Google Betas Chrome 4, Touts 30% Speed Boost

CWmike writes "Google upgraded the beta version (4.0.223.16) of its Chrome browser yesterday, boasting a 30% speed improvement over the current production edition and adding integrated bookmark synchronization. Developers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin, who announced the release, tout Chrome 4.0's faster JavaScript rendering speeds. 'We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, and by 400% since our first stable release,' they said, referring to Chrome 3.0. The new beta includes the ability to sync bookmarked sites across multiple computers."

Comments

60% faster loss of privacy

[h4rr4r]

I bet google would love to see your bookmarks, I bet advertisers would pay dearly for that sort of info.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[RiotingPacifist]

if only you could look at the source* to see that they are not doing that...wait what?

*and if you don't trust them compile your own

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[h4rr4r]

That would be chromium-browser, chrome itself is a derivative of that, but not Free software.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[h4rr4r]

Troll?
For pointing out why google would want to do this?
You would think I had insulted the Cult of Jobs.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Dwedit]

That would be Firefox which reveals your bookmarks. By abusing the visited link style, it can conditionally load images depending on whether or not you have visited a specific page. Carpet-bomb enough of those, and you can tell which of the top 5000 websites a user has been to.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Only if history is enabled, which is always the first thing off on any browser I use.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

links visited != bookmarks

the links visited are usually a lot more fun

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Try SRware Iron. It's just Chrome - tracking bits.
 
  Comparison of Chrome Vs Iron

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, they slap some Google branding on. That's it. The distinction between Chrome and Chromium is entirely academic (or legal if you prefer). They're functionally equivalent.

If you have a problem using Chrome because it isn't free software, use Chromium. You won't notice a difference other than the branding.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[LordLimecat]

For the tinfoil hat crowd, theres always SRWare Iron, which is Chrome, with updated webkit, with any google-related tracking removed. You lose site suggestion and auto-update tho, which personally i enjoy.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[LordLimecat]

Youre not allowed to label a compiled version "chrome" AFAIK, but judging by the SRWare Iron team's work, you certainly can compile a full blown chrome-clone with whatever pieces removed and whatever added you want.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

That's why you use the Chromium's privacy-enabled open source fork Iron, That way your privacy lies not in the mercy of the browser but in solely your browsing habits (obviously even the most private browser can't prevent you from throwing your privacy out the window by actively or passively using data-mining services).

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

That is true for ALL browsers that have the visited link style and browsing history activated.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you think the bookmarks are synced? It could use magic unicorns but I'm guessing it uses a Google server.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[javabsp]

That is not limited to firefox, almost every graphical browser is "vulnerable" to this

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[bonch]

Slashdot fucking loves Google. They want to use Google's OS, browser, bookmarks, RSS reader, email, and phone. Then they bash Microsoft's platform expansion attempts and Apple's branding.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[V!NCENT]

"SRWare Iron: The browser of the future - based on the free Sourcecode "Chromium" - without any problems at privacy and security

  Google's Web browser Chrome thrilled with an extremely fast site rendering, a sleek design and innovative features. But it also gets critic from data protection specialists , for reasons such as creating a unique user ID or the submission of entries to Google to generate suggestions. SRWare Iron is a real alternative. The browser is based on the Chromium-source and offers the same features as Chrome - but without the critical points that the privacy concern.

  We could therefore create a browser with which you can now use the innovative features without worrying about your privacy.

  We want our users to participate in our work and make the browser free to download under the name "SRWare Iron" into the net."

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

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[johny42]

Better yet, he can compile his own Google servers! Of course, the bookmarks could be encrypted client-side before being uploaded to Google servers, but I doubt this is the case. Most people trust Google with their e-mails and let them track their search history anyway, so I don't quite understand why it is necessary to point out these (obvious, at least for anyone reading Slashdot) privacy concerns everytime Google releases a new service.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Jugalator]

I bet google would love to see your bookmarks, I bet advertisers would pay dearly for that sort of info.

I bet I don't care if advertisers know I like Slashdot.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Sadly they're not keeping up with chromium releases.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[TheRaven64]

Most people trust Google with their e-mails

Really? Because last time I checked most people didn't use gmail. Maybe it suddenly gained 51% market share while I wasn't looking, of course...

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Zoidbot]

Just use Opera, it's sync'd bookmarks (and more) for years, and includes sync to mobiles.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[lwsimon]

While I believe you are correct, there is absolutely no way to know that. Google could be taking any number of things onto the Chromium codebase before shipping Chrome, and you would have no way of knowing.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

I really liked the idea and philosophy behind iron browser. But unfortunately , I cannot use it as it does not have a 64bit version yet. Any idea about the release date for the same ?

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

60% faster loss of privacy

We're supposed to do this only with Microsoft, you buffoon!

Hey, who has heard of Windows 7's DRM? It will keep you locked from your own files and send them to microsoft for approval! Yes, it's true!

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[afex]

You are correct, and actually i believe out of the web-based email services, Yahoo is #1 with hotmail/msn #2, and gmail is third.

that said, the parent is correct, many (maybe not "most") people DO trust g-mail.

Hell, google can read my email, look at my attachments, watch my searches, even process/store all of my phone calls (google voice) if they want - it's an assumed tradeoff for getting awesome free services! Anyone who things they are doing it "just to be nice" is crazy...

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[afex]

woah woah, buddy - you are WAYY off base
We absolutely do NOT want to use google email anymore!

we want to use google wave.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Hurricane78]

Exactly. Especially the biggest advertiser on the Internet: Google!

No wonder they don't include an ad-blocker!

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[tolan-b]

Where do you think they keep the bookmarks to allow you to sync them? Hint: it's not in the browser. ;)

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[LifesABeach]

The Browser source would look pretty straight forward. As for the Server side, that traffic and content recording capability would be straight forward also.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Johan Welin]

Absolutely! Getting this info and put it together with site-category data would be like candy for advertisers. It would be useful though, if you could mark your private bookmarks as private and be guaranteed (by license or otherway..) that the browser provider honor your privacy.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[immakiku]

None of the major five browsers include ad blocker.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean Chrome with something along the lines of three checkboxes to share information removed (the search/URL bar being neutered as a result, as it can no longer search-as-you-write), some of which were off by default?

Yeah, that's nothing but a publicity game to get Chrome's downloads by SRWare, exploiting silly paranoia. The exact details of everything Chrome shares, when, and how has been detailed in this (remarkably short) page since release: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/

And obviously, if you don't trust it, you can check the Chromium* source and compile it yourself.

*it's called Chromium, not chromium-browser. Package names in distributions != Actual name.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[V!NCENT]

I don't know, but why can't you run 32bit apps in your 64bit OS? :S Is this another strange Windows thing or... ?

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[choongiri]

Posting to reverse my accidental "Overrated" mod. I intended to click Funny, of course, because this *is* funny. Damned stupid f***ing slashdot UI. Selecting an option in a list should not cause an irreversible action.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Simetrical]

For the tinfoil hat crowd, theres always SRWare Iron, which is Chrome, with updated webkit, with any google-related tracking removed. You lose site suggestion and auto-update tho, which personally i enjoy.

SRWare Iron has an older version of WebKit than Chrome developer builds. Their website says they use 532.0; about:version in my Chrome says 532.3. Chrome's developer builds track latest WebKit, AFAIK, or at least something like that. I doubt anything is going to be significantly more cutting-edge.

FWIW, I don't think there's anything in Chromium that transmits any info to Google and can't be easily disabled (e.g., change your search provider). On the other hand, I'd imagine a build by some tiny random software company would be less reliable than official Google builds, and getting support would be harder, so I see no reason to bother.

Who says SRWare is any more trustworthy than Google anyway? If you're paranoid, you're probably much better off compiling the (much more widely reviewed) official Chromium source yourself than relying on any company's official binaries.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[cb88]

what about 'textual' browsers... I will now proceed to wrap my laptop in tin foil and poke a peep hole in it so I can see elinks!

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[Thinboy00]

Opera does, but it doesn't (AFAICT) come with a blacklist, so you have to tell it what is an ad and what isn't.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[FutureDomain]

Seriously though, the good thing about Google Wave is that they are allowing you to use it on your own server. I don't trust my email to them, but it'd be different if I could run an open-source version of their Gmail system on my own server. The issue I have with Google is control. I don't trust them to control my data, but I like their products and if I could use their products to control my own data, I'd do it.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[FutureDomain]

I'm running 32-bit apps (and Iron) under Windows 7 64-bit. Drivers must be 64-bit, and 16-bit apps won't run, but most apps should be fine. In fact, if you want to use Flash you'll have to use a 32-bit browser because Adobe is dragging it's heels and won't release a 64-bit version of it. The GP is just being a troll, ignore him.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[FutureDomain]

Opera does (but it's hard to use). IE and Firefox support them as addons. It's just Safari and Chrome that don't support ad blockers.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[V!NCENT]

"Drivers must be 64-bit"

Are you sure? I remember a guy from my class who had a Vista laptop, decided to install the 64bit version and installed 32bit drivers succesfully (because there were almost no 64bit driver for his HW)

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[AmiMoJo]

Half an hour with a packet sniffer could tell you.

Re:60% faster loss of privacy

[DaVince21]

This feature seems to be available in Chromium (though it's greyed out in my current chrome-daily beta...)

Smoking

[Nithendil]

Loads reddit.com and slashdot.com almost instantly. Occasionally the browser will just hang for a second but it makes firefox look like molasses. I have serious reservations about using Google as my search, browser, voicemail, and email but it is difficult when they keep blowing the competition out of the water.

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm right there with you. Basically all of the free tools from Google have no serious competition in terms of quality. Other tools may have more users, but it's not because they're better.

I'm not saying we give them a free pass, but have there been any serious breaches of privacy by Google? We've seen dirty moves by Microsoft, we've seen slow moves by Firefox. We've seen silly moves from Yahoo. We've seen invasive moves by Facebook.

I see Google as pretty freaking amazing. I think even the people who take issue with one thing here or there would have to agree that they are definitely the least of all evils.

Re:Smoking

[gparent]

both work, dipshit.

Re:Smoking

[Toonol]

But "Slashdot.org" is more ideologically pure than "Slashdot.com". Get your priorities straight.

Re:Smoking

[SuperAlgae]

Well said. Google bashers always baffle me with their lack of factual support. A healthy caution of companies that have so much information is justified. If someone wants to avoid Google for that reason, then fine. But they should not pretend it is because Google has shown any pattern of abuse. If anything, they have been much better than most companies.

I saw someone in another forum using Google's slogan "don't be evil" as some kind of argument that they are evil... asking why they would need such a motto. From my perspective, "don't be evil" is one of the few corporate slogans worth anything. Unfortunately, it is something that cannot be taken for granted. It's sad, but that's the world we live in. And "don't be evil" is certainly more meaningful than most of the warm/fuzzy tripe that other companies spew in their mission statements.

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

The question is "why can't Firefox perform as well as Chrome?"

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is actually run by the aliens from V.

You use them to search, browse, email, find directions, and their OS is soon going to be running your phone (if it isn't already). Google will quite literally know more about everyone than any other company or government. They will have more info and access about you than any given intelligence agency. It is kinda creepy in a way.

Re:Smoking

[Nithendil]

Yah I screwed up. I never look at the address I just click a button.

Re:Smoking

[abhi_beckert]

Because it's old, messy code. WebKit is the most modern rendering engine out there.

Re:Smoking

[BikeHelmet]

Yeah, Google has consistently required court orders before they hand out info. They've even turned down the US government's warrantless demands numerous times, while Microsoft and Yahoo just handed everything over.

I haven't heard of them sharing private info with other companies - they keep whatever they mine closely guarded. I think they realize their reputation is worth more than whatever they could gain by collaborating.

Re:Smoking

[cpscotti]

That's the big honking problem;
They're taking over the world (Internet & TI) and we are all happy with it! :)

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

Doo-Doo head!

Re:Smoking

[juletre]

I just type /. and Opera takes me here.

Re:Smoking

[TheRaven64]

Yes, heaven forbid that a for-profit site owned by SourceForge, Inc would have a domain name indicating that it's a commercial enterprise.

Re:Smoking

[lwsimon]

Only if you're a damn communist.

Why do so many people have an issue with people making a buck? Jealousy, perhaps?

Re:Smoking

[ckaminski]

I've been spoiled by AdBlock Plus. I cringe every time I browse the web in IE and wonder why pages I normally visit look like crap, then I notice the ads. Chrome w/o Adblock is a no-go, no matter how fast it is.

Sorry.

Those sites I *LIKE* to use and want to support, I'll leave some ads on, but the rest of the web? Fuck it.

Re:Smoking

[alexo]

I'm right there with you. Basically all of the free tools from Google have no serious competition in terms of quality.

