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The Future of Google Chrome
TRNick writes "Lars Bak, who heads up development of Google Chrome's cornerstone javascript engine, talks about why Google is so focused on in-browser javascript performance, the role Chrome has played in driving up javascript performance in other browsers, and why it's taking so long to introduce support for third-party extensions. 'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more,' he says."
Being uninstalled?
As we've seen with Windows and IE.... the distinction between browser and and OS matters quite a bit. That is if you don't want to get accused of being and evil monopoly.
You can't take the sky from me.
is that its future per se doesn't matter.
What Google cares about is that there is a least one standards-compliant browser out there with fast javascript. Sure Google might have a slight preference for people using Chrome over another browser with fast javascript (like, say, Safari), but what really matters to them is that they are able to deliver web apps that are fast enough to be reasonable competitors to traditional desktop apps.
Chrome is a combination insurance policy/open-source soapbox whose purpose is to make sure that Google apps (and other web apps) will always have a browser to run on.
Expected time to finish is 1 hour and 60 minutes.
I ask, because I don't know of many. Additionally, it is viewed as "unsafe" for corporate use. My company will not allow us to use Chrome on our computers, but we are allowed to use IE and FireFox with impunity.
I have a bad feeling about this...
I guess it works if you picture Google as taking on a Borg-like mentality.
And its built on JavaScript.
If they they create a framework or engine which internet would be dependent on, they would control the web. The plugins which try to compete against JavaScript will lose their place when its achieve this speed and Google Gears integration.
I think what would happen is Chrome framework being (a restricted) interface to the OS and media control libraries which would try to be what ActiveX,Flash and Java do today(within their plugin interface). Except it would be built-in into Chrome and executed inside the content.
More "the basic distinction between the shell and the browser". OTOH, when you can run MacOS, Linux, and WinXP simultaneously on not too high end equipment (a 2 year old 24 inch iMac w/3gb ram in my case) then you have to ask just which layer is the "operating system", and which is the shell.
Best Slashdot Co
That is UK-English, it seems TechRadar is a British site. I agree, it sounds really strange and illogical if you are used to US-English.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I would rather have the browser guys work on getting something OTHER than javascript into the browsers. Javascript is getting better, but you only polish a turd so much.
With compilers like GWT, Pyjamas, and HotRuby, I sometimes wonder if JavaScript is starting to emerge as a "portable assembly language" for dynamic languages, the way C is often used by higher-level language compilers. I mean, when it comes down to it JS is basically just hash tables and closures, some of the basic elements required for dynamic language execution.
Given a fast-as-C javascript engine, you could have a pretty decent VM to share between several dynamic languages, and due to JS's dynamic nature compiling these languages to JS is fairly trivial.
I mentioned this once on reddit and someone called it a 'braindead' approach. That may be true. I'm not sure. He also pointed out that many things you'd have to do to get languages like Ruby running in JS would require passing the context as a function argument, which he claimed would probably bypass any potential optimization by the JS compiler. Not sure about that either.
But I find it really interesting (and cool!) that JS's heavy web presence is giving it such attention in both the "compiler backend" and optimization departments simultaneously. Whether it's a braindead approach or not, it sure seems to be drawing a lot of interest lately.
it sounds really strange and illogical if you are used to US-English
Yeah, the normal and logical may seem that way if you're used to something so strange and illogical as US English - putting 'z' in almost every word, and I mean, MM/DD/YYYY? come on!
Just kidding... we love how you've butchere^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hembraced our language :)
How come it's Windows-only still if the browser is all that matters and the OS isn't, Google?
So Javascript is becoming what Java should have been, the run-anywhere language, if only Java hadn't been such a superficially ugly language and goddam slow - the browser is the equivalent of the JRE.
If all JRE's (browsers) are alike in syntax, semantics, security and libraries then the faster one will become the shell of choice to run these cloudy, ajaxy apps. And we'll partying like it's 1980 with browser-and-cloud architectures replacing greenscreen-and-mainframe.
It's a shame that, like you said, javascript is superficially pretty but deeply broken (namespaces? proper, native OO? etc.)
'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more'
Wanting it to be so and it being so are two entirely different things.
And I'm sure that the germans love how you've butchered theirs!
I is.
I have no sig yet I must scream.
I disagree.
The problem with javascript is still browser incompabilities, and that would not lessen with other scriping languages.
How about haskell-script?
