Google Chrome Is Out of Beta

BitZtream writes "This morning Google announced that Chrome is out of Beta, and showing improvements for plugin support, most notably video speed improvements. It also contains an updated javascript engine, claiming that it operates 1.4 times faster than the beta version, and work has begun on an extensions platform to allow easier integration with the browser by third parties."

Comments

Credit where credit is due

[AKAImBatman]

I have to give the Chrome team credit. Chrome has been improving in stability and usability almost like magic. From day to day, it seems like problems I had previously just disappear. As it turns out, Chrome has an automatic updater that runs in the background. The browser is constantly and silently upgrading itself as the Chrome team push out new updates. The results are quite impressive.

If you'd reading this in chrome and want to force the most recent update, just go to the "About" screen. Chrome will tell you if an update is available and allow you to manually run the updater. There's a good chance that most users are already updated, but it doesn't hurt to check.

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open. Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As...". I realize that keeping a single Downloads directory is userfriendly, but using it as the default location when the user is overriding the download location is annoying. If I need to download 10 files, I need to navigate to the same directory 10 times. That's just ridiculous.

Otherwise my gripes are mostly minor and have no real bearing on its use in day to day activities. (e.g. I hate that I can't view the properties of an image. Sometimes I need to verify that its under a certain size. Or that there's no easy method of tracking page errors.) Thankfully, most of my gripes are developer-related and are better served by keeping a copy of FireFox around.

Kudos to Google for working on another alternative to Internet Explorer! If Chrome and Firefox can each grab a significant marketshare, Internet Explorer's hold over the Internet will disappear. Firefox's popularity has already caused it to wane. I look forward to the day when using IE will net you nothing but pages telling you to upgrade your web browser. :-)

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Ethanol-fueled]

We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux.

Bingo. When it reaches the functionality of Firefox I'll be the first to get it. It will give FireFox a run for its money.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Stopgap measure: Make a symlink/shortcut from Downloads directory to the desired location. Repeated navigation is less daunting.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Arionhawk]

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open. Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As...". I realize that keeping a single Downloads directory is userfriendly, but using it as the default location when the user is overriding the download location is annoying. If I need to download 10 files, I need to navigate to the same directory 10 times. That's just ridiculous.

That "killer feature" is in there, you just have to turn it on in the options, in the "on start-up" section. You just select the option that says restore the pages that were open last. I agree with you on the saving files thing, that is rather annoying.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[AKAImBatman]

You just select the option that says restore the pages that were open last.

Dude, you just made my day. I wonder when that was added? Or did I simply not notice it back when they released the browser?

Re:Credit where credit is due

[__aaklbk2114]

Been there since the beginning as far as I know.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open.

Wrench Menu > Options > Basic > On startup: "Restore the pages that were open last"

I've never had any problems closing the browser and losing my "tab space".

Re:Credit where credit is due

[au3276f8ads7bfsad76s]

Missing killer feature: Add a keyword for this search. I would switch 100% if that was available.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Homr Zodyssey]

The "Updater" killed it for me. I downloaded/installed Chrome, browsed a little and thought 'ooh isn't this neat.' Then, I killed it and fired up a video game. It was slower. I looked in my Task Manager and there's GoogleUpdater running. I uninstalled Chrome and never looked back.

I really don't care if they want to run an updater when I'm using Chrome. But I don't want software installing stupid stuff to run in the background when the software isn't being used. Its why I hate iTunes and Tivo Desktop. I'm even a little annoyed at Sun (Java Updater).

My machine is over 5 years old. I don't have the resources to allow every new piece of software to run some updater in the background, nor do I have the resources to go out and by a new machine right now.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

You CAN exit and save tabs.

Wrench -> Options -> Basic -> On Startup -> Restore the pages that were open last.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

I have no idea what setting I changed, but from the very first version I installed (close to the first beta), chrome would nicely remember all the tabs when I close it (not just after a crash, also a normal quit).

Search and thou shall find!

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

wait...google put something out of beta??

Re:Credit where credit is due

[daver00]

(e.g. I hate that I can't view the properties of an image. Sometimes I need to verify that its under a certain size. Or that there's no easy method of tracking page errors.)

This I don't understand it, but this is the biggest misconception about chrome there is! Chrome has the best and most comprehensive page debugger I have seen, for Javascript, html and css. Right click on your image, and select "inspect element" from the menu. You will get all of your image properties plus all of its surrounding code. Page errors, same deal just right click and select "inspect element" and you can get an extremely good, verbose output of any javascript errors, or track your way through the dom as it highlights elements firebug style.

Chrome rules, it is the best browser bar none, especially when it comes to development!

Re:Credit where credit is due

[tchiseen]

There are a few really nice little things that are already in Chrome. If you're used to FF, it may take a little re-learning, but that's half the fun of using software imo, is playing with it and learning what it can do. I love my Chrome. I'd love to have Ubiquity on it.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[raind]

As it turns out, Chrome has an automatic updater that runs in the background. The browser is constantly and silently upgrading itself as the Chrome team push out new updates. The results are quite impressive.

That must be why I keep killing that friggin process:
firefox 2016 8 29 767 133972 2:06:20.690 32:21:37.471
GoogleUpdate 764 8 6 66 1836 0:00:00.460 30:24:23.987

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open.

'Options' -> 'Basics' tab -> "On startup:" -> "Restore the pages that were open last"?

Re:Credit where credit is due

[damiangerous]

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open.

This feature works fine for me, perhaps you don't have it turned on? Tools-Options-Basics, there's a radio button in the On startup section called Restore pages that were open last.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As...". I realize that keeping a single Downloads directory is userfriendly, but using it as the default location when the user is overriding the download location is annoying. If I need to download 10 files, I need to navigate to the same directory 10 times. That's just ridiculous.

Odd, I don't see this problem on my end. For me it only opens to the default directory the first time after launch, and thereafter it opens to the last-used directory. At any rate, I wish you luck.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Chosen Reject]

Does it do still do it if you have multiple windows open, each with multiple tabs? That's one thing that bothers me about Firefox. In that scenario, I have to open up the task manager and kill it if I want all tabs on all windows to open. If Chrome allows me to end it normally and then start it up later with all tabs on all windows, I'd get it.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Paul Slocum]

Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As..."...

If you're in Windows, Direct Folders fixes that problem in almost every program. I'm not one to install a lot of add-ons, but since I discovered Direct Folders, I can't live without it.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

turn off the updates. use CCleaner or the autoruns tool from Sysinternals.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Pasquina]

Try running services.msc in Start Menu > Run. That lists all the services that are running and when they start up, whether automatically (at boot) or manually (when needed). I disabled GoogleUpdater, along with other updaters (Java, ITunes, RealPlayer, etc) and things useless to me like Remote Access and Secondary User Log-On.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Why didn't you just kill the task?

Re:Credit where credit is due

[thetoadwarrior]

Oh noes you have to disabled things!

I prefer browser to try and make the clueless masses keep their browser up to date. Some of us are, for instance, sick and tired of supporting IE6.

As a user who too often spends his time behind the technology curve I understand your problem with that but my web developer side says you're probably an intelligent user and can disable all the things you need to disable to make your PC run better more easily than companies can get users to upgrade without trying to make it dead easy or done in the background.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[RpiMatty]

Choose File->Exit or Quit to close all open firefox windows, and it will remember all of them when you restart it

Re:Credit where credit is due

[amRadioHed]

Doesn't really work. I disabled the GoogleUpdater service long ago, and yet the process is still running.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one area where Linux is unquestionably better-designed and easier to use than Windows.

In Windows, you have Windows Update and Java Updater and Apple's updater and GoogleUpdater and umpteen other updaters, all sucking up resources, all with completely different user interfaces -- oh, and also some other programs that don't update automatically at all so you have to check for updates manually or get stuck with an old version.

In Linux, you just have one updater, and it handles everything. Automatically. And normally you don't even have to reboot.

It's a shame Microsoft is refusing to learn. If Windows would only copy the good bits of Linux, while retaining the excellent software support which is the main reason people use it, it could be the best OS around, instead of merely the most widespread.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

What kind of a game do you run on a computer that has noticeable slow down due to a 1,116k process with virtually no activity?

Re:Credit where credit is due

[DarrenBaker]

+1: Boundless Optimism

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anthony_Cargile]

Don't hold your breath, there is a Linux and Mac version in the wings somewhere. Then back in beta for an indefinite amount of time.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Homr Zodyssey]

That was my experience as well.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Strep]

Right, I'll go for this right after firefox reaches IE's compatibility...

Re:Credit where credit is due

[blind biker]

but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open.

Say what? That's not true at all - tabs are saved by default by Chrome, and this has saved my ass countless times with my laptops (where I run Chrome).

I'd love to know more about your browser usage scenario. Something fishy's going on there.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Strep]

Why is is that developers think that everyone else is a developer too? The rest of us just want something that isn't slow, doesn't crash, and is free. Thanks, I'll have all 3.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Lyrael]

Been there since the start, as has the option to change your default download location....it's in the second tab of the options. :)

Re:Credit where credit is due

[rantingkitten]

I am fanatic about ditching unneeded services and startup items, so as soon as I noticed that stupid Google Update thing, that's exactly what I did. For some reason, it kept returning. Every single time. I uninstalled Chrome and it was still there. I had to go manually remove the directory to get rid of it.

Silently installing a retarded updater that's doing who-knows-what is about one-fourth of the reason I loathe Chrome and will never use it again. I'll reserve all the other reasons I hate it for another comment, but I really don't see why getting rid of the dumb updater was such a chore, or why it was there in the first place.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[ndnspongebob]

I completely agree, a lot of companies just try to gain control over your personal computing space.. i don't know, it seems like they need software etiquette? if there is such a thing,
if there isn't, i hereby invent it

Re:Credit where credit is due

[babalouies]

If you mean something to the effect of typing:

'wp searchterms gohere'

to search, say, Wikipedia (or whatever else you can wrangle an url for), then I know that at least Chrome, Firefox, Konqueror and Opera support it.

In Chrome you can customize it via
Options > Default Search > Manage

In the others, I think it's handled through bookmarks (add a keyword to the bookmark properties, and throw a %s in the link address for the search term).

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Vectronic]

"That must be why I keep killing that friggin process"

Indeed, im generally "ok" with an application that has some background nonsense I have to kill, but "GoogleUpdate.exe" refuses to go away until you delete the damn thing, there seems to be no way of disabling it via Chrome itself.

Pointless comment, but for me its a major reason why I don't use it, the only thing I give them credit for about it, is not naming it some obfuscated nonsense like guu.exe

Re:Credit where credit is due

[CyDharttha]

I haven't even gotten to use Chrome yet :( I hope they release a Linux version soon!

Re:Credit where credit is due

[darkpixel2k]

It's a shame Microsoft is refusing to learn. If Windows would only copy the good bits of Linux, while retaining the excellent software support which is the main reason people use it, it could be the best OS around, instead of merely the most widespread.

Excellent software support? Have you ever tried calling Microsoft support? Terrible. And Illegible.

And yeah--I know you were really talking about the number of applications available for the platform.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[spyrochaete]

I have a few browsers installed for when I need a secondary browser for whatever reason, but thanks to the persistence of GoogleUpdate.exe I uninstalled Chrome a long time ago. Can't the browser update when it's running? Well, of course it can, but Google published Chrome to increase its overall face time with its customers so that's why they'll cram as much down our throats as possible.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[rdnetto]

But if you do that, you can't have a default list of tabs. I think what the GP was referring to is the ability to open the previous set of tabs *in addition to* the default tabs, like IE7 does.
Oh, and the killer feature isn't tabs, its extensions. I'm surprised Chrome made it out of beta without them.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[rdnetto]

Yes, but that's not the same info when you get an image's properties in IE7, which gives you the file size and date created/modified. i.e. data on the actual file. All Chrome gives is the HTML, although I agree that it is an excellent browser - I've been using it since its first release.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[lysergic.acid]

frankly, i'm already tempted to give Chrome a try. i recently updated to FF3, and despite disabling/uninstalling over half of my Firefox extensions, the browser UI still locks up randomly for no apparent reason (it's quite annoying to be typing something and then have the browser suddenly stop responding)--something which FF2, for all of its flaws, never exhibited.

though, FF3 does load up a little bit faster (though I'm not sure if that's because of the new codebase or because a bunch of my extensions were disabled due to incompatibility), and opening new browser windows doesn't take nearly as long as it did before (3 seconds as opposed to 15~20 seconds). also, the tag support in the bookmark manager is a huge plus.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[rdnetto]

The rest of us just want something that isn't slow, doesn't crash, and is free.

I heard its called Google Chrome. It's this thing like Internet Explorer, except its not! Totally blows your mind! /sarcasm

Chrome's killer feature is that it is significantly faster than IE7 or Firefox. Now that it's out of beta, it'll be acceptably reliable (although I only had one crash when I was using it in beta, and that was early on). As for free, you're doing something wrong if you think you have to pay for a browser...

Re:Credit where credit is due

[More_Cowbell]

Then, I killed it and fired up a video game. It was slower.

I know it would be a hell of a coincidence if it was something else causing you problems, but... are you sure it was Chrome?
I just tried the same thing; fired it up (and updated, as I haven't run it since it came out - back then it did not have smooth scrolling).
When I killed it, the updater is sure there, but it is using 516K.
Of the 73 processes I have running, it takes third from last in memory use. Seriously, RAM for older computers is very cheap these days; if you notice when you are short 516K, pick up a gig for $15, regardless if you use chrome or not. Or am I missing something?

Re:Credit where credit is due

[jamesshuang]

Clearly, someone hasn't discovered firebug yet... I think I would shoot someone if I had to develop a full AJAX app ONLY on IE...

Re:Credit where credit is due

[lavardo]

you normally can disable the service or kill the process. on one of my puters, I just written a batch file to kill them upon boot. works for me. or rename/delete the update executable file.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Right click on your image, and select "inspect element" from the menu. You will get all of your image properties plus all of its surrounding code.

1. Yeargh, too much information!
2. Up-front, you're only shown the resolution the image has been scaled to (ex. if the browser auto-fits a large image, or if a webmaster has never heard of thumbnails). The image's native resolution is buried in one of the collapsed lists.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Merusdraconis]

Can you go and get some RAM, at least? My old computer is 5 years old, and I can still get RAM for it. It's ridiculously cheap right now, and as a bonus your game'll run loads better.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[lysergic.acid]

this may not be the ideal fix, but one solution is to get something like Tab Mix Plus, which allows you to restore all tabs AND windows. it also lets you merge all of your browser windows and move tabs between windows more easily. but all you really need to do is remember/restore opened tabs and windows to get the behavior you're talking about.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[The MAZZTer]

Check Scheduled Tasks. Google Chrome installs it there. The service were probably installed by some other Google product.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Firefox is still by far the most useful web developers browser, mostly because of Firebug.

For example - one feature I use pretty often in Firebug is it automatically logs all postbacks, so you can see what is returned on those pages.

Also, another feature I couldn't really see myself developing without : console.debug(obj). With firebug, this will log the object, allowing you to view all the properties of the object.