But competition is good, isn't it?
What does Mozilla plan to do to keep Firefox competitive?

Re:Smoking

[SimonTheSoundMan]

Pages take as long as Gecko or other Webkit browsers to load here, however /. is slow when scrolling and causes high CPU usage. Hopefully a bug that will be ironed out.

Re:Smoking

[Nick Novitski]

I've seen precisely two sensible arguments for Google-mistrust.

One is from a perspective of generalized mistrust: stated in the strongest terms, no one besides you should have access to any of your data.

The other is from a perspective over the long-term: there is a real chances that, in one's lifetime, either due to individual breaches or a shift to corporate evil, Google will cease to be entirely trustworthy.

To me personally, they both seem tiresome, and not worth the effort, but I understand why people with stronger commitments to privacy or safety would make those arguments.

Re:Smoking

[JCholewa]

The most moden OSS engine out there, perhaps. I'd bet that Opera revises theirs just as frequently, and they seem incredibly adamant and aggressive about adhering to standards and trying out new methodologies.

Re:Smoking

[JCholewa]

Although adblocking is only available in Mozilla variants and Opera and Konqueror, et al, there is still the option of using a proxy app that blocks ad banners and soforth. So, in effect, all browsers can be used to view adblocked sites.

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

.org is part brand marketing and part remembrance at this point.

if you don't think .com lines up with as many "priorities" having to do with "slashdot" as .org does, you are being unrealistic.

and if you value ideology over reality, you're an idealogue. ;)

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

Correcting someone on the fact that he typed .com instead of .org instead of saying something relevant is what really is a mix of priority.

Re:Smoking

[Thing 1]

Yeah, more like "don't be evil ... unless in China."

Re:Smoking

[Anonymous Coward]

You're a fucking idiot. There are two choices:

1) Don't do any business in China. The Chinese people are left to deal with Baidu, which is constantly sucking the government wang.
2) Accept some compromise in order to get a foothold in China, and try to change things from there.

There aren't other options. Which would you prefer?

Re:Smoking

[Thing 1]

There aren't other options. Which would you prefer?

Um, the one that in fact aligns with "don't be evil"? Duh. Any sort of pragmatism devolves that into "don't be evil, in general, unless it means more money and the chance for eventually not being the same sort of evil that made us that money", which is absolutely not their stated corporate charter.

Password Sync also please

[James Carnley]

The biggest feature keeping me on Firefox right now is bookmark and password syncing. Xmarks does the job beautifully.

I love the fact that native bookmark syncing will be coming to Chrome, but nobody has mentioned password syncing. This is arguable just as important as bookmark sync and should be possible to release alongside bookmarks in this next release.

I wish they would mention it at least just to know that they are working on it. At the very least I can fallback on the Xmarks version for Chrome that will be available for Chrome 4, but I would much prefer a native solution.

Re:Password Sync also please

[wisty]

The biggest feature in Firefox is all those unimportant passwords it remembers.

OpenID might fix that eventually.

Re:Password Sync also please

[someSnarkyBastard]

One small problem with that feature request, how would Google securely store said passwords? (Whether or not you would WANT Google to have access to your passwords is a different discussion entirely)

Presumably Google will password-protect your password storage (using some form of cryptographic identification (eg private/public key pairs) would be nice but it would never happen (stupid users either lose the private key or accidentally leak their private key into the wild)) but that just means a potential attacker needs to know how to use a password cracking tool like THC-Hydra or JohnTheRipper, or leverage a botnet to do the work for him.

I could see this becoming a major target for botnet masters:

1 crack some sap's password-sync using botnet to distribute lockouts over several hundred IP addresses

2 grab any banking or finance-related password pairs

3 drain 'em dry

4 ???

5 profit.

6 GOTO 1

Re:Password Sync also please

[James Carnley]

Keep in mind that Xmarks already does this as well as Opera Link.

Xmarks encrypts the passwords using a key only you know and they presumably use a pretty good form of encryption.

Your argument is basically that nothing is secure so don't even try it. With that attitude pretty much nothing in tech would ever be done. Most banks don't even let you store the password. I know Bank of America doesn't since I have to type it in each time. For the rest of the forums and websites I visit it is nice to have it stored and ready to be used as it saves me time. It is my choice to store my passwords and run the risk of them being broken. You can continue typing in everything by hand.

Re:Password Sync also please

[someSnarkyBastard]

I'd trust a local encrypted password file that I can import and export, but I wouldn't trust a third party with my passwords.

Re:Password Sync also please

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

But if you give google your passwords, they'll be able to use their world-renowned search technology to spend your money for you on the online merchandise their algorithms deem you most likely to enjoy!

Re:Password Sync also please

[someSnarkyBastard]

But I already have plenty of Japanese tentacle por...crap, can I have a do-over here?

But I already have plenty of...ummm...mp3s, yeah, that's it, mp3s....

Re:Password Sync also please

[LordLimecat]

Password sync is coming in version 4, as are extensions.

Re:Password Sync also please

[drizek]

I use firefox on all my systems because of xmarks. I wish they would release it for hte Pre, too.

Re:Password Sync also please

[James Carnley]

Do you have a source for that? I've only ever seen talk of bookmark synchronization.

That would be wonderful news if true.

Re:Password Sync also please

[Korin43]

Xmarks is actually extremely slow and bloated. You should try Weave..

Re:Password Sync also please

[James Carnley]

I tried Weave. Weave is horribly buggy and not even close to beta yet. I might try it again sometime next year after it's had time to mature.

Xmarks works flawlessly and syncs within seconds. I don't even notice it. It also works on other browsers (such as Chrome) which is a nice feature.

Re:Password Sync also please

[Anonymous Coward]

Coming? going to work? How old is this article?

I am currently using chrome 4.0.229.1 on OSX with xmarks working great (No passwords yet though).

Adblock also works dandy (Though i had to use the one previous version, any extension that relies on putting an icon in your tool bar doesn't work on OSX it seems)

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac for chrome

http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblock/ (or whatever other extensions you want)

Xmarks you need to get through the Xmarks website but a quick google tells you what you need to know. Enjoy!

Re:Password Sync also please

[anethema]

Oops forgot to log in, above comment is me.

Re:Password Sync also please

[Jugalator]

And bookmark sync is coming to Firefox at some time around spring 2010 with Firefox 3.7. :)

Yes, some time until that date, but I wouldn't be surprised if Google Chrome 4 is released in final form around that date too.

Re:Password Sync also please

[Zygfryd]

Actually, it's conceivable to allow secure storage of data remotely, in a way that prevents even the storage provider from accessing it.

You can't trust storage providers today to implement that kind of functionality, unless you analyze the source code of the scripts on the service's webpage every time it loads.

However the browsers could add functionality to enforce that. They could offer "protected" input forms, input from which is tagged. Every protected input form would be visually indicated and made it apparent what encryption key it's supposed to use. The browser then ensures that any data in DOM nodes and JS objects tagged as protected cannot be sent to the server.

To remove the protection tag from such data the scripts on the page need to pipe it through a builtin encryption function with the indicated key. The protection tag needs to be viral so that any data derived from protected data is also protected and any JS objects created after a branch based on protected data are also protected.

On the decryption side, a builtin decrypt function would produce data tagged as protected.

In short, make browsers ensure that input from indicated form elements is
* always encrypted before being sent to the server
* encrypted with the desired key

Naturally that doesn't fix the stupid user problem, but it'd make smart users happy.

Re:Password Sync also please

[Anonymous Coward]

Except the extension API is laughable compared to that of Firefox, because chrome's UI is hardcoded.

Re:Password Sync also please

[Anonymous Coward]

...and they presumably use a pretty good form of encryption.

Ah, PPGP: we're not sure, but it's a step up from PGP!

Re:Password Sync also please

[webheaded]

I was going to say that too. I also really hope Google comes up with their own version of Weave. Of course, the idealist in me also kind of hopes I can actually use Weave in Chrome so that all my stuff is synced up because that, my friend, would be AWESOME.

Re:Password Sync also please

[moosesocks]

Hear Hear! If Google and Mozilla agree on a standardized format (or even simply integrating their two services), I'll be a very happy camper.

Also worth noting is that Xmarks works in Chrome, IE, Firefox, and Safari. As someone who moves between browsers frequently (for work, web development, etc.) this is invaluable. The only "major" browser unsupported by Xmarks is the mac port of Chrome, simply because extensions support hasn't been merged into mac Chrome's source tree yet.

Re:Password Sync also please

[chaodyn]

Bloated code - I think they may be able to skip "4" and go straight from "3" to "5".

Re:Password Sync also please

[webheaded]

Unfortunately, XMarks only does bookmarks and passwords. I've really come to enjoy the history and address bar things it does too. Didn't realize what I was missing before I got Weave. :)

Re:Password Sync also please

[Anonymous Coward]

Bookmarks and passwords are each stored in a simple file in your profile directory. You can't figure out some way to sync those files other than waiting for it to be implemented within the browser? There's still a whole OS and collection of applications under there, right?

Re:Password Sync also please

[DaVince21]

Chrome remembers (unimportant) passwords too...

Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[MasterOfGoingFaster]

I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.

As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.

In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

It's snappy but the lack of plugins like NoScript, Adblock Plus, Firebug, and numerous others is what kills it for me. So I stick with Firefox and the 3.6 beta isn't bad at all.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BitZtream]

Yes, less features.

Firefox is bloated now. Too many features, those features cost RAM and CPU time. Start adding all the 'must have' extensions that geeks use and Firefox REALLY starts to suck ass performance wise.

Couple in that Mozilla has seriously lost its focus and is too busy inventing more crap rather than making Firefox run properly. Mozilla building something like Breakpad/Socorro makes sense, adding crap like new font formats when they already support ones that are more than capable and MORE open is.

Chrome doesn't have a bunch of crap to tweak, doesn't support everything and the kitchen sink. You get far less features from Chrome and more speed.

You decide which one is more important for you. Me, I take Chrome for web browsing, Firefox for a mutli-OS development platform where speed isn't as noticeable.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[linuxgeek64]

Pages with little/no JavaScript render faster than those that have much... Why would you think that JavaScript-less sites render faster?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Junior J. Junior III]

I get annoyed when I try to scroll a window in Chrome and it's so fast I can't control it easily.

I'll be keeping firefox around for as long as there's no adblock and no flashblock for Chrome. Chrome wins the instant they're compatible with Mozilla plugins.

I'm glad that there's once again some vibrant competition in the browser sphere.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[L0wt3ch]

I disagree, Firefox is perfect,

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

> Too many features, those features cost RAM and CPU time

You think chrome is faster because it has less features? Your deep knowledge from studying the application architecture and using profilers tells you this? Or is it the typical desperate need of slashdotters to be relevant that they scoff at everything and tear anything and everything down without knowing why?

You people are like grumpy old men without even the benefit of the wisdom that you'd accidentally pick up with age.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[tukia]

I'm sure you could have a look into the code and figure out how it does it since it's open-sourced? ;)

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll be keeping firefox around for as long as there's no adblock and no flashblock for Chrome.

Adsweep and BlockFlash2 are the Chrome equivalents, respectively.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Judinous]

No matter how good Chrome's JavaScript performance gets, it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all. Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing. Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change. Until another browser implements these two features, Firefox is the only rational option for home browsing.

I'm not a Firefox fanboy, I'm just aware of my needs. In the business arena, I wouldn't recommend anything but Internet Explorer (behind a proxy, of course), because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments. That's another area that I wish more browsers would improve upon.

If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets along with their superior rendering performance, they would blow the web browser market wide open. I don't know why it hasn't happened yet, since most technical people are well aware of these issues.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

BlockFlash2 isn't as pretty as the Flashblock userscript, but works somewhat better. For some reason, certain Flash elements still get through though (whereas in Firefox, the same userscripts seem to block reliably). Keep an eye on Issue 26638.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Myrcutio]

the only holdout that IE can still claim is activex. Between SSH and the plain html web portals, most needs are covered.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.

You like fast sex? I prefer it to last...

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[brentonboy]

How can you trust NoScript anymore though? It really ought to be removed from the list of essential plugins.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[MaliciousSmurf]

Care to enlighten us, then?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[MaliciousSmurf]

He might mean the relative speed of rendering between chrome and firefox? Not sure.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

You must be a woman.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

The ridiculousness of this post is, of course, that webkit is getting features at a crazy pace, mostly driven by Apple wanting to get as much native support for stuff that could be done in javascript (so it runs fast on the iphone), and everyone else (google, apple, etc etc) who is behind the "html5!!" drumbeat.

look at bugzilla for webkit and you'll see an even match for mozilla in terms of adding features. you'll see the same parity (or worse) in RAM and CPU time (what happened to the decrying of process/tab?).

now, there is a much better argument to be made about gecko's antiquated architecture. webkit's source is a joy to browse, comparatively. there are several kitchen sinks in webkit, but someone did a nice refactor and they all derive from one water-dispensing receptacle superclass.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[jim_v2000]

Because it works.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[jim_v2000]

I actually get more value out of the addons in Firefox than the speed boost in Chrome. This is mainly because I usually open a bunch of links in new tabs first, and then go through and read them. In this situation, speed isn't that important.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[onefriedrice]

Yes, less features.