I'd argue it's stupid since you're referring to a single entity in a plural sense, which is grammatically incorrect. And no, the excuse that it refers to a collection of people is stupid. You don't say "The set of integers are infinite", do you?
I understand that British English often uses this convention for multi-personed organizations.
98% of America's teens drink alcohol, smoke, and have sex. Put this in your sig if you like bagels.
We embraced during the colonial period. After the revolution we extended(and had Noah Webster ram our extensions through a standards body to give them an air of legitimacy).
Don't worry, nothing bad could possibly happen next.
I like how the Japanese do it: year/month/day.
Circumcision is child abuse.
I use it as my main browser. I've got a portable Firefox and (of course) IE, but I only fire them up when something isn't working right in Chrome. This is happening less and less.
If Google REALLY wants to help people out, they'd provide Chrome with native support for the functions that the noscript plugin gives to Firefox.
No, but you do say "His pants/trousers are blue", normally referring to a single entity.
YES!
YYYY/MM/DD makes so much more sense, as it means that you get sane sorting when ordering using a computer.
DD/MM/YYYY results in a mess of dates, whereas YYYY/MM/DD always orders dates in chronological order.
I hate printers.
It totally makes up for all that tentacle porn...
Slashdot: where don knuth is an idiot because he cant grasp the awesome power of php
It's a *pair* of trousers. I can't recall ever seeing anyone wearing just the one trouser, mind.
We're gonna tax your coffee, you freeloaders!
To be fair, we've butchered Latin as well as German.
I use that format for log-files and things like that. Easily sortable.
...The lawsuit concerns the question of whether or not a web browser is structurally distinct from the OS or not: is it an integral component, or an instance of bundling of two essentially unrelated things.
Ah, to clarify, it was Microsoft who managed to muddy the waters first between browser and OS with their implementation, with every damn window on the screen essentially being a IE browser. I certainly don't get the same when I install Firefox on top of any other OS.
incidentally, you may be unaware of the distinction made in the UK between pants and trousers, i.e. that pants are what one wears under trousers.
Rule of Slashdot #0: You and people like you are not representative of the larger population. - A.C.
No, but you do say "the integers are infinite", similarly, you don't say "the company google are ..." but you do say "google are ..."
Since I correspond with people in Asia, the US, and Europe for work, I've found that the only unambiguous way to express dates is YYYY-MMM-DD or the reverse (e.g. 2009-Feb-02, 02-Feb-2009). Short of going to the long form, of course. I personally like having the day first, since that is often the most relevant piece of data... how did we Americans end up putting the month first, anyway? I bet it's just the short form of our longhand: "February 2, 2009". Do the Brits write "2 February, 2009"? If so, do they say it that way? Americans almost always say the month first.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I'd be much happier with Chrome if they fixed the little things, like rendering checkboxes properly (especially when it breaks Gmail, of all things) or getting Flash to stop freezing after a few seconds of video after fast-forwarding (which breaks sites like Youtube)
That would be far too awesome to ever happen on this side of the mirror.
and I mean, MM/DD/YYYY? come on!
Well, you can hardly blame them for that one. When your average English speaker writes out a date, they'd write it as, for example, "February 26th, 2009"... which just so happens to be MM/DD/YYYY.
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Why doesn't everyone just say express numerical dates as 2009-02-26? (I was going to use your dates, but the duplicate 02 didn't illustrate my point).
Yes, I write "2nd February 2009" and say "The second of February two thousand and nine"
The problem is people still fail to grasp the difference between Javascript and DOM and CSS manipulation....
All Javascript engines have been ECMA compliant for 5 years now. Javascript incomparability is not the problem, it is the DOM and CSS incompatabilities.
"resistance is futile, you will be assimilated"
i think slashdot needs to update its icons
the borg bill gates icon is threatening only circa 1996. microsoft of 2009 is on a real decline
meanwhile, the company of all-domination in 2009 is obviously google. we need a remake of the google icon for slashdot to include the borg cube
and the microsoft icon should be remade with just a non-borg bill gates holding a jar of mosquitoes
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
You do realize that using a 'z' is the correct English usage and always has been? This is one area where our American cousins are actually more correct than we are. The usage of an 's' is commonly referred to as the 'Frenchified' version and is a dilution of the language due to cross-pollination with our Gallic neighbours. The misconception that the Frenchified usage is correct English has arisen since the Government adopted it for their official documents (in the 70s?). I can see the connexion, but read an early print of any of Tolkein's works and tell me how many instances you find. Use zeds.