Anyway - I'm done advertising for Firebug - but it will probably be quite some time before any extension for chrome has anywhere near the features of firebug.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[DocHoncho]

Off-topic, but thanks for the tip, that's awesome.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually "the saving files thing" is also just a matter of settings. Same menu, one inch up.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never had a problem with Chrome not remembering my last save directory.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Baricom]

Google is the only legitimate company I've seen that auto-updates desktop software silently. Arguably, Google's implementation qualifies as badware for these reasons:

1. The fact that it auto-updates is disclosed only in the EULA, not separately from the EULA, as required by Method of Disclosure and Consent.
2. In violation of Software Which Installs Deceptively, the auto-updater makes substantive changes to the application, silently downloads, and does not clearly disclose the auto-updates during the initial install.
3. Previously, Google Updater was left behind when Chrome was uninstalled, in violation of Software Which Is Not Easy To Uninstall Completely.

Microsoft gets a lot of things wrong, but at least it lets you reject a patch you know is going to break something that you need.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[TheLink]

It depends on what he really meant by video game.

If it's an online game and the updater takes up significant bandwidth, then it can make things slower - more laggy.

As it is I think I won't bother trying Chrome for now - seems that uninstalling chrome does not get rid of the updater.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[theaveng]

Pass.

I've been using Mozilla or proto-Mozilla since the days of the Mosaic browser. From time to time I briefly flirt with Internet Exploder, but immediately return to using Netscape and Firefox. This line of browsers has served me well for the last 15 years and I see no reason to switch now.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[amRadioHed]

It looks like that's it. Thanks. I'd have never looked there.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[caluml]

frankly, i'm already tempted to give Chrome a try. i recently updated to FF3

/me too. I hate that "Awesome bar", and so do lots of other people. Also, it just runs worse, and they've messed around with little things that worked fine before.
Google - get AdBlock, Flashblock, and NoScript working (or write a framework that allows people to write them for Chrome), and I'm yours.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[danielsfca2]

> Can't the browser update when it's running

Uh, if the updating code is running, what do you care whether it's running in the process with the main browser process or in its own process where you can see what resources it's consuming separately? Do you think the number of processes is that important? I would rather have it in a separate process.

> Google published Chrome to increase its overall face time with its customers so that's why they'll cram ...

Yay conspiracy theory! I'm sure the engineers who designed the updater were thinking exactly that when they made that architectural decision.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

GoogleUpdate.exe is why I won't use any software from Google. Many of their downloads include this "helpful" resource hog.

The only 2 Google apps that I really like are Chrome and the Photos screensaver. For Chrome I just download the Chromium snapshot that includes nothing but the browser. For the Photos screensaver, I had to strip out the .scr, discard the rest and it works fine even copying it to other computers.

Google may have some cool software but I won't use any of it unless I can get it without the updater crap or strip it out manually.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[theaveng]

I never even noticed the difference until just now!

To me the "dropdown bar" has been a standard feature on both Firefox 2 and InternetExploder for quite a while. I've always liked that it saved typing time. I can type www.s and then just select www.slashdot.org quickly and easily. That's not annoying; it's pleasant.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[thetoadwarrior]

What is a google chrome patch going to break?

That's no stricly true either. XP, by default, should automatically update your PC. Mind you it will do the install upon shutdown and yes you can change the settings but you can stop the google update service too.

I just think if you liked Chrome in every other aspect then it'd make more sense to just disable the update. I think you'll find most computer users prefer what Google has done because they're too afraid to maintain their PC themselves.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[spyrochaete]

Uh, if the updating code is running, what do you care whether it's running in the process with the main browser process or in its own process where you can see what resources it's consuming separately? Do you think the number of processes is that important? I would rather have it in a separate process.

Yeah, I do think the number of processes is important. So many apps install permanently resident updaters (Java, Acrobat, Flash, etc.) when it would suffice perfectly for those apps to simply check for a new version when their base app is invoked. It's presumptuous and greedy of those companies to assume their app is important enough that it should be resident 24/7.

Yay conspiracy theory! I'm sure the engineers who designed the updater were thinking exactly that when they made that architectural decision.

It's a very popular theory that Google developed Chrome simply to put another logo in front of users' faces. That's why Microsoft took on Netscape. That's why Google invests in Firefox. It's not like these companies profit fiscally by spending R&D on this free software.

So yes, I do argue that Google's engineers were thinking of this face time when they designed an always-resident, inefficient, and unneccesary updater. If they cared to do it right they'd do it like Firefox.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[tokul]

I have to give the Chrome team credit. ... As it turns out, Chrome has an automatic updater that runs in the background. The browser is constantly and silently upgrading itself as the Chrome team push out new updates. The results are quite impressive.

You are joking right. Program updates automatically without user's consent. WTF is that? It looks like Chrome is not any better than any other trojan or spyware. Google does not have the right to execute remote code on user's machine unless user approves it.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Homr Zodyssey]

My RAM is maxed out at 1 gig. Its my understanding that this is as much as my mobo can handle. And seriously -- upgrade my RAM, or use Firefox instead of Chrome. That's a no-brainer.

I don't care if it is only 512K. If every app I install creates a 512K service to run in the background, my resources slowly vanish.

Several people are saying I should kill the process or disable it. I didn't see anywhere in Chrome's settings to disable it. And I refuse to be required to go kill a process or turn off a service every time I reboot. Not only that, but it kept coming back when I did so.

I run at least a half dozen softwares that check for updates whenever I fire them up. They do not require long-running background processes.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[redxxx]

With the new one, if you come here regularly you shouldn't really have to type anything.

don't bother with the www. part. Heck, unless you want the slashdot homepage, don't type slashdot. If you want this page again, type chrome and out. You want your comments page, type in comments and it will be near the top.

You can get to the specific page you want, without having to mess about with incomprehensible urls. I can't wait till they roll awesomebar-esque behavior into a file browser.

I love the thing, because I no longer load up webpages, just so I can get to pages I've already seen.

Chrome, of course, has the exact same type of addressbar, but it is also geared toward search. If it is just because of the awesomebar, Chrome is kinda a bad choice. A better option would be one of the FF plug-ins that just change it back to the FF2 version.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[redxxx]

just uncheck the little box next to it in MSConfig. It won't run unless you install one of google's other apps(gtalk, google earth, google desktop, etc.), which it is also responsible for updating. In that scenario, you may have to spend another 30 seconds to uncheck the box again.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[docgiggles]

Google has done a fantastic job with Chrome, it could well prove to be the app that kills Explorer. That said, however, I use a Firefox clone. The only difference besides the logo, is built in torrent support. I know Google likely will not add this, I am not switching browsers until they do. By the way, a great browser with built in torrent support is called Wyzo, it is secure and amazing. Go download it.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

To stop GoogleUpdater from running, remove it from the Run section in registry. Not sure if it's under HKCU or HKLM through as I've already removed it.

Besides, you may use Chromium instead. That one has no Google Updater built-in AFAIK.

http://code.google.com/chromium/
http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp/

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

Check this out too...

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/continuous/LATEST/

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

You are already running code you don't have the source for... what's the point if they call it a update.exe or browser.exe? you're still going to run the code they want you to.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[repvik]

...almost like magic. From day to day, it seems like problems I had previously just disappear.

And new ones have appeared ;)

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

> I can't wait till they roll awesomebar-esque behavior into a file browser.
They(Apple) have, it's called Spotlight.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[interploy]

I think it's more amazing Google actually got something out of Beta.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[redxxx]

Naw, that's just decent search. I'd never noticed it showing any sort of preference for what I commonly use(I suppose that is what 'Top Hit' is trying for, though the results aren't exactly impressive) and the interface isn't integrated into the non-existent address bar in finder.

I'm only running Tiger(10.4), as opposed to Leopard(10.5), so there may be some changes.

It's useful and saves me a bunch of time while I'm typesetting, but it isn't really what in an ideal world. I want the UI and functionality; Spotlight just isn't awesome enough.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[OutOnARock]

Seconded...but isn't Chrome with AdBlock Google biting off the hand that feeds it??? :)

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Quantumstate]

First you cannot disable this updater by any normal means. I have tried searching Chrome's options but there is not option. I tried disabling using some of the system tools in windows but it put itself back when i next used the browser.

Also your argument about keeping up to date is complete rubbish. It is easier to make the program auto update when the software is run like firefox does (for minor version numbers). If they don't open the browser they are not causing web compatibility problems.

Thus there was no reason for them to do this and I don't like it either.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Quantumstate]

You clearly need to be informed about firebug lite not quite as good as the full firefox version but so much better than nothing.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Snaller]

"The browser is constantly and silently upgrading itself as the Chrome team push out new updates. "

That in itself is a dealbreaker - NOTHING should *silently* update anything. *I* download new versions, if *I* want.

"run the updater."

Another deal breaker - don't bloody well install an 'updater' program.

Oh well, Google is evil - the tide has turned.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Snaller]

"I looked in my Task Manager and there's GoogleUpdater running. I uninstalled Chrome and never looked back. "

Perhaps you should - when I tried Chrome, and uninstalled it - the updater wasn't removed but was still running.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Snaller]

"..but I really don't see why getting rid of the dumb updater was such a chore, or why it was there in the first place."

Because, alas, they are turning evil.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Snaller]

"The service were probably installed by some other Google product."

No it wasn't.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

The "Updater" killed it for me. I downloaded/installed Chrome, browsed a little and thought 'ooh isn't this neat.' Then, I killed it and fired up a video game. It was slower. I looked in my Task Manager and there's GoogleUpdater running. I uninstalled Chrome and never looked back.

If you liked Chrome aside from the behavior of the updater, you might also like Iron.

http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php

Re:Credit where credit is due

[drew]

I'd really like to see some support for Foxmarks or something similar that also supports Firefox. Between 3 different computers and a half dozen or so virtual machines, keeping my bookmarks synced between all of them becomes really important, otherwise I am constantly wondering "Which computer was I using the other day when I found that page about FOO?" If they are working on extension support, than I assume this is coming as well.

This must be some sort of company record for them getting a product out of BETA. They managed to do something in a few months that many higher profile projects have not been able to do in years.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[daver00]

I love firebug, best addon to firefox ever, but then I do a bit of web development. However, chromes java console is far superior to firebug, far far superior.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[alexeiz]

Same for me here. GoogleUpdater was so hard to uninstall on Vista. I was disgusted by the whole process. You need to remove it from startup, then from services, then open (quite obscure) Vista tasks, search for the updater task and remove it from there. Then you have to go to AppData directory in your user profile and clean it from there. Hell, the last time I felt so completely violated was when I installed RealPlayer back in 2000. I'm so happy it's dead now. Same is wished for Google Chrome.

I tried to raise the issue on Chrome help forums and got completely ignored. I will never install this browser again or anything from Google that uses the updater for that matter. And I'm discouraging all my friends from using it by describing my experience in all details.

Out of beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I the only one surprised just to hear that Google has taken something out of beta?

Re:Out of beta?

[Hordeking]

Am I the only one surprised just to hear that Google has taken something out of beta?

No, and you ain't in Kansas, neither.

Re:Out of beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

[citation needed]

Re:Out of beta?

[Anonymous Coward]

Picasa went out of Beta not too long ago there.
That was when we were all laughing.

Re:Out of beta?

[UnknowingFool]

No, but am I the only one to check if the Ice Capades were performing in Hell this week?

Re:Out of beta?

[gparent]

Nope. I was about to make the same comment myself.

Re:Out of beta?

[Snufu]

Maybe "out of beta" is the Googlespeak equivalent of "Discontinued: end of product life cycle."

Re:Out of beta?

[Khuffie]

I read somewhere a reasoning for this: that google wants OEMs to bundle Chrome with their browser, and OEMs don't want to bundle software marked as 'beta', hence, magically, Chrome comes out of beta!

Re:Out of beta?

[AmberBlackCat]

So they're basically doing the same thing they did with Android, and saying it's ready whether it's ready or not...?

Re:Out of beta?

[lavardo]

well...i know a woman who's name is Beta... I hope Googlespeak doesn't discontinue her.

Re:Out of beta?

[gwbennett]

I am! And I would have expected a linux beta before the Windows build went final. Odd that the developers have worked on a browser this long that they can't even use themselves.

Surprised

[fredstrading]

I'm surprised, Google never takes anything out of Beta.. I've been using Chrome since it was first available, haven't had many issues with it. Seems stable to me.

Re:Surprised

[Abreu]

Thats what I thought... "But, but it hasn't even been a year!"

Anyway, let me know when we can get it from the Ubuntu repositories...

Re:Surprised

[Anonymous Coward]

The search engine is the only other google app which is out of beta I think

Re:Surprised

[mR.bRiGhTsId3]

Yeah, but part of that is, the masses get to beta test the latest and greatest features for Google. Its the price you pay for getting the service for free. They sell their services to companies that want to have the same kind of hosting, the only difference being that if you pay for their stuff, you get something they've branched and stabilized.

Addons

[kinocho]

I am sorry, I can not conceive the internet any more without add-block...

Re:Addons

[pushing-robot]

Get Privoxy and don't look back.

Re:Addons

[rite_m]

They are going to support extensions. The list includes content-filtering extensions like ad-block.

Re:Addons

[moosesocks]

I am sorry, I can not conceive the internet any more without add-block...

I find that subtraction works well.

Re:Addons

[LingNoi]

Great, however "going to" isn't "already support".

Re:Addons

[windsurfer619]

Please stop telling everyone about it! I want slashdot to remain free.

Re:Addons

[Shikaku]

You can't add things on the internet because it's all 1's and 0's, you have to do two's complement and add to subtract in binary.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

HOSTSman

Privoxy

PeerGuardian

Much better than AdBlock will ever be.
AdBlock is literally "for noobs".

Also, if you want it THAT much right now, there is a userscript adblocker
http://userscripts.org/scripts/review/33482
For Greasemonkey, which has limited support just now.

Re:Addons

[Surt]

With adblock I can right click on pretty much anything and make it go away forever. Does privoxy have a similar plugin to the browser to make it that easy?

Re:Addons

[fyleow]

My experience is the opposite. I discovered adblock and never looked back at Privoxy. The user friendliness differences are just staggering. Adblock is a one click install affair while you have to edit text based configuration files for Privoxy.

Re:Addons

[MoeDrippins]

It didn't used to. That'd be a killer feature, for sure.

Re:Addons

[trawg]

Weird, why was this moderated Funny?

I assume all you guys that run AdBlock realise that ads keep these websites free. I'm happy to absorb a few ads in the interests of getting free content.

Yes, sometimes they slow page loads, yes, sometimes they're annoying, but they keep sites free.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

Privoxy it the bomb. It even works for IE.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

And why aren't you moderated Insightful?

I turn off my ABP on sites I frequently visit as a gesture of support, though I'm sure many people kept theirs on all the time. I used to too but my conscience is slowly catching up to me.

Re:Addons

[Jaknet]

I assume all you guys that run AdBlock realise that ads keep these websites free. I'm happy to absorb a few ads in the interests of getting free content.

Yes, sometimes they slow page loads, yes, sometimes they're annoying, but they keep sites free.