I don't completely buy that argument. On my setup, even gimp-2.6 cold-starts faster than FF 3.5.4, and gimp seems to be pretty featureful. FF and Thunderbird are the slowest apps I use, and presumably they share some code. That tells me there's something really wrong with how Mozilla is writing or deploying their programs.

Not only is FF slow, but it uses amazing amounts of memory. I can't understand what it's doing with all that memory, because it's obviously not using it to cache stuff to make it faster. Or if it is, it's failing. In the very least, I find it amazing that even after all these years, it's still noticeably leaky.

Actually, I've noticed FF seems to be zippier on Windows, so maybe Mozilla just struggles with with Linux port... Regardless, after chromium grows up a little bit more, I'll also probably be leaving FF.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ElectricTurtle]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BitZtream]

Heh, considering I develop software for a living, one of our products is embeds on XULRunner 1.9.1 (which is what Firefox 3 is built on top of) and several of our products use WebKit for rendering HTML.

So yes, my knowledge of them and profiling them tells me this.

You can find my name in the Gecko commit logs and all over the developers mailing lists, wheres yours? I don't think I've seen Anonymous Coward committing anything.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Spikeles]

He apologized

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Beyond simple dislike of relentless commercial pressure, which is a matter of taste(but can be a strong one, is the issue of performance.

For reasons that, I assume, have to do with the fact that advertisers are subhuman vermin who would sell their own grandmothers for a nickle, ads are overwhelmingly among the slowest page elements to load. Even if you don't mind what eventually pops up(which can be a tall order, particularly with noisy flash crap) wasting 10 or 15 seconds on what would otherwise be a highly responsive page waiting for one or more overloaded 3rd party ad servers sucks. It sucks even more when you do it dozens of times a day.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BitZtream]

GIMP is C/C++ code loaded in a compiled state. The majority of Firefox's functionality is in the form of JavaScript that has to be compiled at some point.

GIMP is compiled and then run, Firefox is run (and of course the core is compiled) but then it has to unzip a bunch of files and read a bunch of XML, JavaScript and other resource files, turn them into something usable in memory and then do its thing.

FireFox is FAR more flexible than GIMP, but that comes at a cost of speed.

You can actually speed FireFox up with a custom build (an option to configure for FF actually) or by uncompressing all the chrome for firefox before hand. In theory it shouldn't matter as FF caches it, but it does make a difference.

The main thing is that they aren't shooting for the same targets. Chrome is trying to be as fast as possible so Google's webapps run fast and feel more like native apps. FireFox on the other hand is trying to be far more flexible.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[k8to]

How is this a troll?

Moderators, you need help.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[CoughDropAddict]

Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.

This is why I never understand how people can say "sure, maybe Java/garbage-collection/50mb-binaries/etc. are a little slower, but computers are SO FAST these days and programmer productivity is SO much more important. Hardware is cheap, programmers are expensive." etc.

Speed still matters! And it always will.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BitZtream]

We're not talking about WebKit, we're talking about Chrome. Chrome is faster than Safari, they both use WebKit. Safari has more features and it costs.

FireFox uses Gecko rather than WebKit. I'm not talking about the differences in the rendering engines alone as that is not all their is to a browser. The stripped down browsers that use Gecko are faster than FireFox as well. Same rendering engine, different wrapper, different speeds.

Gecko is FAR more feature rich than WebKit, but Gecko also supports XUL, whick WebKit does not and I doubt it ever will since WebKit isn't trying to be an application development platform for all sorts of apps. WebKit just renders HTML pages and the requirements that go with supporting those standards.

WebKit can support more HTML standards and still not have as many features as Gecko.

When you can load an XULRunner app in WebKit and everything work, then get back to me, until then, I stand by my statement.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Guspaz]

The lack of extension support is a myth. As is the supposed lack of adblocking extensions.

The chrome extension API specifically includes the exact functionality needed for ad blocking via the filter APIs... and yet here we have conspiracy theorists breaking out their tin foil hats and claiming that Chrome is Google's plot to get rid of ad blockers. *facepalm*

The adblock extension I linked above isn't the only one, although it's the only one that I've tried. It's a bit buggy and the UI isn't all there yet, but it does subscribe to the real ABP's easylist, and it *does* block the ads in the list.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Colonel Korn]

I so loved Firefox and use to tell everyone to use it. I loved that it kicked IE's ass. Gotta love any open source project that goes up against Microsoft and wins.

As much as I hate to admit it, I can no longer stand to use Firefox. Like a slut that wins you over with fantastic sex, Chrome got me where it matters most - raw speed.

In fact, it seems way too fast. Is Google caching the web pages in a nearby Google server? Even sites that use little JavaScript seem to load really fast. Is something going on here?

Test the same sites with Firefox. Notice how the javascriptless sites actually run faster in Firefox, and scroll far more smoothly. Now install Adblock and try not to smirk as you load things in half a second that take Chrome 5 seconds. Enjoy.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[aardvarkjoe]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Because web advertising has gone way beyond "little images trying to sell things." Instead, we get Flash monstrosities that slow my computer to a crawl, pop-ups that jump in front of the content you're trying to read and steal mouse clicks, and pages full of blinking, animated pictures that make it difficult to find the actual content.

Just because you don't mind having your time wasted in that way doesn't mean that everyone else will put up with it.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[shutdown -p now]

At this points, in terms of meaningful UI alone, Chrome is a much better choice than Firefox, particularly for unexperienced users (whom you'd just want to move off IE). It just makes sense. Like Apple's stuff, only without the reality distortion field.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome (Iron) with Privoxy is ridiculously faster than Firefox with Adblock. Sad but true. Without Privoxy, probably still faster, but I didn't bother using it for long without.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Whiteox]

Both Aardvark and Fungus are correct. Firefox is the only browser that supports Adblock and it is the sole reason why I don't make regular use of Chrome/Opera/Safari/IE8.
The meccano-like ability of Firefox makes it absolutely and tautologically unique.
Simply, there's nothing else.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Whiteox]

Agree totally. What's the point of /. if you can't discuss relevant poi's?
Maybe /. should instigate a moderator license scheme as lately they've been hopeless.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Nevyn]

Depends, I don't see many people using wordpad/gedit instead of MS-word/OO-writer. Features always matter, and they often matter more than speed/security/usability (all of which have their fans who ask "why can't all apps. consider X, and stop being bloated") ... but sometimes, if you do _really_ well on one of those three and you are "close enough" feature wise, then people can live without the features you don't have. But it's a big gamble, much bigger than just adding features as fast as possible.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[QRDeNameland]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

In addition to the previous reasons offered, another good reason to block ads is to reduce the number of potential vectors for malware. For instance, when malicious third party ads were served from the New York Times web site less than two months ago, needless to say users of AdBlock were unaffected.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

I used to be like you. Still am, in a way.

Here's the thing: Clicking something and having the action take place instantly makes that unnecessary for quite a lot of tasks. And that goes not just for links to new pages (though that is a factor), but for links that drive Javascript.

I'll give you an example: I always hear people whining about the new Slashdot AJAX crap. I agree, it's bloated and completely unnecessary, and on Firefox and Konqueror, it's slow as hell. In Chrome, it's actually faster than the old system -- click reply, half a second later there's a reply box ready to type, and that's about the longest anything takes here. Clicking on a semi-hidden thread to expand it is even faster.

Granted, that's not "instantly", the way so much of the Web has become for me. But the difference is pretty staggering, and pretty significant.

I still use tabs almost the way you do, but that's when I have a slow connection, or a bunch of links that I can't easily visit in serial.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

The first difference you mentioned is C/C++ code vs JavaScript. FWIW, Chrome does actually cache compiled javascript somewhere.

And no, I don't agree with this:

they aren't shooting for the same targets. Chrome is trying to be as fast as possible so Google's webapps run fast and feel more like native apps. FireFox on the other hand is trying to be far more flexible.

Except Chrome's extension API, while incomplete and not as powerful, is much cleaner and simpler to use -- it's just HTML and Javascript. But then, it's also been rumored that Chrome intends to support Firefox extensions, eventually.

In other words: You can have the best of both worlds. But it's hard to do that from Firefox's codebase. It's a lot easier to start with Chrome and write an extension.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

So let's see...

The AC has already mentioned some userscripts. I've written one that uses CouchDB and works as a native Chrome extension.

And you probably want to look for the SmoothScroll extension. It doesn't work for all webpages, but when it works, it works.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

it will never be faster, more reliable, or safer than simply not running any JavaScript at all.

Unless "not running any JavaScript at all" requires using a less secure browser.

Blocking all JavaScript by default, with the ability to individually white-list individual items (close, but not quite, Opera), is a bare minimum requirement for safe web surfing.

No, it's an extreme. It's a "bare minimum" like the thumb reader on my laptop is a "bare minimum" -- buys me almost no real security, makes things more cumbersome to use, and the time and effort would be better spent elsewhere.

One example: Chrome's sandboxing makes the entire browser more secure against any web compromise, whether it originates from script, HTML, CSS, images, anything. It's not there yet, but you can imagine it dialed up to where individual iframes have their own render process, to where Flash in one tab physically can't touch Flash in another tab. It's not a new idea, Postfix has been doing it for years (decades?), but if anything needs this, browsers do.

Blocking advertisements does more to speed up real-world browsing speed (not just benchmarks) than any other single change.

Yes and no.

Yes, and that's the reason I wrote an adblocker extension for Chrome. It took about an afternoon, including learning the Chrome extension API. I once spent an afternoon just trying to play with writing a Firefox addon...

But no, sorry, sometimes you actually do benefit directly from the browser being fast. I'm willing to bet that Slashdot with ads enabled is still more pleasant to use with the new AJAX in Chrome, than it is with ads disabled and no JavaScript in any other browser.

If either Opera or Chrome would implement those two feature sets

Worth mentioning that you can implement them for all browsers with privoxy.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

Nope. Chrome supports ActiveX.

The only holdout IE can claim is corporate intranets and other hideously nonstandard websites.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[anethema]

I use Adblock+ for chrome and it works well, but keep in mind it does not actually block anything. It still downloads all the ads and then hides them upon render. Probably little to no speed benefit but sure is easy on the eyes.

It isn't their fault though, apparently this functionality has not been coded into Chrome yet.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[vipw]

Arora has adblock. It's even enabled by default.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

Actually, you're proving those people's point:

sure, maybe Java/garbage-collection/50mb-binaries/etc. are a little slower,

Let's see...

chromium-browser is a 38 meg binary on my system, and that's just the binary. The libraries it distributes bump it up above 40 megs, and it's probably easily 45 or 50 with all the system libraries it pulls in.

Here's an example of where you're both very right, and very wrong:

You're very right in that speed still matters, and always will. By applying a little optimization at just the right point, we gain massive speed boosts for everyone. For example, Webkit instead of Gecko, and all the little tweaks of v8, make Chrome's HTML, Javascript, and CSS at least on par with, and usually several times better than the competition.

On the other hand, you're entirely wrong about the argument you've used. Tons of stuff in Chrome, including the entire extension API, is done entirely in HTML and Javascript, because they are fast enough. I'll give you a stupidly simple example: Hit "new tab". That entire New Tab page is HTML and Javascript.

Want proof? Ctrl+U.

Want more? Next time you start a download, open the download list/manager. HTML and Javascript. In fact, the only things that aren't HTML and Javascript are the Chrome itself -- the toolbar, tab bar, and status bar. Even the toolstrip bar, managed by extensions, is mostly HTML and Javascript.

At a lower level, much of the core Javascript library in Chrome is, in fact, written in Javascript.

Guess what? Javascript is a little slower than C++. It's also garbage-collected.

Guess what else? Even if you could theoretically do these pages in C++, programmer productivity is still more important.

What did we learn?

Premature optimization is the root of all evil. Chrome is fast not because speed always matters, but because speed matters at the specific points they targeted.

If you know anything about Javascript, you know how difficult it must have been for the v8 team -- yet if you look at the v8 presentation, much of the optimization they do is remarkably obvious in hindsight. So the second thing we learned is that Java is not slow. A language is generally not fast or slow, by its very nature -- while some aspects of language design can make it easier or harder to optimize a language, it is ultimately the implementation that is fast or slow.

Conventional wisdom (like what you're spouting) says Javascript is slow. Chrome proves otherwise. Remember that the next time anyone says something as stupid as "Ruby is slow."