It is not immoral to create the human species - with or without ceremony, Samuel Clemens.
You is right.
If enithin kan gow rong it whil. (Murfey)
Me fail English? That's unpossible.
Google is a company. "Google" is a single noun, just like "group", "family", "staff", etc.
The staff is ready to work.
My family is going on a picnic.
The group is going to be late.
Google is working on Chrome.
This is why Superman dresses as he does. He landed in America, and was told to wear his pants on the outside.
Well, mystery solved! I love it when it is that easy :) I guess the American way is slightly lazier... "February second, two-thousand and nine" is 2 fewer words. Is that lazier or more optimized?
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
ISO standard is YYYY-MM-DD which I use for documents when I need it. Good for sorting.
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
No. You don't. Singular nouns are singular. You say the integers are infinite because the "the integers" is a plural noun. Google is a singular noun so you say "the company, Google, is..."
You could say "the workers at Google are..." because then you're talking about many instead of one.
Hey, I hate Javascript like any other, but Python?
Ugh. You ain't serious, are you?
"incidentally, you may be unaware of the distinction made in the UK between pants and trousers, i.e. that pants are what one wears under trousers."
So what the hell are under-pants in the UK then? Do they go under your pants?
You guys wear 3 layers of pant?
Do you wear a pair of pants or more? So confusing.
All I know is if you wear pants under your trousers and that's all... well then you aren't wearing underwear and that's nasty.
Yes, people tend to use OS as a synonym for the shell (graphical or text) or the packaging environment, where the OS is normally just the kernel and maybe its modules.
You would say, "This company of people is ", but you wouldn't say, "This Google of people is ". 'Google' is a proper noun (and a verb), not a collective noun.
Wouldn't a committed American slacker say, "February two, two thousand nine"? Cutting thirteen syllables down to nine.
It makes me cringe every time I hear a date expressed this way...
Yes, then we mixed them together, ingested, digested, and what came out the other end after all was said and done was a flaming piece of turd.
"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be."
"web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more', he says"
Um, the Web is actually an internetwork, that is networks of networks. It is *not* part of the computer, it is a resource the computer accesses, based on user commands.
Remember Larry Ellison telling us "The network is the computer"? No, Larry, the network is the network. The computer is the computer. Apparently you get this in your CS4xx classes, the ones you skipped when you had your one Big Idea, kinda like the kids who come out for the NBA Draft a year early and skip their NBA4xx classes on foul shots and firearm safety.
The browser may be the most-used, most common, multifunctional software on the computer, but the basic distinction between the OS and the browser is that the browser can't yet boot the computer, or render it useful for other things such as file management, network connectivity, or printing. The browser is an application. We see Windows with so many services and features that intertwine the browser (and other apps) with it that it is hard to tell where the OS stops and the app begins, but that's the simplistic view anyways.
How about Google makes good on that statement and pump out a down and dirty OS/browser combo that just does it? Include an install that lets you multi-boot XP/Vista/Windows7 or whatever Linux ya got, and people will be choosing either 'ChromeOS' or 'my usual OS', and lamenting that they have the wrong one loaded for whatever they want to do next. Or go whole hog and write it as a VM shell, and let Windows run underneath it. Xen is giving their stuff away now, how about leveraging that? And yes, I know of at least one reason right now why that doesn't work. I'm just ignoring it for the sake of the argument.
I know, I know. One of my machines is still a Sempron, the others are Pentium 4 CPUs, and I had no real reason to upgrade until now. So current VMWare won't like those so much, what with VT extensions missing. So I've got a reason to upgrade, finally - taking Xen up on their offer.
Bleagh. The apps guys are still trying to make the OS superfluous. And making stupid statements.
ps - which CPU should I buy to be able to dive into VMware and Xen in a big way? Core 2 Duo or AMD?
arghhh....
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
It seems to me that the browser will not be able to replace the desktop ... or even claim to be an "OS" in anything but the most attenuated sense... until we have the ability to use something other than javascript in a reasonably cross-platform way. Imagine for a second that Windows could only be programmed in Visual Basic, or Linux could only be programmed in C. We'd absolutely hate it, and we'd be right to hate it.
Now, granted, any given development platform generally displays a preference for a given programming language. If you're going to develop Gnome applications, you're probably going to use C, if Cocoa, then Objective C, etc. But right now the situation in the web space is one of total locking to Javascript, which isn't even all that good of a language.
