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Google Releases Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta
Nick Fletcher writes "Just a few short months after the initial release, Google has released a pre-beta version of Google Chrome 2.0. It sports a few new features including form auto-completion, full-page zoom, 'profiles,' and Greasemonkey support. It seems the only notable feature would be profiles, which allows users to separate out their homepage, history, and bookmarks on a per user or category basis. It seems Google is still playing catch-up but they're definitely moving at a pace unknown to some of their competition. The full list of new features is available in the release notes."
They updated the version of WebKit that they're using to one that passes the ACID3 test. That's something.
Form autocomplete? It's about time. Not that I like the feature anyway, it's too dumb. 90% of the time it doesn't offer any suggestion (wild guess, if a web site asks for my name, maybe my browser might know the answer). The rest of the time (10%), it has a fifty-fifty chance of guessing right.
The auto complete isn't guessing. The reason that it doesn't always know your name is because different web sites give the fields with more or less the same meaning different names (name as in html attribute, not as in the label). They do this because the web front end reflects whatever backend that the site runs on.
/><input type="text" name="lastname" />
/>
/> />
As a web developer, you might want somebody's first name and last name separately, (for example, if you have to check a cc number against it) in which case you would use a two fields like this:
Name:<input type="text" name="firstname"
Or, it might just be to display your name to other users, in which case you don't care and to keep your database simple you just do:
Name:<input type="text" name="name"
Or, you might be asking for login credentials, so you'll ask for: Name:<input type="text" name="firstname"
Or, you might want to be preventing bots from trying to use usernames/passwords harvested from another, insecure sight, so you'll obfuscate like this:
Name: <input type="text" name="wxys"
As you can see, form auto complete has no way of knowing which entries it should use. However, auto-complete is far from useless. We have a web-based client management database where I work, and there the browser does know what to put in the fields because, obviously, the fields are consistently named. In this case, it is a huge time saver. It just seems dumb to you because you have not really needed to use it for what it was intended for.
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
I'm rather fond of Opera's solution. All of the text and images are increased in size, but the page remains the same width. That way L/R scrolling is eliminated (unlike PDF's or the iPhone) but all of the elements of the page are larger and more usable.
The ______ Agenda
That would be about 1965, or whenever it was that UNIX was conceived. UNIX has had the capacity to support thousands of users simultaneously since the beginning of time (literally). When X appeared in the late 80s, very little changed in this regard.
Since Windows 95, Microsoft has been trying very very hard to add sensible multi-user facilities to Windows. The fact that consumer releases prior to XP were unable to prevent users logging in without a password, let alone prevent users from having full write access to each others' files, is perhaps irrelevant considering those users each had permission to delete the Windows kernel as well.
The NT kernel supplied XP with the capacity to handle multiple users securely and XP introduced fast user switching, but the damage was done --- most of the apps available by that point had to be run as root, and the attempt to bring the system a tiny fraction further along its long journey to UNIX-level user security was one of the more significant nails in Vista's coffin.
I reckon MS will eventually (too late) do what Apple did (also too late) and replace the entire thing with a bastard UNIX system running the shell from the previous system, and provide a compatibility layer. Indeed, it might be the only way to save it. Meanwhile, Wine continues to make it increasingly obsolete.