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Webkit source may be joy to browse, and it's absolutely the easier solution for some small embedding project. Whether it's "better" for larger projects (like making your own browser) is not that clear.

See Chris Lord's comments (he writes the Moblin browser, a Clutter+Gecko based browser with some modern features like process-per-tab) and the ensuing discussion: http://chrislord.net/blog/Software/mozilla-is-actually-pretty-good-guys.enlighten

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ProzacPatient]

If I recall correctly though, extensions only work with builds in the development channel but most people use the stable channel.
This may have changed in the past couple weeks without me noticing though, so I could be wrong.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Had you written that: "I disagree, Firefox is perfect, because&/Gs%#%TW7#W NO CARRIER" you'd be at +5 by now.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[V!NCENT]

"It's snappy but the lack of plugins like [...], Adblock Plus, [...] is what kills it for me"

"As our way of thanking you for your positive contributions to Slashdot, you are eligible to disable advertising."

Lolz...

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[CoughDropAddict]

Want proof? Ctrl+U.

Whoa, don't blow my mind quite so hard. I'm not sure I can handle all this wisdom at the same time.

C'mon, you think I execute shell commands by writing a C program that calls fork(), exec(), and pipe()? You think I write web pages pixel by pixel? Obviously high-level languages and programming paradigms are appropriate in many cases.

I'm sticking it to the Java weenies who think that C and C++ are obsolete. The people who year after year say that *now* Java is "often as fast as C++ and sometimes faster." The people who still won't acknowledge that there is a real reason C and C++ are still the languages of OS kernels.

It's not premature optimization to write libavcodec in C. Likewise with OS kernels, virtual machines, rendering engines, DSP plugins, and many other applications where the code will almost certainly be on the critical path of a resource-intensive application. It's not premature optimization to use manual memory management in applications that need to move lots of data around with low latency.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[the_one(2)]

It seems they don't have a tree style tabs equivalent extension:( I would try chrome if there were but without tree style tabs there just isn't a point. But I'll check back later and hope there is one then (or maybe make one myself?)

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[klui]

There is Flashblock but Adblock+ (not to be confused with Firefox's Adblock Plus) is actually hiding the ads after downloading them instead of blocking their downloads due to Chrome's lack of content policy.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BikeHelmet]

I'm loving the V8 JIT. Firefox is fast for javascript, but Chrome is blazing fast. For pages like slashdot it doesn't matter, but I tried a javascript NES emu, and man, what a difference...!

0.5fps vs 60fps.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[selven]

As for the Linux port, Firefox seems to be slightly faster on Wine than the native Linux version.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BikeHelmet]

I've had vastly different experiences on different systems.

On my gaming computer, every browser feels pretty close. Chrome feels like it renders the page fastest, and it scrolls the fastest. Opera scrolls the smoothest. Firefox is slowest, but it's packed with page altering addons. I don't use IE.

If I had to guess the time to open a reply box in Chrome, I'd say... 250ms? Firefox feels a bit longer, at perhaps 300ms. It's not enough that I care.

But on my old Athlon XP, it's a totally different scenario. It's not dual-core, so it becomes unresponsive when rendering. It loads pages slowly enough in Firefox that there's a multi-second delay before the page can be scrolled at all. If I open multiple stories at once, my browser can be unresponsive for over half a minute.

But right now I'm on my gaming computer, and there's almost no difference. Firefox just loaded gmail for me in 4 seconds. (cold) Now I can get back into it in under 2 seconds. That's quick enough.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ztransform]

Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

I guess for the same reason I don't like pamphlets on my car windscreen, or the mountains of leaflets in my mailbox. For the same reason I detest the super-bright advertising screens facing the roundabout that blind drivers. For similar reasons it annoys me that television advertisements are frequently twice as loud as the program I am watching. As well as reasons why I hate being asked to give money to beggars, charities, muggers on top of my extraordinary tax bills.

Or could it be a long-standing aversion to unnecessary bandwidth from an age where bytes used to be expensive? Or a repulsion to moving images much like animated cursors used to be?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[noundi]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

I completely [TOO SMALL? WANT TO GET IT BIGGER? VISIT XXXXX.COM] agree with you. There [THIRSTY? DRINK COKE, IT'S HEALTHY] is absolutely [ARE YOU TIRED? SLEEPY? TRY RED BULL, IT WILL MAKE YOU FLY!] nothing to be [TRY THE NEW MCBURGER, YOUR TONGUE WILL THANK YOU!] annoyed about.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

All I need is a Firebug-equivalent and I'm there. :-)

(There's a "mini developer toolbar" for Chrome 4 dev build, but I'll wait for the stable to show up.)

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[TheRaven64]

I use a click-to-flash plugin, so that any site with flash can only run it when I choose to allow it, but I don't blanket ban adverts (and a lot of flash things are not ads, but still need my authorisation to consume CPU resources). I don't object to sites displaying ads, because their ability to do so give me the content I want for free. Some I'd be willing to pay for, others I would simply ignore. The solution to intrusive ads is not to block the ads, it's to block the site. Every time I come across a site with too high an ad-to-content ratio, I add a line to my user CSS which adds a warning after any links to that site. I then don't click on them unless the link looks particularly interesting. I removed The Inquirer from my RSS feeds when they started using those obnoxious underline random words ads and sent them an email explaining why I had done. Since doing so, I haven't followed a single link to the site. They lost whatever revenue they got from showing me ads.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[TheRaven64]

With regard to the AJAXy Slashdot, the speed issue was never important to me. I'd command-click the reply button and have it load the reply box in a new tab while I read. After editing, I could go back to the page I was reading and have it submit in the background (and not jump back to that comment after submitting, as it does now). Expanding comment threads would be nice, except that half the time the 'parent' button is white-on-white (broken CSS somewhere; you can often fix this by changing the domain name in the URL) and half the time you can't actually get at the hidden children anymore without finding a non-hidden subchild and then hitting the parent buttons repeatedly.

In short, we're not complaining about AJAX in general, just the incredibly poor implementation on Slashdot.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

In one word, Flash. Check out this demo and wait until the end, when it's just flipping colors. That alone cranks my CPU to 50%... http://thejimi.com/wallet/demo.php

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[homer_s]

I assume, have to do with the fact that advertisers are subhuman vermin who would sell their own grandmothers for a nickle

Have you ever sent your resume to someone asking for a job? Yes? Congratulations, you are an advertiser trying to sell your services.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[bkr1_2k]

Except for the fact that, generally, resumes are solicited for job openings and you are therefore not "advertising". You are responding, which is something entirely different.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Chicken04GTO]

Yes its a big deal, when half a page is full of ads. There are other sites out there besides slashdot.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Hurricane78]

That's why I always used the mother of tabbing. The mother of many cool features in Firefox. The king of raw speed since forever!

OPERA!

But nowadays I can't live without my AdBlock, TagSifter, FireGestures, SmoothWeel (AMO), DownloadHelper, DownThemAll, Greasemonkey (with Greasefire), TabMixPlus, BetterSeach, Resurrect Pages, Stylish, and in its own special category: Firebug (with FirePHP, Firecookie, Firefinder, Codeburner, FireRainbow, Jiffy) and the Web Developer toolbar, the Javascript Debugger, Tamper Data, Colorzilla, Measure It, Palette Grabber, Pixel Perfect.

How can any browser ever replace that?? And who cares for that itty bitty piece of speed you gain, when you then have to give up all that?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ElectricTurtle]

Why give obnoxious sites any traffic? That will only encourage the practice.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Increased page load time (in some cases, massive increase due to ridiculously underpowered ad servers).
Increased storage/cache/whatever.
Increased CPU use (animated stuff/flash)
- The above two being particularly relevant on low-powered netbooks
Additional malware vector (recent cases: nytimes serving malware from rogue advertiser)
Page clutter & distraction.
Total irrelevance (products I don't ever buy, competitions etc. aimed at US and not relevant to my country).
Accidental clicks on ads leading to new pages/tabs/browsers opening annoyingly.

Enough for you? It's plenty enough for me.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Nerdposeur]

You are responding, which is something entirely different.

And what are you responding to? That's right, an advertisement for a job.

So are ads always evil?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[word_virus]

Heh.

"Google Chrome: Do Less. Faster."

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[zigurat667]

Flash?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

It might be a myth that Chrome will never support extensions, but it's not a myth that no release version of Chrome out now supports extensions. Chrome 4.0 will be the first release version with extension support built-in. Doesn't matter if current versions can support extensions if they're not built with that support.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Codger]

I don't care about AdBlock, but I stopped using Chrome because I couldn't run Flashblock on it. Without Flashblock, I have to reboot every day because the machine (WinXP) gets so bogged down. With Flashblock I leave it up all week.

Flash is evil, and if I can't block it with Chrome, I won't use Chrome.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[vitaflo]

Chrome is just faster, as is Safari (funny, they both use Webkit). In my experience they can both be up to 3x faster than FF in doing JS related tasks. This is especially apparent to me as I build a touchscreen kiosk for my company. It's fairly interactive with the JS, but always seemed sluggish in practice. I assumed it was just an underpowered machine (running Vista), until I tried it in Chrome. It was like night and day.

I still love FF, but if you're trying to push the envelope online a bit, then a browser like Chrome is going to make you smile a lot more.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[nschubach]

I'd beg to disagree. A resume shouldn't be an advertisement. It should be a historical record of your work history. If you are making it into an advertisement, I'm sure you are using it more than I am. When the company that hires you finds out you up-sold yourself and your experience, do you improve the wording in your resume to try to make yourself sound that much better for the next place to fire you for incompetence?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, chrome is a very badly behaved browser. You see, you can "accelerate" your web experience by having a number of connections open to the server to load images simultaneously. Behaved browsers limit this, Chrome does not. Although FireFox can't compete with Chrome for javascript execution, if you want to abuse websites and make them load faster there is a hidden preference setting to increase the number of connections firefox will make (by default it is two).

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[JDeane]

I use the hosts file found at http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Its like an adblock for your whole system, works with every browser and to top it off it ads a little nastyware protection (not quite as useful under Linux but the ad removal still works)

I rarely see an ad and when I do thats when I know its time to update that file.

I should probably make the disclaimer that I am an Opera user with a side of Firefox.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[nschubach]

How much do you pay for Slashdot only Internet? Can you give me tips on how I can get my ISP to only serve me content from this site?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[nschubach]

I actually think that Troll mods should decrease the mods rating as well. This would make people carefully consider "wasting" points on people that they disagree with and a troll mod would hold more power since someone gave up rating to mark it. On top of that, a threshold could be set to permanently remove said post and return points to modders that accurately reported it.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[brkello]

Java != Javascript. Compiled languages, when done right, are always going to be faster than non-compiled languages. C will always be faster than Java (because you have more control and the compilers are still better).

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[V!NCENT]

Isn't Slashdot the internet? Huh? What?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Guspaz]

The Content Script part of the API can be reviewed here:

http://code.google.com/chrome/extensions/content_scripts.html

I don't see anything there that would indicate that the code would not execute before dependencies such as ads would be fetched.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Guspaz]

They definitely aren't yet in the stable build, but they are in the beta builds.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Guspaz]

The term "release version" is somewhat nebulous these days. In an age where products seem to be stuck in eternal "beta", the distinction is just relative levels of stability.

In fact, the beta channel of Chrome has the same type of download page (http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/) as the final versions. Only the dev channel doesn't have that nicety. So it'd be more apt to say that Chrome 4.0 *is* a release version, and it supports extensions.

Of course, beta is still not as stable as final, and I can certainly understand that some people would like to wait.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[JCholewa]

Tree-style tabs are amazing. I like Opera better as a whole, but I often use Firefox *just* for that one extension. I'm off it right now, because there's a weird bug where when the tree-style tab bar is docked on the right and you try to scroll the bar, it treats the entire bar as a draggable image (that's in opensuse 11.x, FF3.x, darnedest thing).

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[AntiDragon]

Oh my - I feel somewhat childish and churlish saying this but... Consider yourself owned, Mr AC!

I personally still prefer Firefox when using windows. It's not as snappy as it used to be, particularly alongside Chrome amd Safari (my preferred browser overall) but it's fast enough and I've grown used to it. I make particular use of a lot of develpoment addons as well, which shores up my preference. Anecdotal opinion in my case though!

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[MMInterface]

I'm currently using Chrome but AdBlock is a big deal. Until I switched to Chrome I had no idea that some of the websites I used had so many full page ads that required you to wait a few seconds then click close before you view the content. It's not a matter of there being a few ads, its a matter of going to a news website where there is literally a dozen animated ads. There is a big difference here in the user experience. I have even noticed that the performance boost you get from Chrome is often negated by the lack of AdBlock.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing about this argument (also when Opera people use it) is that the existence of an ad blocker, while nice, is not really what makes me use firefox. I like firefox because it has a plugin system with hundreds of random developers around the web making plugins for every conceivable feature. Ad blocking is one of the more important functions of the plugin system, but not the only one by far.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[curunir]

...because no other browser comes with the enterprise management tools necessary for large deployments.