What I really want to see is a reasonable degree of cross-platform support for the use of a reasonable variety of object-oriented scripting languages embedded in the browser, as plugins. So I can develop web pages in HTML + Ruby, or HTML + Python, or HTML + Javascript, as is best suited for my application. The hooks are there in the HTML specs to do this, but browser implementations don't seem to have caught up.
"He who would learn astronomy, and other recondite arts, let him go elsewhere. " -- John Calvin, commenting on Genesis 1
When your average English speaker writes out a date, they'd write it as, for example, "February 26th, 2009"
but that is still the wrong way round, nearly all UK residents will write 26th February 2009 (you insensitive clod!)
The date should be fully written as "the 26th day of February in the year of our lord, 2009" (as our Gregorian calendar is christian-centric).
Javascript HAS proper, native OO. It just doesn't have class-based OO (though some libraries like Prototype hook onto the prototype-based OO and provide not only class-based OO, but with mixins, too). Yes, there IS a distinction; no, just because you don't use prototype-based OO often or aren't used to thinking in its terms, that doesn't make it `improper'.
it's faster to develop for a single platform than to use a shotgun approach.
Yeah, but telling your developers that they can develop for windows only and then porting the application is likely to be a lot slower than writing things portably from day 1.
An argument to back this assertion up: the sooner you fix a bug, the cheaper it is to fix [this is widely believed]. Every dependence on a particular platform that's not put into a platform abstraction layer is a bug. If you develop for every platform all the time, you'll find and fix those bugs immediately, paying the lowest possible price for portability. If you develop for $PLATFORM first and then port, you'll pay the largest possible price for portability.
Unusual maybe, but illogical? Google = multiple people. It's perfectly logical to refer to 'them' rather than 'it' since the entitity is a collection of individual elements that act in unison.
The stereotypical Brits I've met have too many conflicted ideas about the staid traditions of their mythical England to internalize the linguistic fact that US English is the archaic snapshot of common English from the American colonial era. They are emotionally invested in the idea that Brits are traditional and Americans are new-fangled and immature, when really it is the UK that has been punking out the language and forgetting its past.
Fortunately, many of the Brits I've met in the tech sector are not stereotypical Brits, so we can get right down to drinking and laughing at our respective stereotypical cousins further down the bar...
Yeah, the normal and logical may seem that way if you're used to something so strange and illogical as US English - putting 'z' in almost every word, and I mean, MM/DD/YYYY? come on!
Yes they store dates in mixed endian format.
Not to mention football which Americans think is a sport where you don't have a proper ball and you very seldom play it using a foot. :)
)9TSS
You seem to have confused the word 'stupid' with the phrase 'something I'm not used to'
You mean during the colonial fullstop?
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I would rather have the browser guys work on getting something OTHER than javascript into the browsers. Javascript is getting better, but you only polish a turd so much.
Right! What we really need is a platform-independent, reasonably fast language, with built-in security.
Perhaps we could have a language which compiled into some sort of 'bytecode', so if developers wanted to use Python or Ruby or Whatever they could, and they could still compile into the same bytecode.
While we're at it, we could have one language particularly aimed at writing this bytecode. It could retain the popular syntax of C and C++, but fix confusing and often-misused features like nonstandard numerical types, pointer arithmetic, and operator overloading.
We could even enable this new web-programming-language in older browsers using plugins, like Flash and Quicktime do, so anyone who wanted to take advantage of its functionality could just download a plugin.
I, for one, look forward to the future when this fantastic technology becomes available. I'm certain web application writers will be all over it, in preference to the slow, browser-incompatibility-laden morass that is JavaScript.
No, he'd say "two, two, oh nine." Ironically, in that specific instance, it doesn't matter which one the month is as long as you know the year.
This entire issue rapidly becomes a non-issue.
Be DAMNED if I'm running anything on my computer that some yahoo out there at some web site has decided is gonna run. Momma didn't raise no fool.
And the godz bless Firefox for the NoScripts addon!
I'm not buying into this "Your PC is a web client" concept.
YYYY/MM/DD makes so much more sense, as it means that you get sane sorting when ordering using a computer.
You should upgrade your computer to a version that allows you to do non-lexicographic sorting.
Since I correspond with people in Asia, the US, and Europe for work, I've found that the only unambiguous way to express dates is YYYY-MMM-DD or the reverse (e.g. 2009-Feb-02, 02-Feb-2009).
