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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."
Not too many exciting new features, I'm not sure why they call it 2.0.
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.
Full-page zoom and auto-scroll? Great. Now I can use Chrome like I use Safari on my iPhone. Of course scaling should scale the whole page, not just the text. It shouldn't be that hard. An old technology like PDF (10 years old) knows that.
Profiles? Ok, could be moderately useful. It sort of conflicts with the OS's notion of swapping between users. So I'd use it more as a workaround because bookmarks are hard to organize.
Greasemonkey scripts? That's my favorite. But it's for power users only. Just read the instructions and imagine your grandma giving it a try:
To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add --enable-user-scripts in the Target field. While you're in the Properties dialog, click on "Open File Location" and create a folder named User Scriptsin the user data directory, where you'll need to manually save scripts.
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FairSoftware.net
Blogger Belzecue said on January 8, 2009 10:55 PM PDT:
Johnny Effyew here, lead strategist at Google.
Now, I hear a lot of complaints -- a helluva lot of complaints, actually -- about Google not supporting Linux, like how Google Chrome runs on Windows only. Sure, we're already up to version 2 of the Windows client with no Linux version in sight. That may be technically true, but I'm here to tell you, we built our entire company and fortune on the back of Linux and free, open-source software. So of course we support Linux just as much as we support Windows.
That's why it's my pleasure today to announce we've committed to delivering a native Linux Chrome client by 2015 or by the time the Windows client reaches version 10 or when Linux gains greater than 50% of the desktop market. That's our promise to every Linux user out there. You can take that to the bank. We know we have a moral debt to give back to the Linux community what we took from them and turned into a billion-dollar business. We know that.
But, as it turns out, writing software for Linux is kinda tough. We're still figuring it out. I mean, we all use Windows around the Google office, so it's not like we've got a bunch of internal people clamoring to use Chrome under Ubuntu or whatever.
And yes, we know there are much smaller companies out there like Dropbox who easily manage to code and release their Windows and Linux clients simultaneously, which is kinda like having your cake and eating it too. We think that's really cool, and we especially like cake. So that's doubly cool.
So hang in there, Linux community. Google Chrome for Linux is coming. In the meantime, just keep screwing around trying to run the Windows client under Wine. Good luck with that, hahahaha. Yeah, that should keep you nice and busy while we eat more cake and polish off version 3 of the Chrome Windows client. (Whoah, did I just say that out loud or think it? Pfffft, like those Linux fanboys will notice anyway.)
Folks, in closing let me say again: Google is committed to Linux the same way a tapeworm's committed to your lower intestine. From now on, when you think of Google and Linux I want you to think of me, Johnny. Think "Effyew, Linux! Effyew, Google!"
The vast majority of people I've seen using windows never log out to switch users. They are automatically logged in as Administrator or whatever admin account was created when windows was installed. Switching user profiles makes perfect sense in a browser.
I totally agree in the context of family members sharing a computer, but I find profiles useful because I'm a web developer and I don't want lots of toolbars taking up screen space and development extensions running when I'm just surfing the web normally as opposed to working on a site.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Gecko is large and unwieldy compared to Webkit. When Apple decided to build a browser, they hired ex-Mozilla developers, who promptly turned around and used KHTML because it was so much leaner and better designed, despite their extensive experience with Gecko.
It's far from obvious that Firefox is ahead in the technology stakes. It trails in many ways and seems like a far less agile project compared with Webkit and Opera. It does have a few areas where it is ahead, but the downsides seem like an albatross to me.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Hey, I know! We can have the email program have profiles too! And the photo editor, and the instant messaging client! Perhaps one day someone will come up with a unified way to have them synchronize, so that I don't have to create and manage a set of profiles on every application. It could also unify password management, and give each profile its own common place to put files.
Or, I don't know, we could actually use the user system that exists. Poorly reimplementing users in every single program is a horrible idea.
That said, there are uses for profiles that aren't just crippled reimplementations of the user concept. But they have more to do with wanting a different, well, profile of settings for different tasks -- things like the private browsing mode. Or, for example, I use a different Firefox profile for browsing Freenet (there are both performance and security reasons for that).
Boo hoo..
OSS doesn't have to mean using an OSOS. One of the tenets of the GPL is that you're free to use the code for *whatever* purpose you see fit, not solely (or at all) the purpose envisaged by the author. You can't have it both ways.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
But it is all somewhat meaningless, whether Chrome passes ACID3 or not, since Chrome is meant to support a company that sells advertising.
I'm guessing that Chrome will never have AdBlock Plus and NoScript.
It's all about control. Firefox allows you to control what you read. Many advertising companies try to change readers into time-wasting, ad-reading, money-wasting robots.
Those who don't like being the target of aggressive behavior and want control over their lives will need to continue to use Firefox, no matter how technically superior Chrome is.
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.
If you want to see evidence they're working on delivering a Mac version, you might start at the Mac build instructions or the revision history.
I assume most on this website are like me. I have a circle of friends/family that look to me for all of their computer needs. They use Firefox because I showed it to them. I run Linux. By not making a Linux version they are not just shutting out 1% of the market, they are shutting out all of those Windows users that surround me. I don't suggest Chrome because I don't even have the opportunity to use it at home. If I am the 1 in a hundred that use Linux you can add 20 to 30 to me when it comes to what software gets a thumbs up, a thumbs down and an unknown. So really they are leaving out 20 to 30% of the market by not making a Linux version.
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.