It may not be everything that IE has, but there are third-party builds of Firefox designed for enterprise deployment and management.

See here, for one example.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I have. I just dont sign any of it.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[drinkypoo]

http://swiftweasel.tuxfamily.org/ is your friend... failing for me on amd64 ubuntu karmic right now though

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome also needs to add the ability to authenticate automatically on Windows domains so that corporate websites work seamlessly without having to endure login popups. In Firefox you can do it by changing a parameter in about:chrome, but it's still not as easy as checking something in the options GUI (which is where they should have it). Chrome does not have that feature at all (it might come out of the summer of code, but it's not there yet)

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

Try and be more self-important in future. Oh wait, that would probably be impossible.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ElectricTurtle]

You should stop using sites that have obnoxious ads. People who run sites make decisions based on hits, and if the hits don't drop off, they'll make things worse and worse.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[jim_v2000]

I also do the tab thing because sometime when I hit Back it loses my spot on the page.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

You should try blocking ad servers with you're hosts file. That way you can use whatever browser you want without ads.
example: someonewhocares.org/hosts/zero/

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Thing 1]

[...] and that's about the longest anything takes here.

NO! Try responding to two posts in two minutes. Fail.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Thing 1]

For me, I've got so many tabs loaded in various windows in Firefox that keep crashing, that I only use Chrome. I mean, I love Firefox and the extensions (Chrome shows me the Flash ads that I have to scroll down from to remove(or hide)...), but every time I bring it up, it crashes a few hours later. Usually while I'm playing Starcraft, if that's any indication. But I don't want to debug it, I just want browsers to stay up with the shit I'm viewing; so, now, I use Chrome for most browsing.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Thing 1]

I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Slashdot is not the only site. If you follow the links to the articles (yeah, yeah, I know), then you will likely see a ton of ads. Many of these are Flash ads, that never stop moving.

We are wired to be distracted by movement; it generally means either there's some prey we can hunt, or there's a predator that's going to eat us. Hence it's very, very important that we pay attention to peripheral movement.

But with Flash ads, this just tends to completely distract one from the simple act of reading the content on the web page you clicked on, with the intention of absorbing said content. Hence, things like FlashBlock et al are well worth it. It's not that I don't want to be sold to; I'd love to know that there's a product out there that will cut my X expenses by Y%. However, I don't want to be distracted by e.g. tampon commercials when I don't even have a uterus.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Anonymous Coward]

adblock and flashblock extensions for chrome:
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2009/11/02/15-great-google-chrome-extensions/

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I find I need it on some sites where there is flash video (that I want to watch) and also a flash advert, because any flash uses so much of my CPU, with two flash objects running, the flash video craps out.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[Whiteox]

Sounds good. How about 2 mods agree that the post is a troll? Something like casting a pre-troll mod point, with another moderator confirming it?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[nschubach]

I'm confused. How was that a troll?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[nschubach]

Damn it, I read your post wrong. Not really. You'd need to ensure that someone with multiple accounts couldn't just abuse the system like it's done now. I don't know the details of how it would be done though. I'm an idea man! ;)

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

C'mon, you think I execute shell commands by writing a C program that calls fork(), exec(), and pipe()?

In other words, you acknowledge that there's at least some truth to what you were arguing against -- that machines are fast enough that for at least some purposes (I'd argue many), CPU time is cheaper than developer time.

The people who still won't acknowledge that there is a real reason C and C++ are still the languages of OS kernels.

That reason is mostly historical significance.

No, I'm not suggesting Java, specifically. But really, we can do better, even for a traditional kernel. C and C++ are not the only compiled languages worth considering.

It's not premature optimization to write libavcodec in C.

Has it been tried in other languages? And would it be premature to write it in assembly? (I'll bet some parts of it are in assembly, on supported architectures.)

In particular, if I see another order-of-magnitude increase in computing power without a comparable increase in codec complexity, I'd much rather have a libavcodec that doesn't crash, even if it's 2-3x slower.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

Java != Javascript.

I realize. My point was that, if anything, you'd expect Javascript to be slower, and that I found it incredibly ironic that someone was praising Chrome for performance in the same breath as they were berating people for using Java.

Compiled languages, when done right, are always going to be faster than non-compiled languages.

First, this isn't entirely true. There are optimizations which can be done at runtime, which can't be done at compile-time. Obvious examples are selecting an appropriate algorithm based on which data you actually have, not which data you expected to have. Now, you can theoretically duplicate these in a compiled language, but at a certain point, you'll find you've built your own mini-interpreted language anyway.

It's kind of like the assertion that manual memory management is always better than garbage collection. This is theoretically true, since in any case where garbage collection would perform better, you could manually build a garbage collector, and enable it for just that situation, and not others. But at that point, you kind of have to admit that there are real cases where garbage collection outperforms manual memory management.

Second, compiled or interpreted is a property of the implementation, not the language. Google Chrome compiles JavaScript. It's entirely possible to interpret C. Most so-called "scripting languages" do roughly the same tradeoff Perl does -- compile to some internal bytecode-ish representation, then interpret that.

C will always be faster than Java (because you have more control

Even if you were right, this is only true in that assembly will always be faster than C. And the problem here is, the speed of a nonworking program is irrelevant. People very rarely use assembler, simply because it's usually hard to write faster assembly than your C compiler, and even if you do, it's going to take you a lot longer, and it's going to be a lot buggier. I think similar tradeoffs can be made by replacing C with a higher-level language (though NOT Java, please), and using C or assembly when you actually run into something broken.

the compilers are still better

I'll give you that, tentatively. That's mostly a matter of popularity.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[SanityInAnarchy]

With regard to the AJAXy Slashdot, the speed issue was never important to me. I'd command-click the reply button and have it load the reply box in a new tab while I read.

Yes, I did exactly the same.

These days, though, it's just faster -- especially if I have a quick point to make (right now). It's also nice in that I get that much more context while replying -- I can see your post, and posts below the one I'm making. When I submit, if Slashdot is feeling fast, I can preview/submit without leaving the page, without having to manage multiple tabs, and without really waiting at all.

It's kind of like the advantages I get from Git being faster. It's actually faster enough that it changes the way I work, because I can now commit at pretty much any stage, knowing I can redo the commit, or rearrange a bunch of commits before I push. I can also branch as often as I want, knowing that the merge will be instantaneous and much more often conflict-free than with Subversion.

In short, we're not complaining about AJAX in general, just the incredibly poor implementation on Slashdot.

Perhaps, or a bit of both. The point is that AJAX in general is faster on Chrome, and that it can make an incredibly poor implementation usable, a barely-usable implementation awesome...

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[DaVince21]

Ad blockers exist now, as well as several other extensions. See http://chromeextensions.org/.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[DaVince21]

They did sandbox JS to the best of their efforts, though, especially since each tab is a process on its own that can't access the other ones (by conventional means, anyway). Me, I'd miss JS as tons of sites now make good use for it (like AJAX pages) and there are other practical uses coming for it (interactive SVG, that browser 3D thing Google is making).

If there's a need, I'm sure an automatic JS blocker extension will be written eventually for Chrome.

Really Fast

[gmuslera]

With it Google news is showing articles of next week.

Re:Really Fast

[martin-boundary]

I'm on Debian, you insensitive clod. For some reason, the only articles I actually see are from two years ago.

Re:Really Fast

[Rockoon]

Google Chrome, now with 30% faster version number increments.

Love to use it, but...

[owlnation]

...I use a Mac. How is it possible that it is in its 4th version, but there's still no Mac version of the browser?

This is like the situation with Google Earth which only eventually showed up in a Mac version a few years after the Windows version.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[paulius_g]

Yeah, it's a shame. I'd love to see official versions for both Mac and Linux as soon as possible.

This really reminds me of Skype. The Skype version for Windows is ages ahead of the ones on Mac and Linux. I had to use Skype on a Windows computer, and I was blown away by the interface changes and features. Let's hope that Chrome doesn't become that.

Granted, at least Google is working a Mac version. There are even development builds that can be downloaded. I don't think it's anywhere near beta quality, though. Hopefully this doesn't mean that by version 6 of Chrome for Windows, Mac users will be rewarded with Chrome 1 for Mac :-P

Re:Love to use it, but...

[ltmon]

FYI, nightly builds for all platforms (Mac, Win, Linux, Linux x64) available here: http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Should get official versions soon, I guess, but I find any given nightly build (on Linux) fast and reliable.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[willy_me]

I am using it right now on a Mac. You just have to google "chrome developer mac" to get a download link. Or you can just go here. Anyway, it is fast and works well. It does not integrate with MacOS the way it should - but they are working on it. Overall I am very impresses as I like it more then Firefox.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[RiotingPacifist]

demand? won't most of these features get ported to safari anyway?

Re:Love to use it, but...

[BitZtream]

http://build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/

Which can be found by visiting:

http://www.google.com/search?q=chromium+mac+download

Imagine that.

I stopped bothering with Chromium, Safari isn't different enough to justify the instability of Chromium for me.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't know why slashdot ignored the link... Oh well, here it is:

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=Mac

Re:Love to use it, but...

[morganm]

Developer releases are available here: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel

OSX, Ubuntu 8.04+ (32/64) and Debian 5 (32)

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Mac

Hello PC, Whats that you have there?

PC

Oh this? Its Google Chrome and its faster than IE and Firefox.

Mac

But it still gives you viruses and spyware right?

PC

Oh Mac, you're such a brainwashed little cunt.

PC (Cont'd)

Look, it uses WebKit, the same stupid thing your Safari browser uses. Happy now?

Mac

Sort of. I'm a Mac and I want it my way. I want Google Chrome now!

Mac (Cont'd)

PC... give that to me.

PC

You know Mac...You could just buy a PC, or at the very least boot windows on your over priced PC hardware.

Mac

But then I will get viruses...

(PC Throws his arms up and walks away)

PC

I give up.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[jeffstar]

skype on windows has become a piece of shit! The linux version does everything except for SMS messages and hasn't become a UI nightmare. let's keep it that way

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Hrmm support 5% or support 90%, I really hope you can do the math on that. How can you even think that you should be considered an equal citizen? Go cry to Apple to make a browser that doesn't suck. Where has innovation been with Safari?

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Google is a PC and didn't pay $2000. :)

Where is your god now?

Re:Love to use it, but...

[93 Escort Wagon]

...I use a Mac. How is it possible that it is in its 4th version, but there's still no Mac version of the browser?

This is like the situation with Google Earth which only eventually showed up in a Mac version a few years after the Windows version.

Well, I whined about that too for quite a while - I'd try other browsers but couldn't leave Firefox, despite it's issues on the Mac, but kept pining for something better. But now I've finally switched over to Safari plus a couple plugins (ClickToFlash and Glims) instead, and am reasonably happy. As far as HTML rendering goes, Chrome won't be any faster obviously. It's possible Javascript rendering will be faster, but I wouldn't bet on it - Safari 4's Javascript engine runs circles around Firefox 3.5's (yes that's totally subjective).

I imagine, since Safari and Chrome are both Webkit-based, a Mac version is just not a priority for the guys down in Mountain View. So basically I've just given up on them.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Temporal]

You mean this?

(It's dev channel, meaning it's still a little finicky, but it is good enough to be my primary browser on Mac.)

Re:Love to use it, but...

[JasonMaloney101]

Anyone else have the commercial's traditional piano tune playing in their head while they read this?

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes yes, now convince Apple to make safari not suck (I had to enable an IE 5 workaround in apache to fix safari's broken keepalive that caused safari to show blank pages if you clicked "too fast"). Until then, Chrome's webkit means it's everything safari is, but with network code that doesn't have 10 year old bugs in it.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[jim_v2000]

lol, yes I did.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google focuses its efforts on real computers, not toys......

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Temporal]

The dev channel may be more stable than the nightly builds.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[ElectricTurtle]

It's sad but yes.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[spud603]

wow, i didn't know such a (relatively) stable mac version was available... thanks for the link.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Lemmy Caution]

As much as I wish it could be for me, there's some serious lacks. The biggest ones are that Google Gears doesn't work and that not all the privacy and security features are working. The lack of working "Create Application Shortcut" (SSB) is another big not-yet-ism.

Chrome for Mac is in the 20% limbo, it seems.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Techman83]

Yep and the voices.. But the voices are always there.. why are they always there.. Oh that's right, I'm a PC and I run Linux :)

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Chrutil]

...I use a Mac. How is it possible that it is in its 4th version, but there's still no Mac version of the browser?