I've seen this form (usually little-endian) quite a bit, and yes, it was probably to remove ambiguity. When you have underpaid and overworked staff trying to quickly parse the date on an invoice, that seemed to be the clearest way to convey the information without mistakes.
Do the Brits write "2 February, 2009"? If so, do they say it that way? Americans almost always say the month first.
Yes, we do. But we usually write the ordinal form, e.g. "2nd February, 2009". And in speech, there's always an "of" in there: "2nd of February"
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
yes! please!!! almost any other modern language would be preferable over JS!
i keep dreaming of Lua on the browser...
of course, if NativeClient ever gets stable and popular enough, it would be dead easy to use whatever language you wish to compile
-Kz-
Why doesn't everyone just say express numerical dates as 2009-02-26? (I was going to use your dates, but the duplicate 02 didn't illustrate my point).
Tradition.
When you can't think of any other reason for doing something, at least you can say "But we've always done it like this."
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
the language itself is mostly compatible across browsers. the main problem is premature standardisation, see crockford's website to see how the language design was frozen before it was tested enough. so now we're stuck with terrible design decisions, like the 'which' keyword, the changing meaning of 'this', the 'not-quite-lexical' scoping of 'var', etc.
(of course, that's besides the DOM incompatibilities, and even worse, CSS completeness)
-Kz-
It's cold in the UK...
for(b=(a=0)+1;;b+=(a+=b))print(a+"\n"+b+"\n");
With my new phone, running Windows Mobile 6, I've struggled to find a good browser. PIE is dated and nearly useless. Skyfire is really neat, but it's still beta and it shows. Opera Mini is the best of the three, but it requires a Java MIDLet engine to run it. I would install and use a Google Chrome mobile browser in a heartbeat if it was good and fast. With Android, I'm hoping that that was part of the plan with Chrome all along!
I always think it's funny when someone gets nervous about whether to use "I" or "me" when referring to themselves in a sentence, so they give up and say "myself" instead, and sound even more stupid.
Oh, how convenient: a theory about God that doesn't involve looking through a telescope.
You answered your own question. 2009-02-02 is ambiguous. It also doesn't fit natural speech... who says "2009, February 26"?
For computer applications, though, it is the most convenient notation (in my mind)... and any time I include a date in a file name I use your convention.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
but that is still the wrong way round, nearly all UK residents will write 26th February 2009 (you insensitive clod!)
Hey, it ain't my fault you're weird, you limey bastard. :)
For the record, I'm Canadian, and AFAIK, we've never written the date that way. 'course, for all I know, that may be a little cultural inheritance from our 800lb gorilla neighbour to the south.
The date should be fully written as "the 26th day of February in the year of our lord, 2009"
Uh, no, it shouldn't. Your "lord" sure as hell isn't my "lord" (which is, of course, the Great Noodley One), so the phrase "year of our lord" is, at best, inaccurate.
The Future of Apple Safari
I know you're joking, but I see this a lot in serious contexts and I need to get this off my chest:
English is NOT derived from German. Yes, it is a Germanic language, but it comes from a language much older than German. German and English are in a cousin, rather than parent/child relationship.
If the geiger counter does not click, the coffee, she is not thick.
I was taught this way and have no authorities to appeal to, so dismiss me if you wish. It's just that, as long as we're expressing annoyances...
"two thousand and nine"?
Two thousand and nine what? Two thousand and nine tenths? Two thousand and nine hundredths?
The connective "and" is used in spoken numbers to point out the decimal. "Two thousand and nine" is 2000.9 (or 2000.09, or 2000.009, etc.) To speak the number 2009, say "Two thousand nine".
Simple and logical, right?
OK, folks, flame away.
PS - I've had this discussion before, so to save people trouble, here's my favorite response to me on this subject: "I can throw as many connectives into a spoken number as I wish. I say 'point' or 'decimal' when I mean to designate the spot where the decimal goes."
Fun attitude, that. That means that the last bank deposit I made was "one thousand and seven hundred and twenty and five decimal ninety and five dollars" or some such clumsy nonsense.
Multiple/misused/misplaced/extra "ands" when speaking numbers == the run-on sentences of the numeric world.
Wouldn't it be easier for people whose first language isn't English to parse '2009-02-02' than '2009-Feb-02'? And I don't think it's ambiguous: not only does YYYY-MM-DD make more sense, but also people who do put the year first always use that format, in my experience. I don't think I've ever seen anyone write a date in YYYY-DD-MM form.
