2.0 Beta Chrome On Windows, Chromium On Linux

AlienRancher writes "Google launched this morning a new beta version of Chrome 2.0: 'The best thing about this new beta is speed — it's 25% faster on our V8 benchmark and 35% faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version.' Other enhancements include user script support (greasemonkey-like) and form auto-fill." And reader Lee Mathews adds news of the open source version, Chromium, on Linux: "Not only has Chromium gotten easier to take for a test drive thanks to the personal package archive for Ubuntu Chrome daily build team, but development on the browser is also progressing nicely. Despite being a very early build, Chromium on Linux feels solid and boasts the same blazing speed the Windows users have been enjoying for months."

Comments

Wake me up when...

[Anonymous Coward]

Until Adblock+ and NoScript are available for the Linux version I'm not the least bit interested. And if there are Google-specific exceptions to ABP, forget it.

Re:Wake me up when...

[tpgp]

Edit your hosts file to block all ad servers. Its quick and painless.

Not as quick & painless as Adblock. Especially when it comes to maintenance.

Re:Wake me up when...

[cryptoluddite]

Edit your hosts file to block all ad servers. Its quick and painless.

www.example.com/index.html
www.example.com/ads/annoying.swf

When people say they want adblock and noscript and you say "just edit your hosts file" you sound like another fanboy making up excuses. When I was using adblock I had */ads/* and a bunch of others that are not even possible with a hosts file.

As for NoScript, I'm not a huge fan of it (its more of a pain then anything else

Wha? NoScript can occasionally be a mild hassle, but it basically automatically block all annoying ads automatically AND all that useless unrendered crap like google-analytics AND in practice it makes your browsing a hell of a lot more secure than separate processes.

Re:Wake me up when...

[NorQue]

e.g. heise.de, a German publisher for IT magazines, which also offers the best informed German language IT news and a very good online magazine on society and culture, hosts all ads themselves. Blocking heise.de would mean also blocking one of the best sources for Germans on the net. Adblock (with a German blocklist), on the other hand, conveniently blocks all the ads and doesn't touch anything else. Impossible with a hosts file.

Re:Still waiting for adblock :(

[Tom9729]

At least for me, Adblock is much more convenient (though I do use a hosts file to block some of the nastier stuff). It is updated automatically, it lets me whitelist sites, and it's pretty useful for blocking annoying avatars/signatures on forums.

Chrome still misses the point

[billcopc]

I want to like Chrome, really I do, and I applaud them for speeding up JavaScript, but they are completely ignoring the one feature developers love about Firefox: add-ons!

I actually switched to FF roughly two years ago, when I found out about Firebug and a few other creature comforts. Nowadays, the first thing I do on a new machine is install the 15-20 add-ons that make my job easier and my surfing more comfortable. I tweak the shit out of that browser, and yes it does bog it down a bit with all the excess code, but that's peanuts next to the time I save with all these finely-tuned add-ons. Even if I had just Firebug, WebDeveloper and GreaseMonkey, I could still do just about everything I want with the browser.

I don't know how Chrome works out for regular users, but as a web developer, Firefox is still the supreme hotness. I'd be more supportive if the Chrome devs just ditched their browser and offered the same functionality via Firefox mods (or code contributions). They could even replicate the Chrome UI in FF, for the many folks who like the de-cluttered style.

Re:Chrome still misses the point

[cryptoluddite]

and you are still missing the point ...

And you're missing the point.

No user cares about the architecture unless if gives them actual benefits. Firefox addons undeniably give huge benefits to many users.

The only architectural feature of Chrome of note is separate processes per tab. But is that a benefit?

First of all, any crash is unacceptable, and I've been running beta firefox on a daily basis at work and the last time it crashed for me was several months ago. So this is basically no benefit. The only real benefit for stability is running flash in a separate process, which firefox already does with nspluginwrapper.

Now performance. Chrome can make better use of multiple processors, which is great, but it means if you have two tabs open with flash on your dual-core then all your other programs have to compete for resources instead of having an idle CPU to use. Or if you are single-core then you have twice as many procs competing for resources with everything else, making everything else more sluggish. Granted, those are bullshit reasons technically BUT what matter is only what users actually prefer and not what is technically 'best'. Users might prefer all their other apps to be snappy more than their tabs to multitask well.

Memory usage. Chrome can recover memory better when a tab closes, but it wastes more memory for a tab to be open (duplicated images, etc). And once there are ad-ons that need to coordinate among multiple processes, is memory going to explode with each tab? Uncertain. Remember that Java also uses the same concept of a separate process per 'thing' and look how well that works out when you have lots of them running at once.

Frankly, if you give people a 'taste test' between firefox with chromifox theme (makes it look like Chrome) and Chrome, I think you'll find the browser architecture, except to geek fanboys, is pretty low on the totem pole.

Re:Chrome still misses the point

[AnalPerfume]

Google must be split on the idea of addons for Chrome. Without addons Firefox users wouldn't be blocking Google adverts, blocking Google's Analaytics etc at every turn. I don't doubt that this was a major factor in deciding to build their own browser, which won't allow Google's data mining / advertising machine to be blocked. Unfortunately for them, the cat is out of the bag for a lot of users who now know it's possible, and insist that the browser they use be able to do it. Firefox can with addons, Opera can by editing a text file but Google really must be in a quandry over letting Chrome users do it. If they don't adapt to the addon system they will only ever be a minority to Firefox and Opera, if they do then AdBlock and NoScript will appear very quickly. If they then try the Apple approach and ban anything which competes with (or in this case, blocks) their own stuff, they will not only get bad PR which affects the "do no evil" image they've carefully promoted but will push people who converted early to Chrome under the assumption that addons will appear sometime down the line and that these features will appear when they're ready. How many of those will then switch back to their previous browser of choice if they know advert and script blocking ain't gonna be allowed.