In the immortal words of Nelson:
Haha!

Re:Love to use it, but...

[BitZtream]

Just for reference, I have two in-laws that have been more than capable of infecting their machines with Chrome. They run as normal users, not admins. Doesn't matter if the machine doesn't get infected, their accounts are, which when theres only one user on the machine, thats effectively the same thing. The only difference is that I can cleanup user infections by deleting their profile. They still get infected with malware.

The one saving grace is that its much less common, and doesn't support crap like toolbar addins like FireFox and IE. Its not a target and doesn't support things that are used by the malware authors.

Chrome does not prevent you from clicking and downloading infected applications.

All the major browsers have URL blacklists now, but none of them are perfect, and users will always find a way to download it. I've seen them get the warning that a page is unsafe and click right on through.

IE isn't really the problem and really hasn't been for a while. You just can't fix stupid.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Swampash]

I've been running Chrome 4 all week on my Macs. It's a free download from the Google dev channel.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

The Mac has a point.....

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You probably forgot the second " inside of your a tag. When you do that, slashdot just ignores the whole thing. Happens to me all the time.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[FiloEleven]

I read this and substituted "inside of your post" for "inside of your a tag." I was chuckling at the AC's cleverness, having an unmatched quote in a comment claiming that posts with unmatched quotes are ignored, and then I realized that I am, forsooth, an idiot. Now you do too.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[SanityInAnarchy]

Chrome (Chromium) is open source. I'm running the nightly on Linux.

This means that if Google ever drops the ball on support, the community can fill in. I can't imagine it'll fall behind once the initial port is done, if any Linux users at all are interested in maintaining it.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[otter42]

Not only the Chromium nightlies, but there's also a Google Chrome for Mac, http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac

I'm not quite sure what the difference is. Right now, Chrome is a couple versions behind the absolute latest Chromium nightly, but I have no idea what is different. I don't even know if Chrome for Mac is just the Chromium nightly from a few builds back, or if some things are and will always be different.

One thing I noticed right away is that in Chrome my bookmarks are poorly formatted to the tab screen, whereas the latest Chromium nightly fits the bookmarks quite nicely.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[JDeane]

You reminded me of this video :)

It makes me laugh every time.... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t-L-0s-7-Z0&feature=related

and no its not a Rickroll lol PC vs Mac vs Linux video's are almost always funny :)

Re:Love to use it, but...

[bonch]

I'm using the Mac version of Chrome 4 right now. The developer channel has provided a Mac version since at least June.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[Techman83]

Haha, yes seen that before, definitely a good lol!

Re:Love to use it, but...

[DaVince21]

I found that rather than being unstable, it sometimes doesn't completely render some pages. Chrome for Linux/Mac has been fairly stable for a few months now, even the nightly builds.

Re:Love to use it, but...

[DaVince21]

A few months later:

Mac

Hey look, I got Chrome now, too! And surprise, it's a little bit better than the Windows version.

PC

W-W-W-Whaaaaaat?!

100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

No AdBlock, No mouse gestures... No Chrome :)

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

google is an advertising company, I think satan will be wearing snowshoes before google puts in Ad blocking.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

I know. Perhaps this is the real reason Chrome even exists. They can prevent people from blocking ads, and of course track peoples surfing habits.

Quite sad actually. The browser is pretty nice overall. Its too bad they will most likely treat their users like most corporations do... like shit.

Firefox is much better in this area. As if that needed to be said.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

You realize Firefox has exactly the same level of sending-data-to-google as Chrome does, right?

Anyway, what's with people assuming malice on the part of Google? The guys who write Chrome are just people who did it because they wanted to build a better browser. They're probably regular slashdot users, come to that. They're just people.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Firehed]

I don't care about Google ads, just all of the flashing obtrusive crap. The fact that I have to block* google ads to prevent that other stuff is in my eyes unfortunate, since they don't annoy me and help support the publishers of content that I like (not to mention support Google, who pretty much owns my entire digital life)

*I'm sure I could adjust the filterset somehow to whitelist text-based adsense, but I'm too damn lazy to do it once, never mind across all of my systems.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

Yes of course. My point was that... with their own browser, they can strictly dictate it however they want. For example not allowing you to block ads, or perhaps more intrusive features.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Temporal]

I know. Perhaps this is the real reason Chrome even exists. They can prevent people from blocking ads, and of course track peoples surfing habits.

Actually, Chrome 4.0 has extensions, and multiple ad blockers have already been written using the system, without being stopped by Google.

Quite sad actually. The browser is pretty nice overall. Its too bad they will most likely treat their users like most corporations do... like shit.

Actually, we're a little bit smarter than that. As it turns out, treating users "like shit" -- for example, by crippling our products just to drive away the small minority of users that run ad blockers -- is actually not profitable. On the other hand, making the internet better for users, in general, is profitable to us, since it directly leads to more usage of other Google products. Which is why Eric (the CEO) frequently tells employees, in plain terms, that we should be doing whatever we can think of to improve the internet for users, without worrying about how to monetize it -- in the long term, this approach is far more profitable than being dicks.

(This post is my personal opinion -- I am not authorized to speak for Google.)

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Google Chrome is released under open-source licenses. With open source, there is no "their" browser. You're free to start a fork with support for ad-blocking and remove the super-secret Google code that sends pr0n surfing habits to Google.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

How is this troll? Whoever modded this troll is the troll! C'mon google fanboys play fair.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Woogiemonger]

You can block ads in Chrome with tools such as Privoxy at http://www.privoxy.org/ Works fine for me.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Given that they actually accomplished something, my guess is they're not slashdot regulars.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[LordLimecat]

There are extensions in version 4. You can download SRWare Iron, which has built in adblocking, and removes all tracking.

Anything else, or is it pointless to try and convince slashdotters to stop spreading FUD

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, they treat you very well. They openly admit to collecting information on you, so of course you know that whatever you do on a google service will be used against you as marketing or worse, pretty much like anywhere else these days.
But the service is free to their produce (us) and blows the competition out of the water. And its open source, so there are forks in which every reporting of data back to google servers is unactivated. Oh, and that they could prevent people from blocking ads in their official version is a non-issue, as they aren't doing so right now, do not seem to aim to do it (they would have done so already), and will not actually be in power to do so, because of the aforementionned open source nature of the thing and the actual inclusion of extension support...
But don't let me take you out of your tracks. Nothing better than congratulating yourself of your unfounded opinion. Firefox has been going so well lately...

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Very glad to hear this. I thought I could hope that this was exactly the aim of Google as a humane corporation when I realised the power of different, very enabling tools and paradigms you have contributed to modern society, most especially this year with google wave imho.
More and more people seem to realize this is a much more optimal way of functioning, and I hope some of your tools (or derivations thereof) might prove a valuable help if we are ever to make the jump to a more modern, scientifically designed ethical society such as advocated by the Zeitgeist Movement. I find their suggested methods to be reminiscent of that CEO of yours :)
Although any such affirmation might eventually be proven false, it is exciting to hear that this is the mentality that drives you. Makes me look forward to what you will unleash next :)

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

You are correct. I should have realized this when i wrote what i said. I did take notice of Chrome's developement builds having extensions and incorrectly spoke without remembering that.

Before 4.0 there were no extensions as far as i'm aware.

But yeah I actually did check out some mouse gestures in dev for the 4.0 build etc but noticed none of it was really available yet or ready.

I'm not saying Google wont do the right thing, I'm just saying its not really in their interest to allow people to block ads. It is in their interest to add extensions if they want to beat firefox.

I of course hope they do the right thing. I actually like Chrome. That is how i found out about the dev build of 4 getting extensions... but i gave up when i realized it wasnt ready yet and kept going with firefox.

There is hope for Chrome. Its not bad at all. I just think its in question, wether google tends to use Chrome as a AOL type money making scheme, or are they sincere at becoming the open browser that competes with firefox and provides the user, the privacy he or she may desire.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[nine-times]

Personally, I think that attitude shows in Google's products. I'm not a mindless Google fan, and I agree with those who say we should be wary of a single company having so much information, but I certainly don't get the feeling from Google that they're trying to restrict their users, prevent openness, or monetize every little corner of every aspect of their interaction with users.

I think more businesses should think of people as "customers" instead of "consumers". It may not be a major distinction, but it's an important one. Don't treat the general population as a herd of mindless animals whose job it is to consume whatever crap you shovel out; treat them like the group of people you need to please in order to support your business. I get the sense that Google understands that.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

What is this bullshit? When did Slashdot become a wank-fest of useless, ignorant blather? I used to come here because people had useful, informative, and insightful things to say, kind of like this exchange or this one.

Sure, there were always the trolls, but there were so many knowledgeable people that you had a good signal to noise ratio. Yet, now, in a story with almost 300 comments, there are maybe three to five comments where people know enough to contribute to the conversation.

Yet those comments sit at 0-2 while the ignorant and easily-proven-wrong shit that you posted gets modded up. It's fucking embarrassing. Did you bother to read up on the subject before you opened the mouth attached to your brainless head?

1. Chrome is a fucking open source project, so you can take out anything you don't like, or if you're worried about monitoring, you can just use Iron.
2. Adblock+
3. Gestures
4. and yes ... Flash blocker

5. In fact, all userscripts are installable as regular Chrome extensions now, just by clicking, but you'd know that if you knew anything about the subject.

   Next time you want to spout off, do everyone a favor and spend three seconds to ask Google (or Bing or Yahoo), check your facts, find out that you are wrong, and change your mind about hitting "Submit." You've been here for six or so years (based on your UID) so you should have learned how to post by now.

   As for the moderators who saw "Firefox is much better" and "Most corporations treat their users like shit," then thought "Dude, he's totally right! +1 Insightful," they should go back to fucking Digg where +1 means "I agree." (Hint: it doesn't here. Read the moderator guidelines.)

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe you could enlighten us. Firefox, Opera, and even IE are capable browsers. Firefox and Opera have driven some pretty strong innovation in the last few years. Why did Google decide to build their own browser?

Google has proven to me that - with enough money thrown at it - browsers can be made to engage the web faster than before. But whats their angle? There has to be a reason for them to enter an already crowded market. If you tell me its strictly for the public's good I'll kick your ass.

Craig

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[iLogiK]

Google lives on the web. Most of the things they do work in a browser.
So the browser has to be good, so they wrote their own. If everybody has a faster browser, then their products work better.
Also, did you notice that in the last year many browsers have started to improve they speed? why do you think that is?

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Temporal]

Chrome is faster.

Faster browser => more internet use => more Google use => Google profits
Faster browser => web apps can do more => Google's business is web apps => Google profits
Faster browser => competing browsers are forced to get faster too => see above => Google profits

The point is that, when it comes to the internet, serving the public's good is actually profitable to Google.

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[DaVince21]

http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblock/

Plugin support

[h4rr4r]

Until it has that or built in addblock and vimperator, no chrome here.

Re:Plugin support

[13bPower]

http://www.chromeextensions.org/

They have adblock.

Re:Plugin support

[Temporal]

Until it has that or built in addblock and vimperator, no chrome here.

So run the dev channel. It has extensions today. Yes, including ad blockers. Dev channel is actually perfectly usable if you don't mind the occasional disembodied head taking the place of a button. Dev channel Chrome has been my primary browser for over a year now.

Re:Plugin support

[Simetrical]

Until it has that or built in addblock and vimperator, no chrome here.

So run the dev channel. It has extensions today. Yes, including ad blockers. Dev channel is actually perfectly usable if you don't mind the occasional disembodied head taking the place of a button. Dev channel Chrome has been my primary browser for over a year now.

Me too. Best part is, you can get Glen's head back by running "google-chrome --glen". (At least on Linux.) I highly recommend you freak out all your fellow Chrome users by changing their browser shortcuts when they aren't looking!

Re:Sucks To Be You

[trickotomy]

Say what you will, but it is nice having an OS that is *tightly* coupled with the hardware -- it cuts way down on poorly written drivers that are responsible for many of the BSOD in MS land. It is a premium to pay, but the frustration spared is well worth it.

Fast, even on Slashdot

[zach_the_lizard]

The annoyingly slow preview scripts here on Slashdot, that appear to bring Firefox to its knees, take very little time at all to run. Now we can finally enjoy Slashdot with its annoying web 2.0 features. Thanks, Google!

Re:Fast, even on Slashdot

[rdnetto]

Slashdot, the new ACID3

Re:Sucks To Be You

[calmofthestorm]

Niche? That all depends on your industry/area of research.

JIT javascript

[IGnatius T Foobar]

I learned something interesting about Google's javascript parser while evaluating various parsers as potential candidates for a scripting engine in an application. The reason it's so fast? It's got a JIT compiler, just like modern Java runtimes. This means that once things get going, JavaScript is going to approach native code speed. Unfortunately it also limits the platforms on which the engine can run. Google is targeting x86 (of course) and ARM (naturally, since they've got their eyes on the mobile market). Interesting times...

