don't think you'll find my mail somewhere in the Google cache.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I got no issues with it as well, however, I will stay with Firefox for a few reasons:
(1) Adblock.
(2) NoScript.
(3) Automatically clear private information on close.
That's quite the understatement, considering the browser hasn't been live for even 24 hours yet!
Also, the comic is quite entertaining for a geek...
If Google were aiming this at geeks, it would have made sense to develop a *nix or OS X version first, and get the geeks interested in using it.
Sadly, by making it Windows-only, they have missed the boat for stirring any interest in much of the more tech-savvy community, and quite probably have left yet another opportunity for malware infestations on insecure boxes.
Why can't servers simply return to ignoring browser identities and let browsers figure out for themselves what they can or cannot do?
They dropped that whole 'Dont be Evil' thing long ago. They're just as bad as most other large companies, worse in a lot of ways.
They have no respect for people's privacy. They act nice and try to look good but when theres a profit to be made they'll happily screw everyone for another big company or government.
A company starts out with ideals. They may want to change the World or give consumers an option. And in the beginning, they may be really really successful. But then as time goes on and they get bigger, they're no longer able to continue at their old growth rates - it's just not possible. The stakeholders ( usually Wall Street and the VCs) still want the huge growth that they or the previous shareholders saw when the company was young. So, little by little, the company starts to compromise its founding ideals. They may even get new management in to aid in that transition.
In a buttshell, a publicly owned corporation has no choice to become evil.
Eventually, User Agent strings will be so convoluted that it will be impractically difficult to identify a browser by the User Agent string. Then webmasters won't bother with the discriminating code. And then browsers can have less convoluted User Agent strings. And then the cycle starts over.
Or maybe people will just stop writing the discrimination code on their own. It is certainly much less than it used to be. Custom solutions are less common than open source professional solutions.
Write your own Choose Your Own Adventure. http://www.freegameengines.org/gamebook-engine/
Really, who is shocked that people decided to try it after so many hype?, I'd say that the first week's stats are not going to be really that relevant, launch day really is just that...
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
The user interface is limitted and the options available for customization are practically nonexistent based on a somewhat single-sided view from Goodger that browsers should not be customizable.
The real value of Chrome is V8, the JavaScript engine, and the smart, asynchronous management of native-code JavaScript objects on the client (without re-parsing them over and over).
V8 will be released to the open source community and hopefully will be the standard JavaScript engine for Firefox which actually has a useful user interface.
I can't really speak of Gears, though, but I think the real value of this release is V8.
Kriston
here
"Our opponent is an alien starship packed with atomic bombs. We have a protractor."
You obviously missed Chrome's, which never writes that private information to your hard drive in the first place.
Maybe not to my own..
Oh, and I forgot to ask - why has Taco linked to a "review" by someone who openly admits to not having even downloaded the product!?
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'
It is pretty much take it or leave it. This is very evident with google talk, I liked the feel of it but eventually I just couldn't change one or two things that bugged me so I am not so fond of it now.
At least they seem to like open standards. Google Talk uses Jabber, which means I can use any Jabber client, and even my own Jabber server on my own domain, to talk to anyone using Gmail.
Same with this browser. If you really start to hate it, you can always use a different browser. Not so with, say, IE -- if you really start to hate it, there's still a fair chance that one site will force you to use it anyway.
For that matter:
we don't want to slip back into the days of IE 6 being all that web developers targeted.
It kind of is that way now. It's incredibly rare that I find a bug that only exists on, say, Firefox, or Safari, or even Konqueror. It's incredibly common that I find a bug that only exists on IE6.
So, while we don't only target IE6, it is still the only browser we have to jump through hoops for.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Right. And that's why they have a 3% market share after one day. If only they had released it for Linux, then they could have had a 50% market share... of the 3% of desktops that run Linux.
You fail, Google! Put parent poster in charge of all your marketing at once.
I'm not saying it can't be misused, but the existence of the ID doesn't necessarily mean that they're doing advanced tracking of your surfing habits.
Because web developers are often complete idiots who believe that people using non-IE browsers are edge cases who need to upgrade to 'modern standards' like IE 7, rather than broken, 'non-standards-compliant' browsers like Safari or Firefox.
If there were a way to punch web developers in the face through some kind of browser extension, I think these people would learn a lot faster.
This is Google so think of their business model. Why would they want to block ads?