While it's possibly true that having ads on a page help pay for and keep sites free, but as far as I know the site does not earn anything from you just looking at the ads, you need to click on them first.

I'm never going to click on the ads anyway, so what is the difference (for me) between me having to see ads that slow a page down that I'm not going to click on anyway and having no ads showing, apart from the fact that the pages are cleaner and faster to load.

There is no loss in revenue from myself as I don't click on ads in the first place.

Re:Addons

[geekboy642]

"for noobs"

Because my choice of a "right-click ad and select block" option is somehow valued less than your choice of "open config file in vi and type '4g2oblock adsite.com:wq'"
Mindlessly dismissing a simple working solution because there is a more complex solution available is no better than the Microsoft-only shills that forbid their students to use Linux.

Re:Addons

[RocketRabbit]

Ads don't keep websites free. They generate a bit of money for the owners of the website.

Websites were around before banner ads. They survive even now, despite the fact that just about everybody blocks ads.

You're the same kind of person who claims that watching TV but going to take a whiz during commercials is stealing.

Re:Addons

[dataninja]

I have a WRT54GL flashed to run Tomato Firmware and I can easily block all ads from my router without having to install Adblock on every computer I control. It's called management. http://lifehacker.com/5060053/set-up-universal-ad-blocking-through-your-router

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

Hear Hear...
the way i see it is that there are two disparate groups with things currently stopping them from making the switch...
To the tech savvy, ad-block is almost staple to web browsing
to the non-tech savvy, familiarity makes it difficult to promote a change, especially when most websites are supported and tested for IE, and non-tech savvy users don't really see the disadvantages of IE

Re:Addons

[DrEldarion]

While it's possibly true that having ads on a page help pay for and keep sites free, but as far as I know the site does not earn anything from you just looking at the ads, you need to click on them first.

Depends on the ads. Some are pay-per-click, but some are pay-per-impression.

Re:Addons

[rdnetto]

I never bothered using it. I've got a large cap and a fast computer, so they don't bother me so much. Plus, I get to support the website. The only sites I find annoying are the ones where the page contains more ads than content. :( It would be good if you could set a rule in ABP, something like 'only block ads if page contains more than X ads'.

Re:Addons

[teridon]

Privoxy is a great improvement over "bare" browsing (no nekkid jokes! :-P), but I found I could not live without the Firefox extensions NoScript, Greasemonkey*, and Stylish**.

The fast JavaScript engine is sexy, but Firefox will have that soon (I know it's in the 3.1 beta).

* Slashdot Sidebar Toggle, Slashdot Expandable Comment Tree v2, and Yousable TubeFix are my favs, see http://userscripts.org/users/14832
** slashdot tag removal, anyone?

Re:Addons

[lgw]

VI is for noobs. Real men use butterflies.

Re:Addons

[TechForensics]

This is from the Google Chrome site:

Use Cases
The following lists some types of extensions that we'd like to eventually support:

        * Bookmarking/navigation tools: Delicious Toolbar, Stumbleupon, web-based history, new tab page clipboard accelerators
        * Content enhancements: Skype extension (clickable phone numbers), RealPlayer extension (save video), Autolink (generic microformat data - addresses, phone numbers, etc.)
        * Content filtering: Adblock, Flashblock, Privacy control, Parental control
        * Download helpers: video helpers, download accelerators, DownThemAll, FlashGot
        * Features: ForecastFox, FoxyTunes, Web Of Trust, GooglePreview, BugMeNot

This list is non-exhaustive, and we expect it to grow as the community expresses interest in further extension types.

Re:Addons

[TechForensics]

I assume all you guys that run AdBlock realise that ads keep these websites free. I'm happy to absorb a few ads in the interests of getting free content.

Sure, we guys who run AdBlock realize ads keep some sites free. Let them keep their ads. We'll keep control over our browsing experience. Seems fair to me.

Re:Addons

[5865]

Ads don't keep websites free. They generate a bit of money for the owners of the website. Websites were around before banner ads.

Yea, bro. Ads don't keep websites free. Their owners do. Oh wait....

Somebody's got to foot the bills especially when you're getting slashdotted 24/7.

They survive even now, despite the fact that just about everybody blocks ads.

Last checked quite a bit of people are still using IE and I think it's fair to assume most of them don't have an ad blocker.

You're the same kind of person who claims that watching TV but going to take a whiz during commercials is stealing.

Yea, I bet GP is a fat 40 years old virgin who still lives with his parents and has 3 level 80 WOW toons.

Re:Addons

[Spit]

Slashdot has ads now?

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume all you guys that run AdBlock realise that ads keep these websites free. I'm happy to absorb a few ads in the interests of getting free content.

Maybe they keep some sites free but ads also keep the internet expensive! For those of us in countries like Australia where "unlimited" plans just don't exist (we pay by the gigabyte) advertising is often a waste of bandwidth. So far only Google has figured out that advertisements can be a few bytes of text vs kilo/megabytes of blinking images/video/flash.

Re:Addons

[Akzo]

Only if you want to change the default configuration, which by default blocks the majority of ad patterns. Privoxy can be used to block advertisements through any software that supports proxying while Adblock only works within Firefox.

Re:Addons

[Dhalka226]

They survive even now, despite the fact that just about everybody blocks ads.

Citation please? More likely you're simply pulling it out of thin air. Nobody I know blocks in-page (versus popup) advertising, and having worked for a digital advertising agency (I didn't do any banner ads, so I'm not apologizing!) and hearing the kinds of numbers they get I feel pretty safe in calling this out as the nonsense it is. If "just about everybody" is blocking them, then those handful of people who aren't sure interact with the ads an awful lot, and they hit refresh the page an awful lot to download them again.

You're the same kind of person who claims that watching TV but going to take a whiz during commercials is stealing.

And you're the kind of person who makes a shitty analogy and then tries to bash somebody with it. Nobody claimed it was stealing. Not on this site. Broadcasting a TV signal costs the same amount of money whether one person tunes it in or one hundred million do. And for that matter, it costs the same whether 0% or 100% of the sets tuned in have anybody watching them. Moreover, the TV stations get paid the same amount of money whether you actually watch the ads or not.

The Internet doesn't work that way. The get paid based on impression or click-through. Worse, every time you visit a website you cost the person hosting it money either directly or by using a finite resource. Many choose to foot the bill and not use advertisements, you're right about that; I'm one of them. Those who don't are making a clear and conscious choice, one which should be respected. You do not have some inalienable right to view their content. In the case of ads they're making a trade with you, and you're welching on your part of the deal. Do it if that's who you are, I'm not your mother, but don't make bullshit excuses and shitty analogies to try to pretend that blocking their ads and taking their bandwidth doesn't directly affect their wallet line. Twice.

Of course given the fact that you've already been modded into oblivion so many times your posts start at zero, I'm not sure why I'm taking the time to feed the trolls.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm surprised they are, considering Google lives on ads.

Re:Addons

[mapkinase]

Viewing ads for moral reasons? I am fed up w/ this crap since my Soviet Communist youth...

Re:Addons

[The MAZZTer]

[url=http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm]Trythis.[/url] It's tiding me over until we get an Adblock extension.

Re:Addons

[The MAZZTer]

So much for preview preventing errors... oops.

Re:Addons

[SanityInAnarchy]

When I used Firefox and Adblock, I maintained my own blocklist, refusing to simply grab a prefabricated block-everything list. I did this because there are a lot of ads I don't actually mind seeing, and sometimes I do actually click through and buy things.

But, I can't stand moving ads, especially Flash ads. Moving ads distract me, and Flash ads eat CPU while doing that -- and, in Flash 9, actually made my browser unstable. And the IntelliTXT people just piss me off... So I started blocking specific networks.

Now, I've switched to Konqueror for most of my browsing, and blocking a given ad just isn't as easy anymore -- no simple right-lick, and no Firebug to fall back on. Sure, I can run Firefox, but it's too much hassle to do all that just to maintain my own list...

So I don't. I just let Konqueror pull down one of the common blacklists, and I don't worry about it.

Moral of the story: If you want us not to block ads, make them less annoying. Maybe even make ads we want to see -- ads we go out of our way to watch. But do it quickly, before everyone is using an Adblock of some sort.

Re:Addons

[Jugalator]

Yes, sometimes they slow page loads, yes, sometimes they're annoying, but they keep sites free.

So Slashdot's ads give them revenue on merely viewing them?

Because I sure never go around and click on ads. Anywhere.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

No, websites are free because they started out that way. If a day comes that 100% of web surfers use an ad blocker, you'll still have the free good-will self-hosted websites, and you'll get pay-for subscription websites. Ads don't keep websites free. Everybody should install Adblock.

Re:Addons

[Ash-Fox]

VI is for noobs. Real men use butterflies.

Oh yeah! Good 'ol C-x M-c M.. butterfly.. in EMACS.

Re:Addons

[kprsa]

privoxy.org is blocked by my company's firewall...

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

I will block Flash-based ads as long as I can get my machine infected by malware just by rendering them.

Re:Addons

[Kashgarinn]

You know what the solution to that is? Have ads which aren't goddamn flash-based. Adblock doesn't block simple text-link ads. I used Google chrome for a few days without an adblocker.. I felt violated by all the flashing/motion crap.

if I see a flashing part of the screen in google chrome, I AVOID READING IT, but the fact it's there disturbs me to no end.

Simple contextual text-ads is fine, plus I actually do glance at the text instead of avoiding looking at it like the plague.

People with adblocker are not trying to avoid ads, they're trying to avoid ads which disturb them greatly.

Re:Addons

[Clifton Beach]

Viewing the ads won't help keep websites free - You have to actually buy the stuff that's advertised. Even clicking on ads to "pay" for content will only work until the companies who are advertising realise that they're paying for advert flirts.

Re:Addons

[pbhj]

Yes, sometimes they slow page loads, yes, sometimes they're annoying, but they keep sites free.

Perhaps I have ADD but I can't read webpages with constantly moving graphics on them. If I'm into a website I'll give it a pass through adblock - however any moving graphics get that pass revoked. Any more-than-normally-misleading advertising will do the same: "you have already won ...", "your system has a virus ...", that kind of thing.

I don't feel that it's too bad viewing content that people have displayed willingly and cutting out the deliberately misleading stuff and the stuff that prevents me from viewing the content.

That's my compromise, I don't think it's that unreasonable.

Re:Addons

[AncientPC]

Privoxy default installation should work well enough for most people. I haven't had any need to edit configuration files for Privoxy on any of the machines I've installed it on, but it's there if you want to tweak it.

Isn't this the same case with Ad Block? Works well enough with default lists, modify them if you want to add / remove certain filters?

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it really is.

I can block pretty much any ad functionality very easily and pretty much never need to look at it again.
It is called "thinking ahead".

HOSTSman deals with pretty much most Ads, Privoxy deals with the rest.
I see only the ads i want to see.

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

I assume all you guys that run AdBlock realise that ads keep these websites free.

Trawg, don't you realize that all ads do is turn websites that were created by cool people with something to say into shitty websites controlled by companies driven by a desire for profit margins? If EVERYBODY blocks ALL ads, ALL the time, the web will be improved.

Re:Addons

[windsurfer619]

Oh, I don't want you to see the ads. I want to keep technologies such as AdBlock to myself and the geeky crowd. If too many people start using it, sites like Slashdot won't be getting any revenue.

Re:Addons

[geekboy642]

Demonstrate one single ad (or ad type) that Privoxy (or similar tools) can block, but Adblock cannot block (or requires unreasonable effort to block). If you cannot immediately do so, my suspicion will be confirmed: you are a fanboy with no data to back your claim. Please also note that automatically-updating filter sets are a major feature of Adblock...if the ad in question is already blocked automatically, it wouldn't at all be a valid demonstration.

Re:Addons

[mapkinase]

"sites like Slashdot won't be getting any revenue." ... and they will come up with a different business model. Or else.

Re:Addons

[windsurfer619]

Sure, but they would have to be collecting revenue from the users somehow. I would just prefer they collected it from the stupid ones that don't know about adblock so Slashdot remains free for me.

Re:Addons

[Zantetsuken]

Exactly - in my case, it's not even about not having to look at ads nearly as much as keeping some random 1 in 100k ads having malicious JavaScript run on an otherwise generally respected site. As crufted as MySpace is, I use it because my friends do. And thanks mostly to Firefox, AdBlock+, and NoScript - I (hopefully) won't be hit by the ill reputed malicious ads...

That aside and to your point of keeping control over your own browsing experience - I visit /. to see whats going on and what people think may motivate Google finalizing Chrome, etc - not read ads for Dice employment services and webhost/rackspace rental companies...

Re:Addons

[trawg]

Sure, we guys who run AdBlock realize ads keep some sites free. Let them keep their ads. We'll keep control over our browsing experience. Seems fair to me.

That's a pretty interesting definition of 'fair'. They're providing you with a free service; the unwritten "Internet browsing contract" that exists between you and them is that you occasionally look at their ads, and they'll keep providing you with interesting content.

I fully support your rights to run whatever software you want and control your own browsing experience - I just don't think you should be surprised when more and more sites move to subscription-based services and use more techniques like interstitial ads, page takeovers, self-served ads, etc.

Re:Addons

[trawg]

So Slashdot's ads give them revenue on merely viewing them?

Because I sure never go around and click on ads. Anywhere.

Probably, yes. Many ad displays are "per impression", not "per click".

Re:Addons

[trawg]

if I see a flashing part of the screen in google chrome, I AVOID READING IT, but the fact it's there disturbs me to no end.

Yep, that's fair enough too. There's a few reasons they use Flash, but the main one is obviously because they can get away with stupid shiny flashing animated obnoxiousness, because it draws your eyes (I assume there's a lot of studies about this in advertising lore).

Re:Addons

[RocketRabbit]

Actually, I start at 1. And, everybody I know blocks inline ads. I help people block Google Adwords as well, because they annoy me.

Get a real business model.

Re:Addons

[RocketRabbit]

"Citation please?"

This is Slashdot, not the Wikipedia. Please feel free to google "ad block" if you don't believe me - there are literally hundreds of solutions, and many major browsers include the ability to block ads out of the box.

"Those who don't are making a clear and conscious choice, one which should be respected. You do not have some inalienable right to view their content."

They don't have to put their content up on the web. And, yes, I believe until somebody attempts to secure their page, that I have the right look at it in any manner I choose.

NOOO!!!

[Anonymous Coward]

Out of beta!!!! There are no more certainties in our lives!

Still no Mac / Linux support.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to try it, but I'm still waiting for the Mac and Linux ports. But I guess if they take it out of beta before those are out, it's not on the top of their list.

Re:Still no Mac / Linux support.

[LunarEffect]

Yup, its not good news for me as long as there is no Linux port =D

Re:Still no Mac / Linux support.

[IceFox]

A few weeks ago I wrote up a summary of the status of chromium on linux. http://benjamin-meyer.blogspot.com/2008/11/status-of-chromium-on-linux.html Summary: You can run it, but a full chrome will be no time soon.

Re:Still no Mac / Linux support.

[SanityInAnarchy]

And the point which I've been trying to hammer home lately:

An important lesson that Google should take away from this is the importance of developing cross platform software on all platforms at the same time. Assigning just one guy six months ago to the Linux port would have significantly improved the source on day 1.