Perhaps it's simply because in the USA we just love corporations so much we like to pretend they're people too? Rather than groups of people.
I guess the distinction between OS and browser does not matter much in the sense that eventually most browser will implement each browser tab/window as a different process. Which is actually a good thing. It can be used to enforce a stronger Same Origin Policy.
At least only two of our dialects sound retarded.
There is a war going on for your mind.
Very interesting. It's probably two thousand, seven hundred and nine because that's how lists are done. John, Mark, and Peter. Although having thought about it, it's two hundred and fifty-two thousand, four hundred and ninety-nine. .25 second of time saying it. You drop a lot of words from English. We're say: "Write to your MP". You'd say "Write your senator". Things like that. I forget the other examples.
Perhaps it's due to the Germanic influence in our language? Drei und funfzig. (Apologies to the Germans here, I'm sure that spelling is wrong.
Well, anyway. As a Brit, the American way of missing the "and" just sounds horrible to me. Like you're trying to save
Get your own free personal location tracker
$ date ; ddate
Thu Feb 26 17:48:30 GMT 2009
Today is Boomtime, the 57th day of Chaos in the YOLD 3175
Get your own free personal location tracker
Actually I would say the set of integers are infinite. I would also say the set of Real numbers are uncountably infinite.
God save the Queen ;)
How many computers are too many?
Uh, no, it shouldn't. Your "lord" sure as hell isn't my "lord"
so when do you start counting years? Is this 2009 to you too, or something else? Anno dominae is the phrase used to denote why this year is the number it is, and not the 4009th year since the last king of babylon, or whatever.
Still, if you write "february 26th"? I have to ask - 26th of what? You're not Yoda: "ahh, February 26th day of, it is"
'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more', he says."
Outch. After this quote, I know I'm never going to test Chrome.
There is an absolutely vital distinction. The damn browser will happily run any code embedded in any website I visit. My OS (don't know about yours, but mine) only runs stuff that I explicitly tell it to, usually after explicitly installing it. In fact, I'd prefer even tighter limits on that.
If you don't get that distinction, your security mindset is fucked up.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Perhaps it's time to do away with phrases like "browser will replace the desktop" and "browser-based OS", because they seem to bring about angry friction in old-school developers. I tend to think that "desktop" operating systems and their BIOS's will eventually merge to provide a base hardware interface whereas the browser becomes a base for most software. And I say most, but realistically everything is on or going to the web and to say otherwise is a denial. It's been nearly 15 years since I started using the internet and all I've seen is a inexorable shift from OS-specific to browser-based. Sure there's obstacles related to privacy, technology, and people but it's only delays (the singularity is near?). All that said, I prefer Chrome as my primary perusal platform. It generally stays out of my way and handles things as I expect. Whether or not Google has its eye on a permanent place amongst similar products, its speedy minimalist approach is a sexy suggestion to its peers.
-- NeilO
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Still, if you write "february 26th"? I have to ask - 26th of what?
Uhh... February. You know, like "day 42 - George and I are still stranded on this desert island, and each day, he looks tastier and tastier..." That isn't too terribly confusing for you, is it? :)
I agree that YYYY-MM-DD is unlikely to cause a problem, but it is still ambiguous. I simply prefer to leave absolutely no question and use the 4 digit year with the abbreviated month name. No one can find a way to screw that up, and it makes no assumptions about the reader other than "they know the month names in English".
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
I strongly disagree. JavaScript is a great language - in fact I think it is one of the best dynamic languages out there. The biggest problem is that 95% of the people who program JavaScript never bother to figure out the right way to use the language. I have heard people who had worked for years programming in JavaScript (actually JScript) claim that the language does not support inheritance, which could not be more untrue. As Douglas Crockford stated in a talk titled "JavaScript: The Good Parts":
If people would actually bother to learn the language (and could be convinced to give up the notion that you can't do OO properly without classes) you'd probably hear a lot less hatred for it.
Also, adding other support for other languages wouldn't do anything to address the biggest difficulty in writing code that runs in a browser, which is the incompatibilities between the different browsers' DOM and CSS implementations.
If I don't put anything here, will anyone recognize me anymore?
as of now Chrome is windows-only.
There has been much talk about the browser (pick one) as being platform independent, but no one seems to have done this, esp. IE.
Building things like JS into a browser is nice and all, but until and unless all browsers stick to standards, we the end users will not see any true benefit.
I'm tired of switching from one browser to another just so I can see a web site or watch a video. I use Linux, BSD, and Windows, and they all have their strengths and weaknesses, but this is getting ridiculous...
