Slashdot Mirror
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...]
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
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.
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
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.
Why can't servers simply return to ignoring browser identities and let browsers figure out for themselves what they can or cannot do?
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
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.'
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.
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?
'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'.
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.
"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".
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.'