And just one guy certainly wouldn't have been a huge setback to getting it working on Windows, either, which is the frequent excuse given in this thread for the lack of non-Windows support.

Re:Still no Mac / Linux support.

[xouumalperxe]

Beta means "feature complete, but has bugs". The windows version was a beta. Now they squashed enough bugs that they feel comfortable removing the "beta" tag. The whole "problem" (if you want to call it that) is that they didn't have os x or linux versions in beta, not that they moved the one platform that was beta to gold.

Re:Still no Mac / Linux support.

[netJackDaw]

In my opinion if it's only available on Windows platform it does not exist. It has taken faaaar to long time to produce a public version for Linux and Mac.

That's nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

What about Gmail?

Re:That's nice...

[Midnight Thunder]

What about Gmail?

It all depends where you are. Some places its Google Mail :)

OEM deals

[javacowboy]

I'm sure Google is trying to work out deals with OEM's to bundle Chrome on Windows PC's. Obviously, they can't do this while the browser still carries the "beta" tag, which is akin to a scarlet letter.

It's interesting they chose to drop out of "beta" before they implemented one of their supposed top features, namely, cross-platform compatibility.

Re:OEM deals

[Bashae]

Maybe they'll have separate betas for the Mac and Linux versions.

Re:OEM deals

[powerlord]

Just out of curiosity, is this the fastest a Google product has ever gone from "released as Beta" to "its not Beta, its Production"?

Re:OEM deals

[benedict]

Dunno. Are there any other Google products out of beta? :-)

Re:OEM deals

[HTH NE1]

Dunno. Are there any other Google products out of beta? :-)

Here, let me google that for you(*).

(*) Enable Javascript for LetMeGoogleThatForYou.com and GoogleAPIs.com.

Call me when it runs on Linux (n/t)

[Anonymous Coward]

n/t

Hands down the fastest browser

[Blood_PuP]

While it seems to have gotten slower since some of its earlier versions like (0.2.149.30) it is still by far the fastest browser by a pretty big margin when comparing javascript with DOM interaction.

In the jsballs fight timedemo it is twice as fast as the next closest browser. Chrome 1 completes it in 21 seconds while Safari 3.2 takes 46 seconds.

Re:Hands down the fastest browser

[MtViewGuy]

I noticed that, too. On my HP Pavilion a6400f PC, I was able to run the jsballs fight timedemo test in 22.5 seconds in Chrome 1.0, 44.5 seconds in Safari 3.2, 79 seconds in Internet Explorer 7.0, and 88 seconds in Firefox 3.0.3.

Google must have really tweaked the rendering engine for some really fast performance indeed.

Re:just what we need

[PotatoFarmer]

They should look into that advertising thing, I hear there's a market.

almost

[Anonymous Coward]

Now to just get gmail out of beta...

Re:just what we need

[digitalunity]

What if everywhere you look you see google, and their ads. What if being the advertising monopoly is all they need to be.

Saturating every software niche they can find, from drawing to blogging to news to search, all with their ads on top. Sounds profitable to me.

Still no Mac version

[Anonymous Coward]

Although even the founders of the company told press that they are ashamed of the lack of Mac version, now it is out of the beta and still no luv for Macs... Sigh.

Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[HaloZero]

Call me when I can get it in .dmg format, or just sudo apt-get install GoogleChrome

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Use aptitude, it tracks dependencies better. (sudo aptitude install GoogleChrome)

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[secmartin]

There are .dmg's of the current version at http://securityandthe.net/chrome/ if you want to give it a try. These are based on the current SVN tree.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[jonaskoelker]

Yeah, not releasing on all three major platforms seems pretty brain-.dmg'ed.

I'm seeing a pattern, though. Could it be that developing cross-platform applications is something for which Google doesn't have any aptitude?

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[bledri]

Yeah, not releasing on all three major platforms seems pretty brain-.dmg'ed.

I personally run Mac OS X, work on Linux and only use Windows to test against IE [1], so I understand the frustration. But I find it hard to believe that one can't understand hitting 90% of the market as quickly as possible and them filling in as much of the remaining 10%. It's not brain-damaged, it's pragmatic.

[1] All of this on my Mac using VMware Fusion in unity-mode which is pretty slick. Oh and I also run Chrome and can't wait for the Mac OS X version.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[AdamPee]

I'd say this is kind of a point. I don't think you should be taking something out of beta before you have reached all of your core beginning announced goals, or announced that you're giving the bugger to it. The point is, that they announced that it is supposed to be cross platform, that it kind of like leaving the tires off your car and calling it close enough.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[nahpets77]

Sorry; meant to mod +1 funny, but selected "redundant" by accident.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[SanityInAnarchy]

But I find it hard to believe that one can't understand hitting 90% of the market as quickly as possible and them filling in as much of the remaining 10%.

If you ever intend to hit that 10%, you're better off starting there.

Keep in mind, Windows/IE is always the odd one out. Stick to POSIX, and it pretty much works everywhere except Windows. Stick to standard html/css/javascript, and it pretty much works everywhere except IE.

We keep an ie.css and an ie.js file, for that reason. We develop in Firefox, and only fire up IE to verify that it still works. If it doesn't, we then add some hack to support IE -- much easier than trying to take a completely hacked-up version developed for IE, and adding the cross-browser compatibility after the fact.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[ndansmith]

Probably will actually be Chromium, the non-branded, open-source distro of Chrome.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[iris-n]

I don't think that it will ever happen.

However, I do hope to sudo apt-get install googlechrome

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[cr_nucleus]

... and only use Windows to test against IE ...

VMware to use IE ? That's a waste of resources.

try ies4osx http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/
note that you need darwine to install/run it. http://www.kronenberg.org/darwine/

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[LunarCrisis]

Could it be that developing cross-platform applications is something for which Google doesn't have any aptitude?

If they'd written it as a web app, like most of their other services, this wouldn't be a problem!

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[smegged]

Stick to POSIX, and it pretty much works everywhere except Windows.

Hey that could be their new slogan. "Stick to POSIX - it works everywhere except in 95% of computers!"

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I'm not saying that you shouldn't implement Windows. I'm saying that if you do POSIX first, you've still got most other OSes, which means lots of practice porting and making it portable.

Which means a cleaner architecture, and probably an easier port to Windows.

At least, I know from personal experience that it's easier porting web-standard sites to IE than it is porting IE-only sites to standards.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[smegged]

whoosh

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[Ash-Fox]

Stick to POSIX, and it pretty much works everywhere except Windows.

There is a POSIX subsystem (provided by Windows Services for Unix) available for Windows which is more compliant than OS X is.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've read, it doesn't display fonts the same way, etc.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[SanityInAnarchy]

(provided by Windows Services for Unix)

And therein lies the problem. How do I get that on a typical user's machine?

Re:just what we need

[Hognoxious]

Meh, it'a all hype.

But does it run Linux?

[FlyingBishop]

All these speed boosts annoy me. I open it FF in Linux, it runs at roughly 1/2 the speed it does in Windows. Of course, I've been using the same profile for roughly 5 years, so that might have something to do with it (and I've only been a Linux user for 1.5 it's a miracle my profile still works.)

Still, when I reboot to Windows, Chrome vs. Firefox? Can't tell the difference, in terms of speed. Usability, Firefox wins hands down. Hotkeys, flashblock, Firebug (when flashblock isn't enough), reopen closed tab. ( I don't want that memory freed every time I close a tab, thank you very much. I'm just doing it to unclutter my workspace. I may need that tab back in a minute, and I'd rather it not vaporize to reclaim 1% of my memory, especially when I am doing nothing with it but browse the web. )

Call me when:
a) Chrome is available on Linux with similar benchmarks
b) I can easily correct my error if I accidentally close a tab.
c) They give me my menu bar back / provide analogous hotkeys for every option concealed behind the buttons.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

b) ctrl + shift + t

PS: What you are only browsing the web with your computer? No long running mathematical simulation running to reveal the secrets of the universe? I'm not sure you belong on slashdot.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[LMacG]

> b) I can easily correct my error if I accidentally close a tab

When you open a new tab, a list of recently closed tabs is available.

Aside from that, and it's been covered all over this post, they've publicly stated that they are working on Mac and Linux versions, as well as an add-on framework.

Most importantly, nobody is forcing you to use Chrome. If your list of requirements is absolute, then just don't use it. Simple.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Bashae]

I prefer Firefox (3) and am a Firefox user, but as a web developer, I have observed that Chrome is faster and more efficient. You can see it more clearly in certain, more complex rendering situations - For example, text scrolling on top of a fixed background image.

Personally, what I miss in Chrome (more than the menu bar) is the status bar. I like hovering the mouse pointer above links and quickly seeing what they all do before I actually click them. I also can't understand the absence of the stop button. I know I can press escape, but it's not exactly a feature that should be that hidden.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[FlyingBishop]

I use the campus machines for that. My single core machine I bought in 2005? Really?

And I suppose, I also run Emacs, half a dozen terminals, and Amarok. However, all told, they still leave enough memory that I really don't care how much firefox uses, just so it's fast.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Kyle_Katarn-(ISF)]

I also can't understand the absence of the stop button. I know I can press escape, but it's not exactly a feature that should be that hidden.

It isn't hidden when the page is loading; look at the right end of the address bar.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[stg]

Just press Ctrl+Shift+T to restore the last closed Tab.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Bashae]

Oh, thanks. That partially solves that problem. Is there a way to stop annoying background music in the websites that have it?

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is a statusbar, it is just hidden when not active.
It appears at the bottom left.

I would like it if they did have an option to select to always have it open, but it "gets in the way" of the Chrome philosophy.
And make it more noticeable as well, it tends to blend in with quite a few websites if you aren't really paying attention to the screen.
Needs a deeper blue and darker text IMO.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[daver00]

Chrome has a status bar? Its sort of half length, but you can certainly hover over links and see where they go. Its in the same place it is in firefox, bottom left.

Also to the parent, I am a huge firebug fan, but chromes "inspect element" wins hands down, it is by far the superior debugger.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[HTH NE1]

For example, text scrolling on top of a fixed background image.

Meh, that's too common. Give me text scrolling on top a background image scrolling half as fast in the same direction.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[creativeHavoc]

Chrome has a status bar. It doesnt show unless there is status though. It shows as a blue background box in the lower left of the browser. There is a stop button. It shows up when a page is loading. It is located on the far right of the address bar. It replaces the "play" or "go" button that is there when you already have a page loaded. This makes a little more sense than Operas way of doing it, which is to show the stop button in place of the refresh button... however both make sense in their own way.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

It isn't hidden when the page is loading; look at the right end of the address bar.

Now if only someone could tell me where did they hide, the master password setting and the print preview...

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Bashae]

I don't think the Opera way makes any sense at all!

I really don't see the status bar, except sometimes it flickers there (like when I go in and out of the window). Maybe the version I have doesn't have it, or has it bugged.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[dubz]

I don't know what you're talking about. Seriously. The "Go" button, at the right end of the address bar, acts as a "Stop" button while the page is loading. And when I hover on a link, I can see the target in the bottom-left corner of the browser window. As far as I remember, both functions have been there from day 1. If I'm wrong then maybe you just need to run an update?

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

I also can't understand the absence of the stop button. I know I can press escape, but it's not exactly a feature that should be that hidden.

The stop button is on the right of the location bar. It replaces the "Go" arrow when the page is loading.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, what I miss in Chrome (more than the menu bar) is the status bar. I like hovering the mouse pointer above links and quickly seeing what they all do before I actually click them. I also can't understand the absence of the stop button. I know I can press escape, but it's not exactly a feature that should be that hidden.

The status bar is there when you hover your mouse.
There is an X to the right of the address bar (when the page is loading).

Try opening your eyes.
Anything else missing?

Re:But does it run Linux?

[The MAZZTer]

I dropped my Firefox startup time from 30-40 seconds to 6 seconds.

Wipe your profile except for bookmarks, history, cookies, and extensions and passwords. Wipe everything else and you might get rid of a couple files that Firefox is having trouble with.

Next if you use Adblock Plus, wipe the adblockplus folder. Adblock was adding 11 seconds onto startup for whatever dumb reason.

If you use FlashGot disabling automatic download manager detection (which causes a sub process to be launched every time Firefox starts up in Windows) could help, never benchmarked it though. You don't need it to run automatically, you can update the list manually through Options.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, what I miss in Chrome (more than the menu bar) is the status bar. I like hovering the mouse pointer above links and quickly seeing what they all do before I actually click them. I also can't understand the absence of the stop button. I know I can press escape, but it's not exactly a feature that should be that hidden.

Re: status bar, a light blue tooltip should appear in the lower left of the window whenever you hover over a link. That's your status bar.

Re: stop button, it replaces the Go button whenever a page is loading. Yep, it's a disappearing button clear on the other side of the screen from all the other nav buttons. People have submitted reports on this idiocy several times, but Ben (Goodger?) always WontFixes them, saying it's "by design".

Issue 545 (No stop button)
Issue 763 (Where the hell is th STOP button!)
Issue 1032 ("Stop loading page" button may be next to "refresh" button.)
Issue 1559 (Navigation Usability - swap 'go to' / 'stop' with 'bookmark')
Issue 3057 (Let both Go and Reload change to Stop)

Re:But does it run Linux?

[BZ]

There are several fun things going into the performance difference there. The three main ones I know of are:

1) MSVC++ happens to generate faster (and smaller) code than g++ does. This is especially noticeable when turning on profile-guided optimization. That gave a 10% speedup across the board on Windows, and basically nothing on Linux. It seems that the g++ profile-guided optimizer could use a lot of work.
2) Certain parts of the OS that are of critical importance to web browser performance are faster on Windows at this point (Uniscribe vs Pango and whatever GDI vs X are the two main comparisons here). It doesn't help that moving to cairo means that a lot of operations are delegated to the X server, via RENDER. In theory this means that they can be executed efficiently on the graphics hardware, but in practice it means they use the same software codepaths that the browser could have used itself. In fact RENDER uses the same pixman library that cairo uses for its own software fallback, except recent cairo versions use a much newer and faster pixman. And while it's possible to ship a cutting-edge cairo with the browser and get the faster pixman for client-side use even if your system cairo is older and slower, I don't think you want your browser making changes to your Xorg install. ;)
3) Some of the system APIs on Windows are a little easier to use efficiently than equivalent ones on Linux. Font selection on Linux, apparently, did get a good bit faster an memory efficient between Firefox 3 and the current Firefox 3.1 beta. But this took a good bit of analysis of exactly how fontconfig works and how to work around some of what it does.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

The status bar is still there. Put the mouse over the link and in the bottom LHS of the screen a small tooltip like zone will appear. Shows the destination URL - very handy and doesn't obscure the screen unlike FF's which takes up a whole line.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[TruchiSoft]

But you *do* have a sort of status bar, just hover the mouse above a link and you will see the real address in the bottom left, its very subtle but its there in a very non intrusive way.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Cigarra]

Have you *used* the browser?

The status bar for hovered links is "automatic", as it appears anytime you... hover on a link.