Re:Chrome still misses the point

[RoFLKOPTr]

I'd be more supportive if the Chrome devs just ditched their browser and offered the same functionality via Firefox mods (or code contributions). They could even replicate the Chrome UI in FF, for the many folks who like the de-cluttered style.

You obviously haven't the slightest clue about what makes Chrome such a revolutionary browser. Here, let me sum it up for you. Chrome has sandboxing features at every level of the application. Each tab runs in its own process in its own memory space, so if a tab crashes, the program as a whole remains stable. Each app within each tab also runs in its own process, so if Flash Player or Java crash, the tab as a whole remains stable. This memory handling nearly eliminates the possibility of memory leaks, because a tab's process is terminated (rendering its memory allocation empty) when you close a tab. Chrome uses WebKit, which is a very fast rendering engine on its own... but pair that with the javascript engine that Google wrote from scratch to be as fast and efficient as possible, and you get THE fastest graphical browser on the market at release date. I believe the betas of a couple browsers are faster than the current stable Chrome... but I'd like to see how this new beta Chrome holds up.

It is THAT, along with its open-sourcedness, and Google's announcements that their plan isn't to dominate the browser market, but to compete in it to promote more advanced browser technologies (remember that their services are AJAX, whose speed is more dependent upon engine efficiency than coding at this point) that make Chrome so great.

(Let it be known for the record that I used Chrome for about 4 months since it was released before I switched back to Firefox because of add-ons)

Re:Chrome still misses the point

[renoX]

[[ the only architectural feature of Chrome of note is separate processes per tab. But is that a benefit? ]]
Yes!! Because it feels more responsive thanks to its use of several process.. Plus when one webpage use too much CPU you can easily find which one does this (using the built in task manager) and avoid this website..

The biggest drawback of Chrome is that you cannot have Flash blocked by default currently.
I'm using Opera now (switched during FF2 days as FF2 leaked like crazy), but I'll switch to Chrome when it'll have a Flash blocker.

Re:Still waiting...

[Tubal-Cain]

I agree. Chromium completely lacks Google Updater, Google Toolbar, Google Desktop Search....

Re:Obnoxious

[Anonymous Coward]

File a bug report?

Speed is not an issue

[microbee]

It's already fast enough. Or, put another way, killing all the ads IS the best way to boost performance.

Give me Adblock and TabMix-level control of interface, and I'm ready to switch!

Re:Still waiting...

[AnalPerfume]

Yep, you can't love without all the Google data mining tools tracking everything your browser does.....well, some can't. Personally it's the main reason I won't be touching the official Google Chrome on ANY platform. At least an Open Source port can be built without all that shit in it.

Oh yeah, I echo the calls for an AdBlock and NoScript type functionality in Chrome.

Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage

[Vexorian]

Firefox is cross platform?! Damn those evil firefox developers.

Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage

[anaesthetica]

Sadly, Firefox developers shifted from "fast and simplified feature set" to "include lots of features to make the web fun & easy." They're working on Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 right now, both of which are feature-driven releases. Astonishingly, the one feature for Firefox 3.5 that makes the release competitive with Chrome & Safari—the new javascript engine, TraceMonkey—was almost cut from the release because it is/was too buggy to fit into their release schedule.

The Mozilla 2.0 project, which is supposed to refactor a good deal of the Gecko code in order to make it leaner and easier to deal with, is not getting much attention at all while the feature-driven point releases consume everyone's attention. Mozilla developers have lost any focus they once had on the fundamentals of browser innovation, and are now given over to the same level of feature bloat that killed the original Mozilla browser (now SeaMonkey). Extensions were supposed to be the solution for this: extra features could be implemented by users so that developers could focus on making the browser faster. Not anymore.

It will not surprise me if the hard core of geeks that abandoned Mozilla Suite for Firefox now abandon Firefox for Chrome and Safari. The first one of those browsers to get an extensions/plugin framework allowing for ad-blocking and development tools will start sucking a lot of folks over.

Don't trust browsers from companies that sell ads

[Logic Worshiper]

Google makes it's money by selling online adds. Why would they make a browser giving you the tools to block those adds? They won't. They'll make a browser which gives them more control over your browsing experience, and you less. Hell, Chrome doesn't even let you block 3rd party cookies, because they don't want the 3rd party cookies they put on your computer to be blocked. Any browser google makes will always be limited by google's business model of selling online adds.

Chrome will never give me the control I want of my browsing experience, because that's not in google's interest. Other community developed versions like SRware might do it for me, if they give me the control I want, and block adds.

Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage

[shutdown -p now]

Or this one, race conditions are solely a problem with multithreaded applications.

Race conditions happen in multi-process systems all the time. Ever seen one process create a file, then try to open it, while another deletes it right as it was closed?

Re:Firefox is a stinking pile of garbage

[Jugalator]

It leaks like a sieve, everybody knows that.

The memory benchmarks I've seen shows that Fx 3 has that issue fix, and well beyond being fixed too. While converesely, IE is far worse off. Are you sure this is not about leaking extensions?

Re:Chrome - Feels Like A Running A New Computer

[Twinbee]

Not enough importance and effort is given to latency with software. Clicking between tabs, resizing windows, opening/closing tabs, clicking back/forward (which isn't ideal in Chrome btw), opening and closing the software - they all are underrated imo.