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Development, Privacy, and Standards for Chrome
Continuing our coverage of Google Chrome, snydeq points out an Infoworld story about looking at the new browser from a developer's perspective, and another about how WebKit should be the focus of development efforts, rather than the browsers that use it. TGdaily notes that Chrome's search box will fetch all types of data, and can be made to display banking information with little effort. ABC and coderrr have slightly more paranoid articles questioning Google's commitment to privacy. NetworkWorld suggests that Chrome's unique process model (explained here) will require the development of new measurement standards.
Even KDE's switching to WebKit, at least as an option. It appears to be sinking into Apple's head that they can 0wn this project, but playing nice with others is more likely to get them something that works well. You know ... open source.
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I would love to see Firefox move to WebKit, it would certainly make life easier for web developers.
How's it run on a lesser box? Using available resources to do their job is what apps are supposed to do, after all ...
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I see no reason not to assume stupidity instead of malice.
I do actually. The HTML 5 compatible client side storage API was lready there. To remove it, they HAD to know it is there. So they stripped it out and replaced it whit google gears. No stupidity there. Any other excuses?
I just don't trust anything that bleeds for five days and doesn't die.
A thread for each tab is something that people have been requesting in Firefox for a long time now. I suppose architectural issues are what prevent it being implemented, but hopefully now people can see the real benefits that come with it the Moz devs will be encouraged to make the effort too.
Firefox freezes up a lot when opening multiple tabs, due to having to render and scale images, run Javascript and do the layout. FF3 is faster because it uses hardware acceleration for graphics, but the pauses are still annoying. In Chrome there is none of that.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
After several real-life friends began working for Google, their views on the company have been extreme. It much reminds me of my time at some early mid-90's startups that, no matter what, said company could do no wrong.
With that in mind, I would not be surprised at all to a lot of the Google hype on /., especially when it comes to blindly justifying possible "evils" of this corporate entity, are simply a bunch of Google employees operating independently in their off-time.
The drive behind my thoughts on this was one company I worked for ended up having a lot of controversy when multiple employees were doing this, but made the mistake of doing it from the corp lan, and got exposed internally, but when news hit other sites, it was considered some kind of evil campaign funded by said company while actually just frenzied staff operating on their own.
You realize that the windows don't have to be maximized all the time, right?
And a rather close one, too. It is amazing people let Apple get away with rebranding KHTML "Webkit", but hey. As long as it makes the world better, and the less code from Apple the better :P
Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.
Maybe I'm a little cynical, but it's an easy excuse for them. It basically strips them of all liability. Did it delete your %PROGRAM_FILES% and post your bank account numbers on a website (theoretical)? No problem for Google! You were using a beta product, you should have known better using a beta for anything important. Does GMail lose all your mail (real)? We feel for you man, but it's a beta, nothing we are required to, er, can do.
I'm a web developer and no one in my small company has ever used user-agent detection in the years I've been there. The closest we've ever come is checking for what's available to the JavaScript runtime, but even that is done by checking for the existence of objects and methods rather than seeing what browser is running.
With few exceptions (and those mostly only in design considerations), coding to standards has generally worked pretty well in recent years.
Developers: We can use your help.
I read the comic book style chrome blurb that google put up and part of it proclaimed that chrome would not crash your system like other browsers cause it opens each tab in a separate process and you can just close the tab to release the memory.
Well being a software engineer i installed chrome, opened a few tabs and task manager and well i watched the memory grow. Instead of one process that leaks memory you now have numerous processes that leak memory.
And they all seemed to get to 10Mb very fast and you could just sit there and watch the Kb tick over, all while your not doing anything. (the first tab was at 25mb)
So if your like me and use a minimum of 5 tabs I bet the amount of memory that you use for chrome will actually be more than firefox as there will be a memory leak in each tab and they will all grow.
But at least it gives the google devs and excuse not to fix the memory leaks.