And the stop button... is automatic too. It appears as a large X, on the right end of the address bar, when the page is loading.It's difficult to reach (or remember it's there!), though . It's just too far away.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[CosmicHound]

A stop button would be nice but no need for the status bar. If you hover over a link you still get the target displayed at the bottom of the screen, it's just appears over the text rather than having a space reserved for it all the time. The screen layout is why I love Chrome, it's particularly great for laptops.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, what I miss in Chrome (more than the menu bar) is the status bar. I like hovering the mouse pointer above links and quickly seeing what they all do before I actually click them

Chrome has a status bar. Hover your mouse over a link and look at the bottom left of the window. The status bar only appears when you need it.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[AncientPC]

Regarding b), both in Chrome and Firefox (but not IE) you can hit ctrl+shift+tab to open up your last closed tabs. I'm not sure how far back it goes, but it's always been enough for me.

Now, I'll just wait...

[mdm-adph]

...for the next update of SRWare Iron. :D

Yeah...

[ZarathustraDK]

...but does it run Linux?

Re:Yeah...

[zuperduperman]

Why yes it does!

http://www-jpc.physics.ox.ac.uk/DemoLinux.html

[ Warning: above link will in fact boot linux in your browser - I'm serious! ]

Don't forget the WebKit team

[Midnight Thunder]

The WebKit team and anyone who ever contributed to it should also get praise. Without it Chrome would never have seen the light of day. Google Chrome is essentially Google's chrome around the rendering engine and any tweaks they provided to WebKit.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[AKAImBatman]

I agree. The WebKit team has been simply amazing. Though in Google's defense, parts of the browser are customizations over WebKit. e.g. The V8 Javascript engine is quite a bit different from JSKit or Squirrelfish.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Enderandrew]

Except Chrome is light-years better than any other Webkit browser out there. They had some truly innovative and necessary ideas when it came to a multi-process, sandboxed browswer with a virtualized javascript engine. Saying that Webkit deserves all the praise isn't remotely fair. If Webkit alone was enough to light the world on fire, we'd be using Safari. And despite the benchmarks of nightly builds of pure Webkit running like a speed demon, Safari sure doesn't.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Chrome is light-years better than any other Webkit browser out there. They had some truly innovative and necessary ideas when it came to a multi-process, sandboxed browswer with a virtualized javascript engine.

You may have a point about V8, but Microsoft beat them to the multi-process/sandboxed browser.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been using Safari/Webkit nightly builds for a while. It's very, very fast. Chrome is a bit faster though :)

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[chrysalis]

Before anyone else, thanks to the KDE team. It looks like Apple and Google names shadow the developpers behind KHTML, but WebKit would probably never have existed as it is now without KHTML.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

WebKit would probably never have existed as it is now without KHTML

...and for that matter, lets all thank Adam and Eve. Because none of this would be possible if the first two Humans didn't procreate!

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[onefriedrice]

Nobody said WebKit should get all the praise...

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[ScentCone]

Chrome is light-years better

Yeah, but is mo better ?

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

Aaaah, I see what you did there. You sneaky creationist you.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

What about KHTML team who did all the original work? Everyone forgot them already? :)

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[kestasjk]

How about giving the KHTML team some credit for writing WebKit? It seems like only yesterday that Apple forked KHTML from Konqueror.

It's definitely the most impressive thing about KDE that they wrote such a good rendering engine that both Apple and Google ended up using it, but you always hear Apple getting praise for WebKit but never the KHTML team. (A bit like OS X and BSD I suppose, but more so)

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[moosesocks]

WebKit would probably never have existed as it is now without KHTML

...and for that matter, lets all thank Adam and Eve. Because none of this would be possible if the first two Humans didn't procreate!

Man, that must have been awkward for the first few generations....

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

I completely agree. The moral of the story is more sex.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[ndixon]

Thank God Chrome's out of beta.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Anonymous Coward]

...and for that matter, lets all thank Adam and Eve. Because none of this would be possible if the first two Humans didn't procreate!

And we should thank the snake, for getting them that first Apple.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Midnight Thunder]

So did Adam or Eve ever get out of beta?

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[MonkWB]

Man, that must have been awkward for the first few generations....

It still is for some of us.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[ianare]

That's because 'WebKit' sounds better than 'KHTML'.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[wasabioss]

Before anyone else, thanks to the KDE team.

Before anyone else, thanks to Richard Stallman. Without him, we wouldn't have gcc and the whole khtml thingie wouldn't be possible to compile at all!

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[sootman]

The WebKit team and anyone who ever contributed to it should also get praise. Without it Chrome would never have seen the light of day.

Unless they went with Gecko. Or wrote their own. WebKit is great but the rendering engine is the (relatively) easy part.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Dot XCF]

The human race still seems to be in beta, so I'd harbor a guess at the answer being no...?
Blaming someone else in 3...2...1...

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[Hes Nikke]

The WebKit team and anyone who ever contributed to it should also get praise.

How about giving the KHTML team some credit for writing WebKit?

i think that the KHTML team does fall under "anyone who ever contributed". ;)

No Linux support?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

Sorry Google, but if you're looking to finish what Netscape started -- namely, making the Internet an application delivery platform that does an end-run around Microsoft's monopoly -- you had damn well better make Linux, Macintosh, and appliance-embeddable versions available before you remove the "beta" label.

Re:No Linux support?

[TurboNed]

There's nothing to prevent them from releasing Mac and/or Linux Chrome Beta. Just because the Windows tree is in a stable, polished, "finished" version (as much as Google software is ever "finished") doesn't mean that they can't apply the Beta tag to other ports of the tree.

Re:No Linux support?

[geekoid]

or Else!

What do you maen "better"? They can do it hwo they see fit. Going after the substantially larger market to get onto PCs at the manufacturer is smart.

They know they won't get onto the MAC until they prove they ahve the chops it Jobs(if ever) and the linux crowd..is..well the Linux crowd.

Re:No Linux support?

[Tokerat]

Yea, um, I don't remember seeing a download of those...

Re:No Linux support?

[TurboNed]

you had damn well better make Linux, Macintosh, and appliance-embeddable versions available before you remove the "beta" label.

And *THIS* is what I was responding to. Just because the Windows version is out of beta doesn't mean that when a Linux and/or Mac version is released (I'm sure it's a "when" and not an "if"), it'll be released as non-beta. Removing the "beta" label is *NOT* premature because the Windows version isn't beta anymore.

Re:No Linux support?

[blind biker]

Sorry Google, but if you're looking to finish what Netscape started -- namely, making the Internet an application delivery platform that does an end-run around Microsoft's monopoly -- you had damn well better make Linux, Macintosh, and appliance-embeddable versions available before you remove the "beta" label.

Google doesn't care to develop for Linux and Mac - because Microsoft is NOT an important player on those platforms. The work of "making the Internet an application delivery platform that does an end-run around Microsoft's monopoly" is already done on Linux and Mac.

direct download / standalone installer

[Anonymous Coward]

http://cache.pack.google.com/chrome/install/154.36/chrome_installer.exe

I really don't like how their stub installer seems to send all sorts of strange information to several google domains.

Re:direct download / standalone installer

[leuk_he]

worse... i use firefox noscript and to download....

"You need a JavaScript-capable browser to download this software. Click here for instructions on how to enable JavaScript in your browser."

Everyone except Microsoft welcomes Chrome

[David Gerard]

"We absolutely promise that we only want to completely screw over Microsoft with this, and certainly not Mozilla Firefox," said Google's Sundar Pichai. "That we put a pile of our sponsored Mozilla developers on the project is completely irrelevant. We're not evil, remember."

"We are so, so happy with Google Chrome," mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. "That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement."

Microsoft was unfazed. "Browsers don't need to be integrated with online apps," said marketing developer Ian Moulster. "Certainly not like the operating system ... I'll just get back to you."

Google's new browser will give you their web and email services, photo processing, mapping, office applications that will run in said browser and will make you a cup of tea. This is all paid for by personally-directed text ads in your tea leaves, based on analysing a DNA sample taken when you sip the tea and sending your genetic code back to Google for future targeting.

Pichai stressed that Google would maintain complete confidentiality within the marketing department of whatever the browser accessed concerning your confidential business data, bank account details, medical information and personal preferences in pornography. "We're Google. We know where you live. In a completely not evil way. Sponsored link: Get Chrome Browsers on google.com. Or we'll make you use Windows Live."

Re:Everyone except Microsoft welcomes Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh Diva, you're such a pricktease!

Can't download it here

[aardwolf64]

Well, my company specifically blocks download of Chrome. Maybe they know something I don't.

Re:Can't download it here

[Atti K.]

or maybe they are just paranoid.

Attn: Network admins Security issue

[semifamous]

This program installs itself to %userprofile% instead of %programfiles%

lUsers without admin privileges can install this, introducing unwanted software to your network and creating security issues.

I believe Google must fix this, but I don't think they will unless people start demanding it.

Any suggestions as to where we can do that where they might actually listen?

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Just give it to your users, then? If you're supplying such a slow browser that your users are looking for a faster one, perhaps it's your fault.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[rtfa-troll]

If your security policy relies on users not being able to install software but the users can install software, you have a problem; not Google.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

(Please note, I say this as the IT guy who locks stuff down)

Chrome's behavior is shared with many other newer programs(usually if you install them with the "just for me" rather than "for all users" option) and is a good thing. Programs that break unnecessarily because of lack of permissions they don't need are a bad thing. This is all part of the move away from legacy single-user design crap, where virtually everything requires arbitrary rights, programs die if they aren't in C:/Program Files, and there is poor or no separation between immutable system files and commonly modified user files.

If tightly controlling installed applications is necessary, you can use signature or hash based execution restrictions, and solve the problem the right way, rather than relying on the behavior of third parties.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[BitZtream]

So, you mean, it was written properly and doesn't require admin rights. So assuming you've properly configured your PC and network this software is not a major threat since it never needs to elevate itself to admin status. It can still damage files and network resources your user has access to, but thats generally far less damaging than taking over the entire PC and effective any user that logs into it or any network resource it has access to.

Your comment is extremely ignorant and indicates that you have no clue about being a network or systems admin. You can run firefox on any windows machine that has a writable directory on it, same for almost all properly written software. Good luck running a windows PC without a writable directory some where, you'll break to many legitimate apps.

So if your idea of 'security' is because the 'installer' doesnt write to any other directory than the 'program files' directory, then you have no security at all. What do you do about the people who install software on their own PC at home then just copy the files to a USB drive, bring it to your network and copy those files to the %TEMP% directory, or their %USERPROFILE% or %APPDATA% directories, all of which you will typically have write access to?

Google isn't going to 'fix' this 'issue' because the 'issue' is with the person who thinks a flaw, no amount of complaining to anyone is going to help you, all the people you would be complaining to have about a billtion times more of a clue than you do about the 'issue'.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[thisisauniqueid]

This sounds like it was written by an admin who enforces the use of IE on "his" networks, because it's safer if everyone has to conform so that he only has to lock down one platform. I have news for you: Chrome will only increase security for your network, regardless of what browser you force your users to use currently (even if that's Firefox). Go read the design docs...

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Arterion]

I think the better method is to install the immutable code to Program Files and all the mutable user data to the user's home directory. I am really not fond of everything trying to install to the user's profile. Even WoW tries to do this. It make administration more difficult because there is no segregation between data and programs.

It doesn't really matter in Vista, as it will virtualize Program Files in the user doesn't have permissions to write there. That can be a real headache for stupid programs that store data in Program Files.

It's not as if the user couldn't change the install path to somewhere it has read and write permissions.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[spandex_panda]

get fucked. I use XP computers 'unprivelaged' all the time at uni and it it ridiculous. Portable apps are the best thing, at least now I can use a great text editor (notepad++) without needing admin rights! Google writes nice applications which don't need admin rights to install and so don't affect your security but enable me to work more effectively and you have the gall to complain about it!

I say stop limiting folks. Sure people need to be stopped from installing all applications cause they end up installing "poker madness" and "spkcatcherXP2009VISTA" which breaks stuff, but don't stop folks installing good programs which install in user profile areas.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Tony Hoyle]

Windows doesn't have the concept of a per-user program files (which makes per-user installation somewhat of a fiction, alas). It's designed around installation being centrally controlled and managed The last place you want software installing is in the user profile, because then it gets uploaded with the roaming profiles (I can remember having horrible problems keeping login times down when people did stupid things like drop .iso files on their desktop.. took a lot of user training to remove that habit).

Running the code shouldn't require any particular permissions.. but installing? That's an admin task, not a user task.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Tony Hoyle]

What do you do about the people who install software on their own PC at home then just copy the files to a USB drive

The usual response would be to get security to escort them to the exit.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Tony Hoyle]

He's pointing out a bug in the installer.

The default for executable code is in program files. If a user wants to move it and they have permissions to do so then there's nothing stopping them.. but defaulting to the user profile is just plain wrong. Home users will have write access to the program files directory anyway. Business users (if they have permission to install things) will probably have quotas on their roaming profiles and this could send them over, using up valuable IT support time.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[geekoid]

Not if it plays in it's own sandbox.

I want it in %userprofile%, and it's nice to see someone using %userprofile% like they were intended to be used.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[TheThiefMaster]

A business user shouldn't have permission to run executables from his home folder if you don't want him installing stuff.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Number10]

"This is all part of the move away from legacy single-user design crap..."

Part of the reason that Windows is still buggy and a pain to administrate is because multi-user requirements are continually being shoehorned into a single-user OS. The NT team had some fundamental assertions: single user, graphics drivers in user space. Most of today's problems are because those assertions have been grossly violated by subsequent versions of Windows.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed, however I'd like to provide Chrome as an option for all users without having to install it in everybody's profile.

It would be nice to have a single installation of Chrome on all PCs so everyone who chooses to use it can do so.

There's a lot of talk in the comments on this article about people having the choice to use Chrome in their environment, how about Google giving us the choice for how we want to use it?

There are existing mechanisms in place in Windows which reduce Administrative overhead, why can't have the choice to make use of them?

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[rdnetto]

The way Google did was weird though. My first impression was that they wanted it to be completely isolated, so that you didn't need admin rights to install it. And unless you block all foreign exes, there will always be some apps that you can install, especially ones that don't actually need to be installed so much as extracted from a zip.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[lgw]

It would be far more accurate to say "single admin at the desktop". NT wasn't designed to be a desktop OS, after all, it was designed to be a file and print server, and to run apps like Exchange or SQL that you wouldn't install for any particular user.

When the NT kernek was pressed into service as a desktop OS for Win2000, Microsoft re-thought the "graphics drivers in user space" thing, but didn't re-think the "multiple users running interactive programs" requirements. This is why Citrix is still in business.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[semifamous]

Have you installed Chrome? You check a box and click a button in Firefox, and it launches another program to install Chrome, which asks for no confirmation or installation location.

I'm not used to my browser launching applications without downloading it and it asking me if it should be run first.