Re:JIT javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Everybody already knew that. Fuck off back to digg, loser.

Re:JIT javascript

[Anonymous Coward]

Uh, they all have JIT compilers (TraceMonkey in Firefox).

Almost every scripting language does these days. If you're looking at embedding scripting languages then look no further than Lua. It's super small and easy to embed, fast, easy API for extending, and similar semantics to Javascript (except way better). Also, LuaJIT 2 beta just came out a few days ago and it's kicking all kinds of ass as far as performance in scripting languages go (rewriting the book in fact)..

Re:JIT javascript

[BZ]

Spidermonkey (the ECMAScript implementation in Gecko, hence in Firefox) and Nitro (aka SFX Extreme, the ECMAScript implementation in Safari) both use JITs as well.

> just like modern Java runtimes

Not quite; the tradeoffs are somewhat different.

> JavaScript is going to approach native code speed

Somewhat. Depends on your jit, on your code, etc.

Re:JIT javascript

[unwastaken]

I've been looking into GPG a bit lately. I was thinking it would be nice if you could have encryption in javascript for webmail.

I found some javascript that can encrypt, but not decrypt, GPG messages. Apparently decryption is very slow in javascript, and possibly there isn't support for the large numbers needed for decryption? But maybe JIT would be fast enough, allowing math libraries to be used to support the large calculations needed.

As far as extensions go, I won't be using Chrome until it has a tree style tab extension. I can't live without that anymore.

Re:JIT javascript

[cecom]

Oh, yes, yes, JavaScript will imminently reach native code speed ... when pigs fly. Remember this: JavaScript will never become 2x faster than what it is now. We are at the end of the curve of easy speed improvements, and it is nowhere near to native code speed.

As a language JavaScript is impossible to optimize well. We will be lucky if it ever gets close to Java's performance, considering that Java is already about an order of magnitude slower than native in extreme cases.

BTW, I am not saying that JavaScript (or Java) is too slow, simply that in absolute terms it will never be close to native.

Re:JIT javascript

[badkarmadayaccount]

http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/07/tracemonkey-overview/

Re:JIT javascript

[badkarmadayaccount]

Time for a operator overloaded CPU arch, ala B5000...

But I guess there are bugs..

[willy_me]

I tried to post the above in Chrome but it failed to work. The Submit button just kept on saying to try again later. So I then tried in Safari. The Submit button still did not work but it did display a countdown. This countdown was not visible in the Mac version of Chrome.

So I guess I'm saying that if you use the Mac version be prepared for some issues.

Re:But I guess there are bugs..

[MichaelSmith]

I get broken interaction from slashcode all the time in firefox. The problem may not be Chrome.

Re:But I guess there are bugs..

[SanityInAnarchy]

Indeed, I do see the countdown here in Chromium on Linux.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[jeffstar]

That all depends on your industry/area of research.

ah, i see, it depends on your niche...

How about

[parallel_prankster]

Doing something that makes firefox addons compatible with Chrome ? I mean its so fast, even if the addons slow it down somewhat it may still be faster than firefox.

Re:How about

[Anonymous Coward]

You mean, by rewriting Chrome completely?

Re:How about

[LordLimecat]

See every other comment, and every other post on chrome, which mentions that version 4 (available now thru dev channel) has extensions already.

Re:How about

[badkarmadayaccount]

Linux already has applications, why does it need WINE?

Speed is nice, but lets get some basic features

[pyrico]

I really wish they would put at least one developer on getting some of their basic features requests done.

For example, I wanted to use Chrome as my HTPC browser as it does a good job scaling it's plugins to the system 2x DPI (unlike Firefox where flash applets are tiny squares in big dark frames they are supposed to fill).

But Chrome does not save the full page zoom setting! Every time you open a tab or browser instance you have to Ctr + which becomes unusable. It has not browser-wide options related to full page zoom and their font options are confusing and seem to make no effect.

Worse is the how easy it is to fine lots and lots and lots and lots of people complaining about this on their own help forums without a single response from the developers.

I know they are avoiding feature creep and keeping things slim, but even by a 80/20 rule, this kind of thing should be picked up (and could even replace their useless font settings dialog).

Re:Speed is nice, but lets get some basic features

[maxume]

It would be a kludge and fraught with difficulties, but you could probably make a bookmarklet (or greasemonkey script) that resized the flash for you. Google says that some already exist, though for specific sites and such:

http://www.google.com/search?q=greasemonkey+flash+resizer

(apparently, there are flash objects that do not scale, messing around with javascript won't fix those)

Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[pclminion]

I think it's kind of depressing that a 30% speed increase in JavaScript processing is actually something which is interesting to talk about. Are web pages seriously doing that much fucking JavaScript that it's even PERCEPTIBLE to the user? That making it 30% faster actually makes somebody's day suck a little less? That's sad. Sad, sad, sad.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Austin Schuh]

Considering that it will sometimes take my computer 30 seconds to deal with all the javascript when I view a poll, I'd say yes. Funny that you post that websites don't use much JavaScript on a website that obviously uses a lot of it.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[pclminion]

That isn't something I've noticed here, and I'm curious as to what your experimental method was in determining that (seriously, not sarcastic)

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Temporal]

This is a common mistake developers make -- they think "Do users really care if this page loads a tenth of a second faster? It's such a short time that it should make no difference". In reality, though, such performance improvements make things "feel" better. You will spend more time on a site or in an app that responds faster, because you will enjoy using it more, even if you don't realize why.

Also, the faster Javascript is, the more of it sites can use in the future -- hopefully for improving their user experience.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Austin Schuh]

I was able to reproduce it a moment ago by viewing all the posts for the Favorite Editor poll.

In the process, Firefox 3.5.3 asked me twice "A script on this page may be busy, or it may have stopped responding. You can stop the script now, or you can continue to see if the script will complete." and I hit continue both times in order to get it to load. My CPU was pegged once the initial part of the page loaded until the page finished loading.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you used GMail? It's amazing what it can do in a web-browser.

When you then consider Google Wave, which has GMail (and a bunch of other Google services) as a subset of it's functionality plus its new collaboration items, it's fairly easy to see the need for it.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[pclminion]

This is a common mistake developers make -- they think "Do users really care if this page loads a tenth of a second faster? It's such a short time that it should make no difference". In reality, though, such performance improvements make things "feel" better. You will spend more time on a site or in an app that responds faster, because you will enjoy using it more, even if you don't realize why.

Interesting viewpoint. I used to develop document viewing and imaging software at a small company with a fairly specialized user base. One of the mantras we followed was that a user-facing optimization was not worth it unless it improved performance by at least 400%. This was empirically determined through unsolicited user feedback (they never commented when we doubled the speed of something) and direct polling of the user base. Point being, the product was already fast enough. But that's a far cry from web development, which I admit I've never done (and won't, if I get my way)

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[billpenn]

Perhaps this was the experiment: 1. Select view source 2. Search source for "script" 3. Notice that this very page has 66 script tags.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Mad Merlin]

If tomorrow Intel released a CPU that's 30% faster than today's fastest while still using the same amount of power and not costing any extra $, it'd be pretty big news, don't you agree? Well, this is basically the same thing, except it's free and you don't need to replace hardware to get the speedup. Like it or not, most people routinely use Javascript heavy pages on a daily basis (most any webmail interface, Facebook, even Slashdot), what's wrong with speeding that up? Or maybe you don't like Javascript because you're only vaguely familiar with it? (a surprisingly common affliction)

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[BitZtream]

30% this time is less than 30% the last time they showed a speed increase.

Start off with 100%, 30% faster gives you 70% of the original time. Take off another 30% and now you're doing it at 49% of the original time. Now remember, we're on the 5th iteration of XX% faster, since the original chrome was XX% faster than (whatever they were compare it to).

Its not likely most people will notice a 30% increase on most pages, especially Googles own pages.

When you're talking about taking 30% off of something that already loaded in 1 or 2 seconds, no one notices, you get more delay from your overloaded cable modem than from the browser.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[LordLimecat]

Ummmm... Slashdot? Google Wave? Yahoo Mail? Google Mail? Facebook?

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I think it's a case of misreporting. If you read the article carefully, they use Dromaeo, which as far as I can tell tests Javascript + DOM. So a 30% boost in DOM speed is certainly noticeable (of course this is a 30% in DOM created by Javascript, so it's unclear how much is DOM improvements vs just Javascript). This also doesn't measure rendering speed.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Since you talk about "fucking JavaScript" -- yes, if I'm at a porn thumbnail gallery and Ctrl+Click to open fifteen different galleries each in its own tab, then Firefox grinds to a complete unusable halt for up to a MINUTE while it loads all those galleries. I don't know if the slowness comes from DOM or javascript or flash, but it's pretty bad.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you still back in the stone age? Yes, it does matter, alot. Because more and more applications are moving to the web (as a platform), JS processing does matter. If you are still back at the plain html static pages then ofcourse this doesn't mean much to you. JS engine was on a standby for so many years and there was so much place for improvements, and this is what's chaning now.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[rdnetto]

For me, the most noticeable increase was my greasemonkey scripts. They're what slow down Firefox, so having Chrome blitz through them is pretty significant.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[carvalhao]

If you haven't noticed, Google is making a huge effort to replace everything you should want on a computer with a Javascript webapp. Believe me, in time, Javascript raw speed will be pivotal to their hability to sell online services.

Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter?

[slim]

Google wants to sell Javascript based apps. Google Docs. Wave. And in future, even more demanding stuff.

They needed browsers with faster JS and faster dynamic rendering. The market wasn't doing it for them. So they did it themselves.

It wouldn't surprise me if Wave wasn't the primary driver for Chrome. "Hey, we've got this cool app, but it's going to run like a dog on most people's browsers. How can we fix that?".

Re:Sucks To Be You

[causality]

Say what you will, but it is nice having an OS that is *tightly* coupled with the hardware -- it cuts way down on poorly written drivers that are responsible for many of the BSOD in MS land. It is a premium to pay, but the frustration spared is well worth it.

Ah yes the "blame it on the drivers" apologetic for various Windows issues. It's the perfect excuse, really, because it's difficult to falsify. So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability, and if the Mac is so stable because it has such a comparatively narrow range of hardware to support, what would be your answer to that question?

Note, my question was about Windows. I don't dispute that the Mac is quite stable. I just believe it's stable because it's based on Unix and Unix had this kind of stability long before Apple decided to use it. Apple was just smart enough to recognize that and smarter still to put a pretty and usable GUI on top of it. It's the "faulty drivers" excuse for Windows that I don't quite buy, and mostly because I've never received an answer to that question that made sense.

Version 4.0 beta

[TangoMargarine]

So by this time next year, they'll be on, what, 12.0?

Re:Version 4.0 beta

[dread]

Your point being that you have a problem with software versions above 10 or?

Re:Version 4.0 beta

[TangoMargarine]

Well, considering how long Google's been having everything in beta...feels a bit like someone trying to kill a wasp on the gas pedal while they're driving.

4.0.229.1 on OS X

[trapnest]

Password saving doesn't work on /any/ website and the link to set up bookmark sync does nothing.

Weird thing is, the password saving feature used to work. :\

Re:Sucks To Be You

[HybridJeff]

I haven't seen a BSOD that since Windows 98.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[spud603]

zing

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Idiomatick]

I've not had a BSOD since a year or so after windows XP's release. So something like 7years?

Getting faster with each new release...

[pckl300]

Chrome apparently gets faster with each new release. After a few more releases, the browser will open before you even click the icon.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[shutdown -p now]

So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware?

The simple answer is that it doesn't. WiFi is still hit and miss on some popular chipsets. Don't even get me started on audio - headphone/speaker auto-switching is still broken in my Karmic, and clicks and pops are all over any played sound (particularly so when it starts). Video is normally fine... except when either NVidia or X decide to break something and forget to tell the other side.

Thats why...

[Anonymous Coward]

you haven't tried google wave yet, or gmail.

80% of my internet experience... ok, its porn.

But the 80% of the other 20% is gmail, facebook, and the same 4 o 5 news sites that i read everyday in netvibes.com (xkcd and youtube are there).

The other 20% is watching TVShows in megavideo, downloading books or atricles i need, adium & skype.

So I do care about javascript speed, i do care a lot.

Re:Smoking -bah hum bug!

[shoemilk]

Loads reddit.com and slashdot.com almost instantly

Dude, it could give me a handjob while it loaded my porn for me, but until it runs on a OS not made by MS, I don't care.

Yawn.

[Colitis]

I'll stop snickering at it when it has adblock support.

Re:Yawn.