I'm ready for Google to take it further so we can log into a google terminal server for our computing needs. Then we can really have $100 computers that are capable, since all they will have to do is work as a dumb terminal!
http://www.AmherstburgVisionCentre.com
Actually, there are more French words in English than German works...just saying...
"Those that start by burning books, will end by burning men."
so when do you start counting years? Is this 2009 to you too, or something else? Anno dominae is the phrase used to denote why this year is the number it is, and not the 4009th year since the last king of babylon, or whatever.
The "politically correct" term is Common Era, so the current year would be 2009 C.E., and ~3000 years ago would be 1000 B.C.E.
last time I checked, it was a long way from even building properly.
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Stay tuned for some shock and awe coming right up after this messages!
How come that you (US & British) are still using outdated imperial system with its inches, feet, legs, arms, and so on? :)
Coding etudes
Actually they aren't called under pants because they go under the pants. It is because they are pants that go underneath. Pants comes from the term pantaloons which originates from Patanlone (trousers in Italy) you would certainly not wear underneath another form of clothing.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trousers
It's all well in good that Americans (including myself) have evolved the language but it's embarrassing that the country doesn't teach people more about why we use certain terms and where they originate from.
Just as most people don't know that Aluminum and Aluminium are both technically British as the US version was the original term for the metal but it was then decided to change it so it has the same sound as other elements on the periodic table.
Java doesn't want to be Javascript which is still a hack of a language where you can't even do basic things like simple AJAX calls without writing a load of code to compensate for the fact browser developers (well one developer in particular) are too petty to agree and make things work one way and as far as security goes it's all or nothing with Javascript unless you install some third party add-on (which should be unnecessary) to manage your per script settings.
This is all just a matter of custom and expectation. Simply because things do not fit your expectations or custom does not make them wrong, neither does making a straw-man argument about the number of "and"s in a spoken number. There are perfectly regular places to put the "and" in British or Australian English, (between the hundreds and tens, whether hundreds or tens digits are present or not). So: "One thousand seven hundred and three" or "Two thousand and twenty one". I have not often heard people use "decimal" to mean the decimal point: they usually use "point", but "decimal" is just as unambiguous.
How about prices? Is it really the case that you pronounce $29.95 as "twenty nine and ninety five" or just "twenty nine ninety five"?
Your assertion that "and" is used to spell out the decimal is a custom I am unfamiliar with. In your deposit example, I would simply have used "dollars" as the decimal separator: "one thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars ninety five". Not matching your rules for spoken numbers does not mean that we just throw "and" anywhere we fancy.
My guess is that the American preference for using fractions over decimals (such as the avoidance of the metric system and quoting stock prices in dollars and fractions rather than dollars and cents) has led to your expectation that the "and" represents a fractional part. This seems unusual to me, but that doesn't make it an error, any more than the custom of using "and" in numbers in non-American English is misplaced. Consistently using "point" (or in the case of money, "pounds" or "dollars") to indicate the decimal point seems far less prone to ambiguity to me.
While we're making gripes about additional one syllable words, the American habit of adding redundant prepositions is far more egregious, in my opinion. "The furniture is inside the house" contains all the information about relative location you need. You don't need the extra "of" in "the furniture is inside of the house". And let's not even begin on a system of writing dates that has non-monotonically changing significance.
I don't get what's so innovative about V8. Didn't both Apple and Mozilla do these things long before Chrome was announced?
Clever signature text goes here.
Basic word roots, and grammar, both matter more than sheer number of words.
For instance, French and other Romantic languages put most adjectives after the noun: "le chapeau rouge" (the red hat). Meanwhile, German puts adjectives before nouns, like English does.
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I work for Intel; they went a step further: instead of having to deal with months and dates, they just designate the year, Work Week number, and day.
Today is WW09.4, or 2009WW09.4, in long form. (Week starts on Monday, Sunday is "Day 7")
It took some getting used to, but I'm sure it helps prevent issues with month abbreviations among non-native English speakers, in addition to simplifying any calculations regarding quarters, fiscal years, and such.
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It's nice to open any Windows folder, or type "ls", and get an ordered list if your files, if they start with a date. If you use Windows' "Scanner and Camera Wizard", and someone who doesn't think about ease of sorting names their photo set "Feb 26 2009", then it's a pain. Then with 10 photos, by default you'll have:
Feb 26 2009_1.jpg
Feb 26 2009_10.jpg
Feb 26 2009_2.jpg
Feb 26 2009_3.jpg
And so on.