Rule #1: Users are stupid.
They don't know WTF they're doing and when software ends up on the computer that offers to be their default browser and all of a sudden, their menus are gone from the top of "the Internet", they ask for help, and someone has to show them what they did so they don't do it again or configure the computer/domain so that it can't happen again.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[The MAZZTer]

If users can download and run arbitrary files from the internet you have bigger problems to worry about methinks.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[The MAZZTer]

Oh yeah... and I find it funny Google choose the install location they did. Programs are supposed to go into C:\Program Files*... but now MS has locked it down. So Chrome just installs itself elsewhere**. I see many more messy programs like this in the future.

* - I'm a rebel, I install all my programs in E:\Programs.

** - I checked, you can move it elsewhere without consequence if you want, just the profile location is hard coded and the uninstaller won't work obviously if you move it.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

chrome.exe --user-data-dir="X:\new profile" if you want to use a different profile folder

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Jonathan]

The usual response would be to get security to escort them to the exit.

If the IT punks tried that in any place I've worked at, *they* would be the ones out of a job. IT staff are like janitors -- they may not like to clean up messes the real employees make, but their job is to clean up messes with a smile -- it is hardly their place to criticize users for making them, as the users typically have far more valuable skills than a mere MSCE certification.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Anonymous Coward]

someone needs a hug

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[arcade]

Running the code shouldn't require any particular permissions.. but installing? That's an admin task, not a user task.

We have a very, very, very different worldview.

Admin tasks are installing the operating systems and the default profiles. It's creating the authentication mechanism. It's automating the installation process. It includes designing the network, configuring the firewalls and IDS systems. It includes creating / making available a system for automatic updates. It includs having the administrator access to the "domain", and thus to all the workstations.

Individual users on the other hand, have been given a login and password. They have access to the programs already installed. They also have access to their home directory, where they can put the extra stuff they need. That's where they can install the extra software needed. That's where they can pull down stuff and compile it themselves - if need be.

It's not an admin task to restrict the users productivity. It's an admin task to enable them to do their work. It's an admin task to help them making smart choices.

Installing software is an admin task.
AND
Installing software is a user task.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Ash-Fox]

Chrome will only increase security for your network, regardless of what browser you force your users to use currently (even if that's Firefox). Go read the design docs...

Lies!

Chrome has tabs crashing occasionally - this decreases job security with your boss, the net admin gets fired over the frustrations the company has over the admin's decisions to use the browser and security is lost because there is no competent admin anymore!

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Ash-Fox]

Your comment is extremely ignorant and indicates that you have no clue about being a network or systems admin. You can run firefox on any windows machine that has a writable directory on it, same for almost all properly written software. Good luck running a windows PC without a writable directory some where, you'll break to many legitimate apps.

Not if you set the appropriate security policies in group policies to permit software to run only in certain locations that are not writable for the user (default is windows folder and program files locations when you enable it).

What do you do about the people who install software on their own PC at home then just copy the files to a USB drive, bring it to your network and copy those files to the %TEMP% directory, or their %USERPROFILE% or %APPDATA% directories, all of which you will typically have write access to?

Consider them a security threat when I get a .exe has been downloaded onto their roaming profile warning and perhaps apply additional restrictions to that user or contact security for corporate espionage, should it look that way.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Ash-Fox]

Corporate espionage is a big problem for some companies. I've known some companies to remove people immediately for using ssh on port 443 to get around the firewall to do something stupid, like chat on licq.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Lord Bitman]

How do you know that? There's still no --help option or similar to list command line switches and what they do. Also, "invalid" options are silently ignored.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[BitZtream]

Typical windows admin.

Let me give you a real quick hint, and google can confirm this for you. Group policy controls are practically worthless. All it takes is one hole to get around them completely, and 9 times out of 10 that hole is the open file dialog. Group policies only control apps which respect them, and there is no requirement that apps respect them or even are aware of them. As a developer I often end up on site for customers with 'locked down' PCs on which they use group policies in their domains to prevent lots of thing from being allowed. I've yet to run into something controlled by group policies that actually prevented me from doing it. It usually just means I get to charge the customer more because I have to write a quick workaround app to do what I want.

Group Policies will help you control the normal user, but does nothing to stop someone with a clue.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[BitZtream]

While I agree with almost all of your post, however, much like the janitors, you MUST listen to IT carefully. They, just like the janitors, have a responsibility to maintain things in a proper manner. If you are causing them problems in doing their jobs, you aren't an asset to the company anymore, regardless of how little you think they mean. Or how much better than them you think you are. You aren't really special either. No one is, we're ALL just cogs in the machine, sorry to burst your bubble. We all have to work together to the goal, not think we're special and the rules don't apply to us cause those other people are just peons and we're the most important part of the puzzle.

Run crap on your PC that you aren't supposed to, you're going to get in trouble, possibly fired.

Take a shit in the middle of the hallway, you're going to get in trouble, probably fired.

Just because IT and Janitors aren't your core business doesn't mean you get by with ignoring them or treating them like they don't exist. Being a dick isn't welcome anywhere, regardless of how great you think you are.

And just like janitors don't have to clean up your stupid mistakes with a smile, neither do the IT workers. They aren't your bitch, and you aren't any better than them. Most of them, the janitors and the IT workers are probably more intelligent than you are judging by your post.

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[Ash-Fox]

Let me give you a real quick hint, and google can confirm this for you. Group policy controls are practically worthless. All it takes is one hole to get around them completely, and 9 times out of 10 that hole is the open file dialog.

Didn't work here. I even tested on a older version of win2k sp2, didn't work. Don't bullshit me.

Group policies only control apps which respect them, and there is no requirement that apps respect them or even are aware of them. As a developer I ...

Developer to developer then, do a exec() on a application in a location that is not supposed to be authorized, watch what happens. Hint: The process doesn't execute.

Group Policies will help you control the normal user, but does nothing to stop someone with a clue.

Group policies aren't the end solution to everything, however, they are pretty flawless for preventing application execution.

FF for Linux does suck quite a lot.

[Anonymous Coward]

And it's on linux! ...
No, wait, it's just another browser for a platform that already has plenty good ones like FF and Opera.

Re:FF for Linux does suck quite a lot.

[karlwilson]

"FF for Linux does suck quite a lot." "Will it run on Linux" is the question, not "how well does it run on Linux."

40% or 140% or alpha-bravo % ?

[alexandre]

1.4 times better is marketing speech for 40% better and not 140% right? :P

Re:40% or 140% or alpha-bravo % ?

[Muffinmasher]

1.4 times is everything speech for 40%

Re:40% or 140% or alpha-bravo % ?

[ceoyoyo]

1.4 times and 1.4 times better are two very different things. Unless you're advertising something.

What Chrome still needs

[br00tus]

* The ability to print a document without the date, the web page URL etc. on the header/footer
* The ability to block images per web server (or at all) like Firefox can

Re:What Chrome still needs

[ducomputergeek]

I'm sure that someone will make a plug-in to block the advertising, but considering that Google is an advertising company that sells web ads as their life blood, I can't see them offering ad-blocking in their own product out of the box. Unless it blocks all ads save for the ones from Google.

It isn't going to replace Opera on my desktop anytime soon, but then again, they'd have to release versions for Mac, Linux, and FreeBSD for it even to run on any of my desktops.

Re:What Chrome still needs

[Anonymous Coward]

Holy cow! Someone uses Opera? Good to know! I'm sure my clients will make me start supporting it any day now... *cough*

But seriously, Opera is a great browser with the worlds worst marketing.

Re:What Chrome still needs

[dubz]

Unless it blocks all ads save for the ones from Google.

Since I find Google ads less obnoxious, I can live with that.

Re:What Chrome still needs

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm using a Chromium fork called "Iron" that can use an ad-block list. Works well for me. Google for "Iron browser" ;)

Re:What Chrome still needs

[Ash-Fox]

A Opera user.. How.. Quaint.

Re:What Chrome still needs

[aaron alderman]

Would this raise antitrust issues?

Chrome is out of beta after less than a year

[Anonymous Coward]

...and yet GMail isn't after how long?

Re:Dear blacks, this song sets your cause back 50

[Ethanol-fueled]

While that song is silly, don't forget that white people also write stupid music. Gewn Stefani's Hollaback Girl for example, or anything recent from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. From the song "Around the World", third chorus:

I know I know for sure/
Neeng neeng yong yong yeeng yong nang nong eeng nay-yong/
I know I know its you/
Neeng neeng yong yong yeeng yong nang nong eeng nay-yong/

That example reminds me of an asterisk comment(which read "nonsense syllables" in the printed music of the Doors' "Roadhouse blues" where Jim Morrison sings:

You gotta roll, roll, roll,/
You gotta thrill my soul, alright./
Roll, roll, roll, roll-a got-ta chee-chay-chow bop-a-lula...[*nonsense syllables]
Thrill my soul./

Still can't see a Linux version

[Rikiji7]

Not really needed anyway.

Re:just what we need

[Anthony_Cargile]

I still don't understand why Google and Sun are offering the same software under different names. Google is backing the Mozilla Foundation while supporting their own Chrome (read: they didn't write Firefox, just back it), and Sun is distributing both OpenOffice and StarOffice. Can somebody please tell me why and how companies can do this?

I would have expected somebody to stand up at a meeting and go "Hey, lets merge the products and save money!" at some point, especially in this growing economic hole (didn't Sun just do a huge layoff, too?)

Meanwhile Gmail is still in beta

[genner]

Someone had to say it.

Re:Meanwhile Gmail is still in beta

[moogoogaipan]

"What comes up must go down." Gmail will probably staying beta until the day they realized they are heading downward. Gmail will come out of beta and save them...for a while. Yup, you'll be paying to save your emails.

Re:Meanwhile Gmail is still in beta

[Anonymous Coward]

No one is excited about e-mail. It's one of those necessary evils no one actually wants to develop 'cause there's no money behind it (or at least far less). Gmail is pretty much the only e-mail client (desktop or web) except maybe Mail on Leopard which has innovation and significant development behind it.

Surpised to be honest...

[fubarific]

I love Google as much as the next person, however as of late Chrome has been crashing more and more for me and I've been turning back to Firefox.

Never mind that when I installed this update Chrome crashed when I restarted it...

I hope my position is unique.

Ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

but when is it coming to Linux? I use it in Windows on my other PC and I can barely stand firefox on my linux box now. Chrome is so clean and nice to use. Please, Google!

Wait, it's OUT of Beta?

[Thomas Charron]

Kudos! For Google, thats some kind of amazing acomplishment.

Javascript?

[SinShiva]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/mozilla-fights-back-with-new-firefox-benchmarks/

I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Google

[Phizzle]

But... Have they removed that "Big Brotherly" unique ID "feature", that each of the Chrome Beta installations came with, that loudly identified you on the web?

Re:just what we need

[Hognoxious]

I still don't understand why Google and Sun are offering the same software under different names.

I would try an explain it with a car industry analogy, but there isn't one.

you want hotkeys?

[Anonymous Coward]

if you close a tab by mistake.. ctrl-shift T , or look at the new tab menu.

Is that two in one?

Congratulations, Google!

[bigstrat2003]

Glad to hear the best browser on the web is out of beta! I look forward to seeing where it goes from here a great deal.

Re:Congratulations, Google!

[lavardo]

"But I want to eat cookies all the time!"

Just let Chrome eat your cookies.

Re:just what we need

[Ethanol-fueled]

Then let me explain: GM is one company, but releases two virtually identical yet differently-branded trucks with similar names. For example, the Chevy Silverado 1500 and the GMC Sierra 1500.

But, as your parent stated, that is very redundant and dosen't make much sense, especially as the companies are clearly suffering(Sun's layoffs vs. GM's bailout).

Bummer

[doktorstop]

Followed the link, went to Google page, actually READ the announcement.. got all excited... had a quick argument with myself why it was time to ditch Firefox and won it.... looked ant whether I have a system backup just in case... sighted... pressed the Download link...

*drums* ... only to discover that it is Windows-only! So we people with Macs and Linuxes can have a bit more time before we get totally googelized.
Amen

Good!

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. We know something you don't.

Every search and keystroke is recorded, aggregated and inspected by "GOOG".

My clients have sensitive work and client lists that can not be known by their competitors or the public. Having GOOG know about it is unacceptable.

Give your network team a thumbs up for me.

The only reason Google is "free" is because YOU are the product. YOU and all the data, searches and clicks are sold to marketers and advertisers and most likely the government.

btw, who do you work for? I'll call them and thank them myself.

Re:Good!

[headbulb]

I would suggest to the original poster to use chromium instead of chrome. Chromium doesn't send what's typed in the address bar till enter is hit.

I would suggest that anyone that's wanting to protect things being sent to Google should totally disable any search from the search bar. In any browser.

I'll take care of this...

[bledri]

Um, go ahead and mod me "Whoosh."

Must be too much caffeine...

Linux on the desktop

[Ikipou]

With Chrome, 2009 is definitely going to be the year of Linux for the desktop. oh, wait...

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Enderandrew]

I only used Chrome for a day before going back to Adblock Plus and Firefox, but I swore there was an option to turn this off.

Then again Google already has tons of my private data via email and I'm not overtly paranoid. If you want a version of Chrome that doesn't phone home at all, check out Iron.

Re:just what we need

[Firehed]

I don't know if there's any Mozilla funding beyond the ad revenue on the Firefox home page and search box, but they could rig that up without Google's explicit blessing by changing the home page. As of now, Firefox defaults to google.com/someaffiliatecode, but it could easily be updated to go to mozilla.com/googlecustomsearch with (as far as I'm aware) no drop in revenue, and certainly minimal coding efforts.

Google's interest in the browser market is promoting web standards, by and large. I'm sure it's a hell of a lot easier for their crawler to weight content with valid, semantic markup correctly than a bunch of tables with unclosed cells. Which means better search results, which means that more people use Google's search, which means that more people see Google's ads, which means more money for them.

As for Sun with Open and Star Office... well that's a mystery that probably exists just so we can ponder it.

Thank You!

[PhotoGuy]

Thank you Google, for the 1.4x speed increase. Now it might finally be usable.

Seriously, the beta kicked-ass for performance; there were pages I thought were not functioning (or were loading from cache) because they were so incredibly fast. 40% more performance could be scary :)

If only they'd put some higher priority on OS X. I'm dying for it on OS X. Firefox seems to become a dog and chew up 30% of my CPU most of the time, and lately Opera seems to be doing the same. At least with Chrome if one of the pages causes something similar, I can isolate it and kill the process; with Firefox/Opera I have no idea which page is bogging me down. (Oddly enough, with both, when I close all tabs, the CPU usage stays high; some background JavaScript??? Who knows...)

Browsers have become so bloated, Chrome is a breath of fresh air. And they seem to be addressing the plugins, for those who want to bloat it up themselves :) (Although Firebig on Chrome would be a dream.)

Still praying daily for Chrome on OS X...

Re:Thank You!

[daver00]

This is the third time I've said it in this discussion: Chrome has a better-than-firebug website debugger built into it. Right click on anything and select "inspect element" and it will open up, alternatively you can go to the page menu > developer > javascript console. It will list the dom in full, give you each and every css property and where it is coming from, highlight dom elements as you hover over them, and it has a nice verbose javascript debugger. Seriously, try it out. I love firebug but chrome is just so much nicer than firefox in every possible way.