Because some completely retarded and stupid web developers disable functionality if they don't see what they expect in the user-agent.
There I fixed that for you.
You have to call these guys what they really are. no talent loser hacks that have an IQ below 60.
Any web-designer that does that crap is a moron. Raging Moron that cant tie his own shoes. I am tired of everyone sugar coating these idiots. We need to tar and feather them and make them stand out so that managers dont hire the fools.
I prefer to douse them in kerosene and set hem on fire, but HR still has not changed the company rules to allow that.
'Yeah, we force the Google Updater on you, we give your Chrome install a unique ID, and we associate that with your Google account so that *theoretically* we could track you anywhere you went, logged in or not, but we wouldn't do that! Honest! You'll just have to trust me on this one, and haven't we, at Google, earned your trust? Actually, looking through your recent e-mail conversations, IM conversations, blog posts, slashdot posts, and usenet posts, it seems as though you are becoming disillusioned with Google. We assure you that we will do everything within our power to change that, no matter how much you may resist.
Good evening, and thank you for choosing Google, 'the choice that is no choice'.
Apparently it has no Mozilla code at all - UA strings have no bearing on reality. So don't get your hopes up.
If there were a way to punch web developers in the face through some kind of browser extension, I think these people would learn a lot faster.
I'd definitely use it.
+5 for this drivel?
Can we be at least somewhat objective when saying "javascript is faster"? What plugins were enabled on the various browsers? Were there any themes installed?
Basically Chrome is a stripped down, light browser. Load it up with the full features of a mature browser (like Firefox, IE, Opera, Safari) and then compare. Better yet, I will wait 6 - 9 months for all this to happen and then read the articles in Slashdot about how Chrome really isn't that much better for all the hype.
You guys are taking that comic book way too seriously. Don't believe it until you have fairly tested it side by side in an apples to apples comparison.
This post brought to you by your friendly neighborhood MBA.
Even Microsoft gave up on the "familiar metaphors and mechanisms" when they introduced the ribbon in Office 2007, so I wouldn't fault Google for tossing it.
In fact, maybe it's really on purpose. With Google's vision of internet applications, there's no need to match other windows apps, as the browser would be the only application running. Inside that browser, there will be tabs with internet applications, few of which would mimic windows conventions.
"When you hit Ctrl+N the window that pops up is a blank window. In IE it's a clone of the current window, which is far more useful."
funny, but when forced to use IE, I HATE when it does that. Why would I want another window with the same page in it? I want a NEW window, that I will cause to be populated with a url of my choice.
"That and the downloads get cancelled if you close the browser - in IE they are seperate processes which live past the browser being closed."
funny, again. When I close an application I want it to close; go ahead and ask me to confirm, but don't pretend to close and keep doing stuff.
and, NO, I never feel guilty blocking ads, just as I don't feel guilty skipping commercials on my DVR, or not reading ads in newspapers, or throwing out those little cards in magazines. advertising is, by its nature, hit or miss. consider me a "miss".
If by "added value" you mean "makes pasting a new URL complicated and slow" I agree wholeheartedly.
Without trying to troll, I really am interested to know what you do that makes this "feature" useful -- I honestly cannot imagine a scenario where I'd want to open another window with the same web page in it. Even if there's some specific application you've got in mind, is the hassle of making cloning the default behavior worth the cost of not having to copy and paste the URL from the previous window from time to time?
Because web developers are often complete idiots who believe that people using non-IE browsers are edge cases who need to upgrade to 'modern standards' like IE 7, rather than broken, 'non-standards-compliant' browsers like Safari or Firefox.
If there were a way to punch web developers in the face through some kind of browser extension, I think these people would learn a lot faster.
Those people are not web developers, they are IE-developers.
I know that's a standard joke here (my UID is lowish after all), but no matter how many dupes, bad summaries and shoddy Idle stories I see, it doesn't mean that I don't hope for better going forward.
Someone else sells the ad space, right? Users submit the content. Others work on the codebase. How hard is it for the editors to check over what they're putting their name/alias to?
I faithfully went to see each review hoping for something insightful, and one was down (hard to avoid), one was benchmarks and not too interesting other than that, and the third was simply embarrassing Made For AdSense junk from someone who, as I said, hadn't even spent a couple of minutes to download the product itself.
Chrome Day II: Shitter than the first day.
'Thats they exact same thing a banana wrench monkey.'