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"basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more"
Oh yeah? Then why the fuck did Google do this http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/02/26/1547223&from=rss
I know comments against Google and supporting Microsoft get modded down on Slashdot (and still Microsoft continues to advertise here..werd) but Microsoft's share of the browser "market" is no more than Google's share of search.
What's the difference between the OS and the browser? Besides the obvious one, that an OS doesn't need an OS and desktop to host on, here's my number two difference: I can use (for example) KDE and Konqueror on Linux, FreeBSD, NetBSD, OpenBSD, other BSD variants, OpenSolaris, AIX, HP-UX, Mac OSX and Windows. I can use most Google websites with exactly three browsers: IE, FF and Safari. Konqueror is not supported. WebKit browsers are not supported. Hell, Chrome isn't that well supported, and it's their own dogfood!
Google is an advocate for what I call "cross-platform lite". Which is about as tasteless as "miller lite" but not nearly as filling.
Don't blame me, I didn't vote for either of them!
What matters is where the language came from, historically speaking. English is a Germanic language because it evolved from other Germanic languages, not because its grammar is similar to other Germanic languages (although the latter is often evidence suggesting the former).
I guess it is for you if you think February has 42 days.
Its also terribly confusing for all date parsers, poor computers can't tell if the date makes sense, or has to be parsed in your arse-about-face way.
"The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more,'" which is exactly where Microsoft went wrong with Internet Explorer. That's why the OS-wide 'Internet Options' are on a menu inside an app, which is even more stupid and illogical than complaining that a UK website doesn't use US English.
Yes, I write "2nd February 2009" and say "The second of February two thousand and nine"
I can vouch for my fellow countryman. That's how we roll over here.
'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more,' he says."
Wasn't that MS' argument in the 1990's about not removing IE? Didn't they say that IE was an integral part of Windows and therefore couldn't be removed? The more things change, the more they remain the same!
I use firefox at work because it has great add-ons to help web development. I use Chrome at home because it's fast and has clean UI with innovative , useful features.
Most people just use IE because it is they think it IS the internet. They don't really understand what a browser is so can't really judge differences.
The browser(s) that most people use in the future will be the one(s) that is/are most easily accessible and easy to use for most people. Hence google creating a decent user experience and getting involved in the MS anti-trust procedings.
Why should they bother with add-ons? They are used by a tiny minority of people.
I like this language tree to illustrate the ancestors of modern languages:
http://www.intersolinc.com/newsletters/Language_Tree.htm
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That's the best reply I've ever gotten to my pet peeve about number pronunciation. Thank you very much. Three points:
You assert that there are "regular" places to put the "ands" when speaking numbers. If that were true, I'd have no objection. It's my observation, though, that connectives are scattered about nearly at random in long numbers. My example was exaggerated but, in truth, I commonly hear something along the lines of "one million, one hundred and five thousand, six hundred and fifteen" when saying "1,105,615." It seems people sprinkle the "ands" into spoken words according to no generally-accepted rules. If there were such rules, such a "regular" way of using them, I'd have no problem.
The rules that I adhere to about how to say words do apply for most Americans during the only time they actually write out the pronunciation of a word - when they write a check. I take that as proof that there's a correct, formal way to write and (by extension) say numbers. Other folks view it as a special, too-formal case that should be abandoned in speech. I can't argue with that, of course; it's just personal preference.
Finally, spoken money amounts are a special case. I find much more consistency in the way people speak dollar amounts and it's far less irritating to me. Generally speaking, most Americans would say "one thousand, seven hundred and twenty five dollars and ninety five cents." I'd say the same, just omitting the first and. I might even shorten it to "seventeen hundred twenty fine and ninety five cents."
I'm certainly open to people saying words however they wish. In spoken communications, it's getting the idea across that's important and pretty much any form will get the job done. The fact that extra connectives irritate me is something I keep to myself except in functionally anonymous internet locales. There's certainly nothing about the way people say numbers that irritates me nearly as much as pull handles on doors that must be pushed and vice versa. :-)
ps - I agree with you about the sprinkling of extra prepositions. I find myself doing it when writing and must focus my editing efforts on rooting them out.
Can they just put that on android?
Because I'd recommend opera, ff, safari, ie (for intranet with BHO); in that order. Google only adds to the browser requirements that clients would ask. argg