I feel that Chrome is to Firefox what utorrent is to Azureus.

Re:Thank You!

[Anonymous Coward]

Download WebKit nightly. Download Stainless. Set Stainless prefs to load WebKit nightly frameworks. Bingo: super fast, multi-processed browser you can use now.

Re:Thank You!

[Anonymous Coward]

It will list the dom in full, give you each and every css property and where it is coming from, highlight dom elements as you hover over them

So just like the DOM inspector?

Re:Thank You!

[Civil_Disobedient]

Except it also comes with a debugger.

Re:just what we need

[Tokerat]

God dammit there IS always a car analogy! You're a genius!

Re:just what we need

[glittalogik]

Vauxhall Astra
Opel Astra
Chevy Astra
Saturn Astra
Holden Astra

QED

The only new feature I want...

[Anonymous Coward]

... Is to be able to choose where to install Chrome. Executable in Program Files (hell, or even public under Vista!) for all users and user personal data in their profile, you know, like most every other civilised (or otherwise) piece of software out there would be a nice thing.

Doesn't matter if they listen.

[SanityInAnarchy]

Chrome is open source. Just as we now have portable Firefox, people with an interest in running Chrome in hostile environments like yours are likely to develop portable Chrome, with or without Google's consent.

It looks as though you'll have to invest in some actual security.

Re:Doesn't matter if they listen.

[Intrinsic]

It looks as though you'll have to invest in some actual security.

*Chuckle*

Thanks Google...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because we don't have enough browsers to be compatible with as it stands.

Re:Dear blacks, this song sets your cause back 50

[Anonymous Coward]

You're seriously comparing this crap to Jim Morrison and The Doors? As for Gwen Stefani, she may be white, but apparently no one's told her that.

Issue importing from Firefox?

[athakur999]

Anyone have any problems during installation when trying to import settings from Firefox? It says it imported bookmarks and moves on to search settings at which point it seems to hang. The cancel button doesn't do anything and I have to kill it from the task manager.

If I skip the Firefox import it works okay though.

Re:Issue importing from Firefox?

[dark whole]

just uncheck search settings. that seems to break it

Re:Moderators, please note: Microsoft troll

[Anonymous Coward]

This person does nothing but anonymously troll Slashdot for a living. He is a shill and should be modded "-1, Troll".

Re:just what we need

[Surt]

Because corporations aren't single entities. They are comprised of many people, and sometimes those people don't agree on the best path for the company. Also, some people are territorial, and may insist on maintaining their path even if it ISN'T in the corporate best interest. It is very hard for corporations to weed out that kind of behavior.

Epic marketing failure

[IDKmyBFFJill]

Google need some new guy in the marketing department. The biggest failure of Chrome is the name. The same with Android. They had the chance to use a cool name that makes the product name easy to pronounce, sharp and sticks to the common people, instead they used a feminine (aka gay) name only geeks in labs would find cool (if at all). The timing of the release was also an epic failure (premature), these days you don't tell the world you're the best browser without at least a respectable amount of plug-ins available. Bottom line, if they released Chrome under a better name and a small plug-in library and turn off the updater, they'll have at least double the user base right now.

Re:Epic marketing failure

[HatofPig]

Really? When you hear "chrome", you don't think of hot rods from the 50s or 60s? It's the first thing that pops in my head, and is pretty fuckin' cool.

Re:just what we need

[dgatwood]

Actually, it makes a lot of sense. They add some trim to the product and make a much bigger profit margin by selling the same vehicle under a high-end brand name. Basically, it all boils down to hoping people won't notice that they are paying a huge premium for trivial enhancements to the same basic vehicle. I'm not saying it is a good practice, but as a business practice, it does pay off, at least so long as the market for luxury goods doesn't dry up. When it does, of course, if you aren't making enough money off your low-end products, you're screwed.

It makes far less sense if the two products aren't build using the same parts, of course, which is why the car analogy falls flat when talking about Google. (It does work for Sun's StarOffice/OpenOffice somewhat.) To explain the Google bifurcation, you have to go back a little farther to an ancient proverb: the enemy of my enemy is my friend. Guess which browser is the enemy. :-)

Re:just what we need

[markkezner]

They never planned to make money directly from the browser, or to dominate the browser market.

They use it as a vehicle to implement web standards, under a license that allows any other browsers to adopt the improvements. Thus the web improves, which directly benefits Google (as well as others)

Re:Dear blacks, this song sets your cause back 50

[Ethanol-fueled]

Jim Morrisson and the Doors wrote some very good music but, from a guitar player's perspective, "Roadhouse Blues" is a joke. I still get a chuckle thinking about that comment in the sheet music. Given all that, I'd still rather listen to Roadhouse Blues than any popular music recorded after 1990.

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

A car industry or an analogy?

I can't wait for...

[Anonymous Coward]

someone that can make a browser that runs in a browser.

The ability to exit and save tabs.

[positiveexperience]

Actually you may configure Chrome to perform this task.
Just go to options and in "basic" tab, change "On startup" option to "Restore the pages that were open last". ;)

Re:just what we need

[PhotoGuy]

Oh come on people, mod parent up, that was funny. Whooosh! I have mod points, but posted in this thread, so can't. Wah.

Re:just what we need

[Sapphon]

If we were talking about something being sold, product differentiation would be one means of attempting to achieve some form of price discrimination.(1)

That part of the equation doesn't apply here (though it will to any of the car-analogies cropping up), but product differentiation is still a recognised way to build brand loyalty by creating (perceived) differences and thereby value.

People don't use Firefox and think "Gee, isn't Google great?" – that's the (a) reason for Chrome.

A further reason is that having R&D in your own company can have positive synergies (apologies for the buzzword, but it applies here) with other projects, which don't occur from simply supporting external development.

Those are mid-to-long-term strategic considerations, while combining the projects simply to save money would be rather more a short-term oriented decision. Which isn't necessarily a criticism.

(1) Price discrimination is the concept of charging each buyer the full extent of what he is willing to pay for a good, rather than the same price as everyone else. For example, school-children don't have much money to pay for cinema tickets, and wouldn't come if they had to pay adult prices. They're still willing to pay more than the costs they incur, though, so the cinema operators increase their profits by charging them less. You'll see it all around if you pay attention.

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Anonymous Coward]

No.

Stop button + thoughts

[unTrainedUser]

There is a stop button. The "go" button to the right of the omnibar doubles as a stop button when a webpage is loading. It is a little counter intuitive being so far away from refresh, but it is there and definately not hidden.

I like Chrome, but I don't use the most recent stable release - I use Chromium and DL the newest nightly build every few days. I use it if I'm just doing some fast browsing, or searching (I love being able to enter a website and search it at the same time from the omnibar), because I find it to open faster and be generally more responsive than Firefox. I use Firefox if I am doing research/work/any browsing that involves a lot of tabs. Ad-block, Flashblock, and NoScript are two big reasons. Also is Tab-kit and All-in-one-Sidebar. Being able to put my tabs on the left and sidebar on the right, and have tabs indent in tree format, makes organizing my workspace much better with a widescreen monitor. And I don't like the lack of tab overflow in Chrome (making tabs arbitrarily small is not the way to go).

Different browsers, different functionality, different purposes. Both are equal valid, and I use both regularly.

smooth scrolling

[x102output]

Does it have smooth scrolling yet? Like Firefox-smooth-scrolling?

Re:smooth scrolling

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly, no.

Re:just what we need

[TSPhoenix]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Badge_engineering

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

...I think I liked the car analogies better :).

still no "send link" function

[tva995]

still no "send link by email" or "send page by email" function...

Good one.

[earls]

Yeah, because just loading the ads magically generates revenue.

Re:Good one.

[5865]

With a prominent site like Slashdot with a guaranteed amount of traffic, yes. Advertisers do keep track of who and how many people loaded their advertisements and from where. It's not pay per click all the time you know.

Re:Dear blacks, this song sets your cause back 50

[severoon]

Clearly, the problem with the post was that the poster forgot to place the lyrics in context to how other races have composed lyrics throughout the ages.

Totally reasonable response to an explosively racist post. Well done!

Re:just what we need

[lysergic.acid]

Google also offers a variety of other web services besides search. and most Google Apps services have complex enough interfaces to make cross-browser compatibility a major hassle, i imagine.

as for StarOffice/OpenOffice, i think it's important to first understand why Sun purchased StarOffice:

The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft. (Simon Phipps, Sun, LUGradio podcast.)

offering StarOffice as a free download (for personal use) was a great way to promote their office suite and did not conflict with their original goal. then perhaps following in the footsteps of Netscape with Mozilla, Sun opened the source code for StarOffice, creating OpenOffice. this further boosted the popularity of StarOffice/OpenOffice (which /. no doubt had a hand in) and also accelerated the development of the StarOffice code base by enlisting the help of the open source community.

Sun then adds proprietary components to snapshots of the OpenOffice code base to develop StarOffice. these proprietary components include:

• Several font metric compatible Unicode TrueType fonts containing bitmap representations for better appearance at smaller font sizes
• Twelve Western fonts (including Andale Sans, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, Broadway, Garamond, Imprint MT Shadow, Kidprint, Palace Script, Sheffield) and seven Asian language fonts (including support for the Hong Kong Supplementary character set)
• Adabas D database
• StarOffice-only templates and sample documents
• A large clip art gallery
• Sorting functionality for Asian versions
• File import filters for additional older word-processing formats (including EBCDIC, DisplayWrite, MultiMate, PFS Write, WordStar, WordStar 2000, and XyWrite (conversion filters licensed from MasterSoft))
• A different spell checker (note that OpenOffice.org includes a spell checker as well) and thesaurus
• StarOffice Configuration Manager
• Macro Converter for converting Microsoft Office VBA macros to StarOffice Basic

so by contributing to OpenOffice, Sun is still just contributing to StarOffice. funding both projects allows them to have the best of both worlds, and doesn't really cost them anything extra. they gain the benefits of an active open source development community, and they also get to keep a proprietary office suite to sell, in which they can include components they're unable to include in OO.org.

Re:just what we need

[ADRA]

Google supports both because regardless of Chrome or Firefox, as long as either 'wins' it is Google's gain for their search business.

This is along the same lines as Best Buy and Futureshop in Canada. They're both owned by Best Buy in the back end, but allowing the guise of choice makes customers comfortable with buying from each of them.

OpenOffice and StarOffice are more along the lines of MyProductBasic and MyProductAdvanced. By getting people into the free version, one can encourage buyers to upgrade to star when there's enough productivity/feature advantage to do so.

Does it support popular applications

[Matt Perry]

Does it support popular applications like Adblock, Zotero, and Greasemonkey?

Re:Does it support popular applications

[Ash-Fox]

Those aren't popular. A very, very, small segment of the Firefox users use those.

Re:Does it support popular applications

[Matt Perry]

Nonetheless, they won't run under Chrome.

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[bledri]

But... Have they removed that "Big Brotherly" unique ID "feature", that each of the Chrome Beta installations came with, that loudly identified you on the web?

I haven't fired up wireshark to confirm (I'm supposedly working), but I think that is covered under Google Chrome Options -> Under the Hood.

Not Yet Ready For Prime Time

[chrismcb]

They maybe be "put of beta" but they aren't finished yet. When they've implemented the features that exist on google toolbar, then I'll think about it. Until then this is a pre version 1 product. In or OUT of beta.

Re:Not Yet Ready For Prime Time

[lavardo]

Well maybe they will start giving us all of those "Service Packs" and "Security Updates" every day! Even a website to visit and scan our systems!!

Re:just what we need

[lgw]

So what you're saying is

1) Release two virtually indentical products under different names for twice the development cost.
2) ???
3) Bailout!

How much longer until Sun gets a bailout?

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome == Ford Prefect?

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[revealingheart]

Rlz.dll, the closed-source file that pings Google on certain actions, is still there.

It appears in the latest zipped Chromium builds too (v.6830), which wasn't there in the October builds (v.3979). Chromium only uses it if it's there, and likely the same for Chrome, so you can delete it and be happy.

Re:just what we need

[Pierre Phaneuf]

I still don't understand why Google and Sun are offering the same software under different names. Google is backing the Mozilla Foundation while supporting their own Chrome (read: they didn't write Firefox, just back it), and Sun is distributing both OpenOffice and StarOffice.

What are you saying here? That Chrome and Firefox are the same software?!? What you're saying about Sun seems right, but Chrome and Firefox aren't close at all...

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only that but the browser really doesn't offer any "security" options. You can't turn off any scripting at all!!! That's just dangerous on today's web. I won't use a browser which doesn't allow me to control scripting and plugins. That's just insane!

Client side scripting is the big new attack vector. That's why I run noscript on Firefox and Seamonkey.

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Bert690]

That ID is only ever sent if you opt in to sending usage stats and crash reports. And if you were dumb enough to opt in when you're paranoid about these sorts of things, you can opt out with the "Under the Hood" menu.

Clientside VBScript?

[edmicman]

It can't be considered a contender until it supports client-side VBScript. Seriously...we have a (public-facing!) classic ASP web application that uses client-side VBScript for all of it's navigation.

On a for-real serious note, it's exciting to see how Chrome has progressed. I tried the new version this afternoon and was impressed. I've been using FF3.1 betas for the last few weeks, and next to that Chrome feels much faster, loads up faster, and all around has some very nice polish. However, my list of requests:

• Adblock. I used a bunch of extensions, but I could probably leave Firefox full-time if Chrome got a decent adblocking feature. But don't implement it like Opera's - I hate how they do it.
• Find-as-you-type. I don't realize how much I miss this until I have to hit ctrl-F in Chrome to search the page.
• MRU tab behavior. I hate the way tabs work by default in Firefox, but at least the ctrl-Tab extension (and others) fix it. I want ctrl-tab to toggle between two tabs, or cycle through everything if I hold down ctrl. If I jump from one tab to another, close the 2nd one, I want it to go back to the first tab, not whatever is nearest to the tab I just closed. At least let me customize it!
• Linux support, of course. The nice thing about Firefox is that my browsing experience is pretty much identical between work and home. It would be nice to not have to maintain two browser experiences.
• The Google Notebook extension. I love this in Firefox. It's not a requirement, but I use it a lot.
• I just noticed this today - a way to "send page..." within Chrome? Within Firefox I use File->Send Link a lot, and have the browser set to use gmail by default. I like it better than using a bookmarklet (which I've found doesn't always work).

All in all I *have* found Chrome to be much snappier on Windows. Especially Slashdot - on Firefox (even with Tracemonkey turned on), after I write a comment there's a 5-10 second pause before I see the preview and can submit it. It seems to get better after I've sent the first one, but still. Chrome was instant. What gives?

Re:Clientside VBScript?

[Alioth]

What's wrong with just a normal <A HREF=... for navigation? Even JavaScript would be better for navigation than a proprietary, Microsoft-only language. If you're using proprietary languages, you don't have a web site, you have an Internet Explorer site.

Re:Clientside VBScript?

[edmicman]

Haha, you're telling me. The stupid thing is, I've viewed the source (in Firefox) and they've got the friggin' javascript functions there, but commented out. With identical functions, only in clientside VBScript. It's all just basic redirect/navigation stuff, too. But alas, I'm don't maintain the site, and the higher ups don't see it as an issue.

Re:Clientside VBScript?

[A Life in Hell]

Isn't the lack of client side vbscript true of firefox as well? And, in fact, every browser that's not IE?

an open source browser on Linux? I think not.

[Anonymous Coward]

Skype and Opera (who arent open source companies) offers their software for Linux, Google doesnt.

Im just happy its not the other way around.
I can live without a choice of browser or two but I cant live without Skype.

I have no problem when proprietary companies dont offer me a choice on my OS of choice but I have no problems supporting the ones like Skype and Opera who do over the ones that dont.

Yup, Chrome on Windows is quick but thats not enough to get rid of my FF and Opera.

scrolling is still spastic

[British]

I don't understand. I set the mousewheel(er, touchpad scroll speed) in Windows, and Chrome insists on going at its own speed for scrolling. I scroll x lines with the zone, and it does page up/page down increments. What the hell?

Re:scrolling is still spastic

[ChinggisK]

Yea, that's my main issue with Chrome. The crazy scrolling gives me a headache. I'd love to use it if they ever fix that, it seems pretty nice on all other counts.

Re:just what we need

[nine-times]

Google is backing the Mozilla Foundation while supporting their own Chrome

This makes some sense to me. Having multiple high-quality web browsers is good for the Internet, and therefore arguably good for Google. It makes some sense for them to support both major open-source engines to some degree.

Sun is distributing both OpenOffice and StarOffice

StarOffice is just OpenOffice with some extentions. I doubt it takes much to support both, and they sell StarOffice. It's comparable to Redhat supporting Fedora and selling RHEL, or Novel supporting openSUSE while selling SUSE Enterprise Linux.

Re:just what we need

[amirulbahr]

Firefox != Google Chrome. They are completely different browsers from the ground up.

As far as OpenOffice vs StarOffice, I believe the latter includes some proprietary licensed code that cannot be open sourced.

Hope that clears things up for ya!

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Really cause I could draw a car analogy about how two different make and model cars look almost exactly the same, have the same engine, and built by most of the same people. As an example, Ford Tempo and Mercury Topaz

Re:Dear blacks, this song sets your cause back 50

[Hucko]

You are generous... I'd have said 77, the year I was born.

Re:just what we need

[mapkinase]

I can't imagine Microsoft taking over the world, but I can easily imagine OSF or any other popular _ideological_ movement doing that. Microsoft will never tell us to buy Microsoft because it's morally good, beneficial for humanity, etc... but "freesofters" do it all the time. And that is scary...

I am less scared of predictable selfish bastards than unpredictable moral high horse crusaders

No Mac version... :(

[EmotionToilet]

No Mac version == Lame.

Re:just what we need

[IorDMUX]

A car industry...?

Not anymore.

Why does it trash my HD?

[Saffaya]

I'm using a laptop, so I am attentive to which applications make a heavy use of the HD.
Chrome's thrashing of my HD is the reason I have stopped using it.

I can't find a valid reason why it finds the need to scour my disk while other browsers do not.
Does anyone know the reason to this behaviour ? What is chrome trying to do ? Can you turn that off ?

Re:Why does it trash my HD?

[gazbo]

ISTR it's the phishing protection. If you disable that, it stops behaving so weirdly. I hunted for a solution after some particularly excessive thrashing that resulted in the chrome process, after a few minutes, having more I/O reads/writes than every other process on the system that had been running for hours.

Re:just what we need

[The Great Pretender]

So what you're saying is

1) Release two virtually indentical products under different names for twice the development cost.

2) ???

3) Bailout!

How much longer until Sun gets a bailout?

4) Profit! (Is my cynicism showing here?)

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Google believes that browsers are what is holding back web apps right now.

Since web apps are a huge part of their business, they want to make sure browsers get better. How can they do this? By making their own browser that pushes the features Google cares about. Either their browser gets popular (big win) or other browsers steal all the features Google cares about and thus become better vehicles for Google web apps (still a win).

This is why Chrome exists. Pretty different goals from Firefox.

Re:just what we need

[Alpha830RulZ]

Think about the Monty Hall paradox. It's a loose comparison, but work with me. If your customers are just comparing between Ford and Chevy, and your products are equal, you get 50% of the market, all things equal. If you introduce a new brand, let's call it GMC, some of the customers who might have chosen Ford might choose GMC. Since all you have to change is the 1 dollar name plate, it's a good deal.

This is how GM has run their business for 75 years.

of all the things for google to un-beta...

[Lord Bitman]

Chrome? wtf?

So I tried to update Chrome after reading this, to see what they've fixed.
"Google Chrome is up to date"

wtf?

cloudware

[epine]

Google doesn't know how to do desktop apps as conventionally defined, and I suspect they don't wish to learn. In Google's world view, everything is a cloud. Patches flow like water, mostly invisible. From Google, what did you expect?

I give you the last point. If you uninstall software, it should *completely* uninstall itself. I recall a poster that was for some reason quite popular in my residence: If you hate something send it away, if it comes back, kill it. Can be applied to more than one monopolist in training.

But where are the options??!

[Laser Dan]

Sure there is an almost empty "options" menu, but I think many users would like to be able to change things like you can in firefox.

For example I am using Chrome on an eeePC as it loads around 3x faster than firefox, but the missing options cause trouble. Mainly the fact that you can't change the location of the cache to the faster SSD, so it freezes quite often when it needs to write to the cache.

Re:just what we need

[Lennie]

Then why is StarOffice always behind on OpenOffice and it's new features ?

(that's just what I heared, I've never tried StarOffice, wouldn't even know where to look for it, etc.)

I would probably much rather buy: Enterprise Support from Sun for OpenOffice. It makes more sence to me.

Re:just what we need

[epine]

I just watched the movie 21 last night. It takes the main character, who is supposed to be exceptionally bright, the majority of the movie to figure out what is behind door number three.

This loose comparison is not the Monty Hall paradox, which never was a paradox in the first place. I always thought of it more as a Vegas paradox. Isn't the whole purpose of a shell game that the car is *always* behind the door you didn't pick?

Monty confuses people because he simultaneously gives you information, and gives you no information. You already know what is behind the door he opens (a goat), so you gain no information there. But you don't know which of the two doors he needs to open to accomplish this, so you learn something there, but this amounts to an implementation artifact. Uncertainty about what was behind the door he is about to open *would* change your original probability of 1/3. Uncertainty about which door he chooses to open to accomplish this does not. 2/3rds of the time Monty faces restricted choice, but of course his patter doesn't reveal this.

I just went to my favorite Wikipedia page, but on a quick scan I didn't spot a GM-style name-plate astroturfing bias as I expected I would.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

The one I was looking for was where humans given a meaningless choice are often quite content to lose control over a meaningful choice. For a good example of this, consult two-party democracy (excepting the last U.S. election, which was atypically black and white).

Another bias is that once we become emotionally occupied by Coke/Pepsi, we forget that there are other soft drinks, or worse, that tap water is good for hydration. Or am I now the last person alive who still drinks tap water?

I don't see how Monty has much to do with the human capacity to become distracted from real decisions by proliferation of meaningless choice.

To the extent it worked, what GM managed to accomplish with this marketing strategy was insulate themselves from whether their customers actually preferred their vehicles to their competitor's. Ouch. Payback's a bitch.

Standards?

[RichM]

This is really strange. I ran Acid3 but Chrome version 1.0 only gets a score of 79. Quite a few months ago I tried a nightly of Chromium which was getting 100/100 - so, what's happened to that?

OPERA DID IT

[battleforevermore]

Opera came out of beta YEARS ago!!!

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

Parent should be at '-4: whooosh', not '+4 insightful'. Subtlety's wasted round here, isn't it?

Re:just what we need

[Simon Brooke]

It makes far less sense if the two products aren't build using the same parts, of course, which is why the car analogy falls flat when talking about Google.

If you believe that the car industry analogy falls flat, you know nothing about the car market. I can go out today and buy a Ford Mondeo, or a Volvo V70, or a Saab 93, or a Jaguar XF - all competing directly against one another, all with significantly different engineering and tooling, all made by Ford. Google only supports two browsers (and only makes one). Ford has about six entirely different executive saloon cars.

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

It's not 2009 yet! There still is a car industry today.

It's okay

[jonaskoelker]

That's okay, you undid it. Sorry you lost a mod point :(

Re:just what we need

[AVryhof]

Ford does this too (Mercury)... and surprise, so does Chrysler (Dodge Aries/Plymouth Reliant and other similar cars).

This is probably off topic and redundant but hey, you can't mod both!

Re:just what we need

[TGoddard]

Tap water? Don't they put chlorine and fluoride in that? Nasty stuff!

OS X

[DanJ_UK]

Please, Google.

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't have time to explain this. Look at Google's wide and large agendas as a whole. If you can't figure out, then don't bother. If you ask something, ask politely.

Linux?

[bytor4232]

Still no Linux version? I'll file this under "I don't give a shit"

Re:Linux?

[wikinerd]

Exactly why would we need a GNU/Linux version of Chrome? GNU/Linux already has very good browsers such as Epiphany, developed by dedicated free software communities.

Re:just what we need

[e4g4]

Ford Mondeo, or a Volvo V70, or a Saab 93, or a Jaguar XF

Good points, all in all. One minor quibble, though: Saab is owned and manufactured by GM.

Re:just what we need

[HolyCrapSCOsux]

"It makes far less sense if the two products aren't build using the same parts, of course, which is why the car analogy falls flat "

I would have to disagree. The Chevrolet and GMC lines beneath the skin are made out of EXACTLY the same parts. Other than the body, there is not a single discrete part from a GMC that Will not fit a Chevrolet. (I own one of each). I take that back. The body as a whole will fit a Chevy if you change it all at the same time. The grill is a drop in replacement.
Ditto between Holden Commodore and a few Pontiac GTO.

Re:just what we need

[itsdapead]

Monty confuses people because he simultaneously gives you information, and gives you no information

No, Monty confuses people because he makes you focus on the one bit of information that he reveals (there is a goat behind door A) and hence ignore the other vital bit of information you have (you chose door B, and there must be a 1/3 chance that the car is behind there).

Monty also confuses people because he "personalizes" probability.

If you play the game once, you're gonna get a goat or a car. If you switch, its still quite likely that you'll get a goat, if you stick you still stand a fair chance of getting a car. Neither outcome will get you into the X-files.

Its not that the probabilities are wrong: if you're a professional quizzer who meets variations on Monty Hall all the time, knowing the math is certainly going to improve your car hit-rate. However, by his patter, Monty gets his victims imagining bits of car and goat teleporting between the doors as they deliberate...

Go write a simulation, 1000 rounds of Monty Hall: once you de-humanize it it soon becomes obvious that there are 3 quite different "games" (a) picking 1 from 3; (b) picking 1 (randomly) from 2 and (c) pick and switch. Each has a different probability of success - who'd have thought it? To do 1000 trials, you'll have to decide - 1000 trials of which game?

When Monty is working out his monthly goat order, he'll also have to estimate how likely punters are to do (a), (b) or (c).

Re:just what we need

[locnar42]

StarOffice is designed for the enterprise that wants a reliable and stable release rather than cutting edge features. Sun can stand behind it and offer better support because of the slower development cycle.

Tangent

[PPCAvenger]

I'm gonna go on a bit of a tangent from the main topic here (shocking for Slashdot I'm sure).

    On the topic of ad blockers I'm curious as to just how the ad model works. On the one hand I know that clicking an ad generates a click-through which generates revenue.

    However, ad blocker or not I'm certain that I won't be clicking on ads because I'm not a good little consumer drone and really don't care about what's trying to be sold to me.

    I shop when I need something at which point research, not advertisements, point me to the best product and I then know exactly what I want.

    From the tone of website owners who dislike ad blockers it sounds as though the mere act of blocking ads from being shown damages the site's revenue. I'm presuming that people paying for ads or companies that serve ads track their distribution by the number of times an ad is loaded by a certain site or page.

    My question here is, if Adblock works by blocking the actual loading of the ad by the server thus denying revenue to a website why can't it be designed to load the ad but simply not display it? Would this not prevent websites from losing revenue to ad blockers?

    In the end, all I want is to not see annoying flashing, blinking, video animated crap in loud colors all over my screen when I'm trying to read. My goal is not to deny a site revenue. I don't imagine there are many people out to intentionally damage a site's revenue but they hate the way advertisements are presented.

    How would loading the ads but not displaying them hurt either A) the ability of Adblock to function or B) a site's revenue stream presuming people are like me and would never click an ad to begin with?

Re:Tangent

[Anonymous Coward]

My question here is, if Adblock works by blocking the actual loading of the ad by the server thus denying revenue to a website why can't it be designed to load the ad but simply not display it?

It could, but I don't want to pay the bandwidth bill for enormous flash ads.

Would this not prevent websites from losing revenue to ad blockers?

Yes, but see above.

Re:Tangent

[trawg]

From the tone of website owners who dislike ad blockers it sounds as though the mere act of blocking ads from being shown damages the site's revenue. I'm presuming that people paying for ads or companies that serve ads track their distribution by the number of times an ad is loaded by a certain site or page.

I don't think it does YET. I think it will once Firefox market share gets a bit more and companies start realising their ad dollars aren't being well invested online if the most popular extension for the most popular browser is one that blocks ads.

My question here is, if Adblock works by blocking the actual loading of the ad by the server thus denying revenue to a website why can't it be designed to load the ad but simply not display it? Would this not prevent websites from losing revenue to ad blockers?

Prrrrrobably something could be done but I suspect it would be pretty site specific.

I sort of forsee a bit of a battle (akin to spammers vs spam fighters) in this area in the future.

In the end, all I want is to not see annoying flashing, blinking, video animated crap in loud colors all over my screen when I'm trying to read. My goal is not to deny a site revenue. I don't imagine there are many people out to intentionally damage a site's revenue but they hate the way advertisements are presented.

Yep that's a fair point. We try to avoid annoying ads, but the reality is the MORE annoying an ad, the more money you're paid for it. We're currently researching less invasive ways that still make money but are not as much of a pain in the ass for people to absorb.

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Anonymous Coward]

If your doing everything legally, whats the problem?
*Im JOKING btw*

Targeted advertising

[shish]

It seems that the advertisment network has noticed that this page is talking about chrome a lot -- all the ads I see are "Download chrome for XP / Vista". Smart, but considering my user-agent is Opera/Linux, not smart enough...

And the day I can download it

[Snaller]

Without having to first download the google updater with its bloatware services and other crap, I might actually try it out.

(Hit google: Make a portable version)

missing features

[Anonymous Coward]

send link by email, send page by email... where are they?

Re:just what we need

[dgatwood]

True, but in the case of Google supporting FF and Chrome, they are basically helping improve a competing product that they don't own in any way and didn't have a hand in designing. It's more like Ford designing new natural-gas engines for Chevrolet....

Re:just what we need

[Anonymous Coward]

It might have something to do with the analogy itself being insightful and 'whoosh' not being a moderation criterion? But as for subtlety, yes, yes it is.