[Anonymous Coward]

Moron, read some of the posts above: It does.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

I get far more kernel panics and oopses than I ever see BSOD's. Still can't suspend a Linux laptop without some kind of problem on resume.

The Unix in Mac is userland. Whoopee for it, it's certainly a better toolchain than windows is shipping with, but it doesn't impact stability one way or the other. The variation on the Darwin kernel they're now using has all kinds of wacky shenanigans with many parts not resembling Mach or BSD. The fact that they don't have to *test* on a huge variety of hardware helps in QA'ing the platform that's left.

4.0.237.0 build 31074: 133% faster

[jijitus]

Running Futuremark's Peacekeeper I have this results:

• Mozilla's 32 bit Linux build gave me 1383 points
• Swiftfox for amd64 (it's 32 bit anyway) gave 1528 points
• Chromium build 31074 64 bit was up a whopping 133% to 3234 points

All under the same computer and the same background tasks/services/etc.
What is keeping Firefox behind so much? Architecture optimization is not the answer: 64-bit Iceweasel 3.0 did not feel any faster than a 32-bit Firefox 3.0, and Swiftfox shows only 10% improvement over the Mozilla binaries.

Re:4.0.237.0 build 31074: 133% faster

[koiransuklaa]

It seems you are comparing a beta version of Chrome to an obsolete version of Firefox. Sounds really fair :)

Try comparing Chrome betas to Firefox Namoroka nightlies or alternatively test the released versions: Chrome 3.0 to Firefox 3.5.

Re:4.0.237.0 build 31074: 133% faster

[jijitus]

I did not make myself clear: both Firefox and Swiftfox are almost up-to-date version 3.5.3, not 3.0. But I get your point: it is an unfair comparison, even more because the Foxes have a lot of installed extensions, a lot of tabs opened, history, Awesome Bar enabled, and Chrome ran as new.
I'll give that Japanese Fox a try

Re:Sucks To Be You

[cbhacking]

how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware?

Well, to begin with, it really doesn't. Sure, some things work great, and if you stick to certain hardware and certain behaviors, you can have a fantastic experience.

Or, if like me you use laptops with nVidia graphics, you may be mildly shocked to discover that any video driver that gives decent 3D acceleration (I've tried a variety of versions over several years, including testing F/OSS drivers to see if they support enough HW accel) completely screws up at least one aspect of power management. The usual victim is hibernate - I haven't been able to successfully enter hibernate in months. In a way that's preferable to what it did previously though, where you could enter hibernate but the system would hang indefinitely when trying to resume. There's also really no reason to run the GPU so hard - it drains the battery more quickly than Windows does, and probably isn't good for the longevity of the video card (an extremely annoying part to replace on a laptop). Then there's things like the way my web-cam only works about 50% of the time. For the real horror of hardware support/driver stability though, consider my first Linux laptop - the closest I ever got to functional WiFi on that thing caused a kernel panic roughly 30 seconds after I would modprobe the driver (although I could actually connect during that brief window). When I checked back a month later to see if there was an updated version, I found the project discontinued. No driver I've tried since then has even been able to associate with an access point correctly.

Now, none of those issues I've had are technically Linux's fault, but they are definitely Linux's problem, in exactly the same way that all the unstable shit that OEMs shovel onto their boxes (which often include completely unnecessary drivers that cause crashes) aren't Microsoft's fault but nonetheless give Windows a bad name. On the other hand, somebody who only uses a clean (non-OEM) Windows installation and only installs required drivers will find that, barring hardware faults, it's quite possible to use Windows for years without a singe crash. Oh, and for the record, I have a friend with a Mac Pro (G5 PPC, not Intel) that will kernel panic if he leaves the computer idle for more than about 2 minutes at WarCraft 3 victory display while in full-screen mode. It's repeatable, there's no indication that it's a hardware glitch (doesn't happen in other programs, and he's tried replacing the hardware), and we're talking about a user-mode program that doesn't even run as root; there's *NO* way it should bring down the whole OS, but it nonetheless will unless he remembers to switch to windowed mode or exit the victory screen.

Enlighten me...

[mathfeel]

I am on ubuntu and Chromium's about box shows 4.0.226.0. Is this the same as the Windows version?

This is cool though..

[Cprossu]

Innovation in faster page loading never ceases to amaze me.. I mean back in the day, Netscape was lightning fast compared to other browsers, and if I dig up an old build of of navigator I find it unbearably slow compared to firefox, or other new browsers out, not to mention surprisingly unstable.
I am happy because this kind of thing is what spurs competition on and leaves us without stale old browsers, even though I am not a chrome user myself, the effects of it are already being felt and features added onto our browsers of preference. Go Google!

Chrome's Issues

[Stan Vassilev]

It's great how fast it is, but it also eats ridiculous amount of RAM. It easily can take 100MB per tab on popular sites.

It's hard to notice on machines with 3GB RAM or more, but after I moved some people with more modest configurations from Firefox to Chrome, they started experiencing heavy swapping and constant PC slowdowns. And as we know, when your PC is swapping, any other performance optimization pales in comparison.

Another major blow for Chrome is its plugin performance. Visiting a site with Flash is sure to kill any decent performance you're experiencing with Chrome, never mind your CPU or RAM. Even sites like YouTube, where other browsers have zero problems.

Re:Chrome's Issues

[vigour]

It's great how fast it is, but it also eats ridiculous amount of RAM. It easily can take 100MB per tab on popular sites. It's hard to notice on machines with 3GB RAM or more, but after I moved some people with more modest configurations from Firefox to Chrome, they started experiencing heavy swapping and constant PC slowdowns. And as we know, when your PC is swapping, any other performance optimization pales in comparison. Another major blow for Chrome is its plugin performance. Visiting a site with Flash is sure to kill any decent performance you're experiencing with Chrome, never mind your CPU or RAM. Even sites like YouTube, where other browsers have zero problems.

Perhaps your setup needs tweaking. I'm on an atom based netbook running ArchLinux, and I have had quite the opposite experience. I have to open up a lot of tabs to use 100MB of RAM, it loads faster than FF, and for me is far more responsive. I compile my own PGO versions of FF (betas and normal versions) and even still FF is a lot slower and ram resource hungry than chrome (well chromium in my case).

One final thing, the performance of plugins has increased for me using chrome. As everyone knows Adobes flash plugin is terrible under Linux, in FF videos stutter and it's horrible. It's only under chrome that I can watch full screen flash videos smoothly.

Caveat: Anecdote != data, this is merely my personal experience.

not Lua, sorry

[r00t]

kicking all kinds of ass as far as performance in scripting languages go

Um, NO.

It's kicking the ass of plain Lua, which was about 100x slower than Python. Given that Python itself is about 100x slower than C, beating plain Lua just means that you don't get an F in first-semester computer science.

Re:Smoking -bah hum bug!

[Adam Jorgensen]

I'm running Chromium right this second. What are you on about?

tracing JIT

[r00t]

Firefox chose a JIT based on trace caching. It's a bit like the Pentium 4, translating stuff based on various assumptions and hoping that unexpected branches won't happen.

Not that it's the same problem space, but we all know how well that worked out for the Pentium 4. :-)

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes the "blame it on the drivers" apologetic for various Windows issues. It's the perfect excuse, really, because it's difficult to falsify. So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability, and if the Mac is so stable because it has such a comparatively narrow range of hardware to support, what would be your answer to that question?

Er, because Linux largely avoids shitty proprietary drivers, written by some noob at a hardware company and code reviewed by nobody.

It's perfectly easy to write driver code to crash Linux. It's just difficult to get it into a distro.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux user here. Did you ever wonder who was writing the Linux Drivers compared to the Windows drivers. Does MS has a developer that works with companies to get well written code.

By the way, I think the drivers were only half the problem, but that is still some of it.

Re:Love to use it, but... what?

[Anonymous Coward]

But what really. Here's a link to the DMG file. Probably has some bugs but I haven't seen any (to be fair I don't use it often cause there's no decent adblock solution).

I've completely switched away from Windows to Linux, but I my work laptop is a MBP because Apple knows how to build really nice hardware and the software is pretty good to (command line is a bit lagging as compared to Linux, but that's more a limitation of them using the BSD versions of the userspace instead of the GNU ones which tend to be much much better in terms of functionality and ease of use).

Adblock now available

[hoover]

Hearing that adblock extension is now available for the chrome beta, I decided to give this new release another go. However chrome claimed that "extensions are disabled" whenever I tried to install adblock from chromeextensions.org, no matter what combination of startup parameters I added to the shortcut (supposedly, --enable-extensions should do the trick).

Can anybody shed some light on this?

Congratulations on YOUR grade F

[Anonymous Coward]

It's kicking the ass of plain Lua, which was about 100x slower than Python

Really? Show us where!

beating plain Lua just means that you don't get an F in first-semester computer science.

Must be a real interesting school you attended. LuaJIT has been completely rewritten for 2.0 and the first beta was released on 31st Oct... here's a clue...

Webkit-based browsers

[AVryhof]

Being a netbook owner, I'm becoming quite fond of Webkit-based browsers for general browsing purposes. For KDE and Windows, I like Arora. On my eee, I use Epiphany with the Webkit extension, and I'm exploring replacing that with Midori.

Yeah, they are beta quality, but they are also screaming fast and the rendering is second to none. I have yet to have them crash, or encounter a website they can't render well enough.

On the other hand, I'm a steadfast fan of firefox for development. I have yet to see a lightweight browser with the Web Developer toolbar, Colorfox, Measure It, or a nicer Javascript debugger.

Honestly, I would like to see these released for Seamonkey, and to see a few more features added to the Seamonkey HTML Editor. (extensions similar to Dreamweaver, Site Manager, more customizable toolbar layout, and a full-featured code editor) Drop all of the other Crap.... Make Seamonkey a development platform with HTML Editor, Web Browser, FTP and support for CVS/GIT/SVN....

Tree style tabs

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anyone know anything tree style tabs feature? I would love to see it, as I use it in firefox with this addon: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/5890

chrome 4

[packrat2]

where's the linux version?

Re:Sucks To Be You

[nine-times]

So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability

I think the idea is more that Linux is rock-solid because they don't have crappy closed-source drivers from every little hardware vendor. Suddenly Linux's lack of hardware vendor support is a plus, since writing their own drivers increased the stability. So Windows is pretty solid so long as you're using well supported hardware with well written drivers, but you get the BSOD when you install some crappy driver from some random hardware vendor and that driver goes AWOL.

Now I'm not a Windows fan, but I've supported Windows since WfW 3.11, and I believe that there's at least some truth to this idea. If you install Windows XP or anything after (maybe excepting Vista when it was first released) on good hardware with good drivers, the BSOD should be pretty rare.

And the thing with Macs isn't just that they only have to support a smaller selection of hardware, but that they get to control exactly which hardware and then test and approve the drivers. If there's some video chipset from a given manufacturer that isn't going to work well for their OS, they just don't include that chipset in any of their systems. It's true that neither Linux developers nor Microsoft have that luxury, and I believe it's at least partially responsible for Apple's reputation of being solid and that everything "just works". It's much easier to make a solid system where everything works out of the box if you're controlling both the hardware and the software.

With more X86 (64) SSE etc dependency?

[Ilgaz]

I bet Opera, Mozilla guys and even Apple can drive their browser to insane speeds but they wouldn't do it. Why? Basically, they want CPU Arch and OS independency. Things and times are changing, ARM Linux and Symbian (with upcoming foundation release) aren't some "nerd fantasies" anymore. Everyone wants to stay compatible with them.

If I told you that Opera 9.5 mobile runs exactly, line by line, same C rendering engine as Opera Desktop, would you believe? That is the level of compatibility and being future ready. It already paid off for Opera ASA and Mozilla Mobile would have a huge market share if they maintained a Symbian S60 (high end) variant rendering engine just to stay ready for future.

I wasn't planning to use Chrome and I found out they don't even support PowerPC OS X. That is not the OS X maintainers fault who is a very capable coder, thing is full of X86 specific unportable code, that is the issue. You/They may laugh at "so 100(!) powerpc users won't have our browsers" but I see a very different issue with it, for the future.

Why did MS Struggle to code/keep Windows NT codebase perfectly compilable and running on a strange RISC CPU (i860 I guess) which nobody plans to use? They had to use preview boards or something, there weren't even any servers/workstations actually _using_ that CPU.

Re:Smoking -bah hum bug!

[James_Duncan8181]

"Dude, it could give me a handjob while it loaded my porn for me, but until it runs on a OS not made by MS, I don't care."

This would make me write pretty much any WINE patches required.

Why Chrome never can be my browser:

[Hurricane78]

Because they will never ever include an ad-blocker.
Because Google is and advertising company. The biggest on the net in fact.

I know that there are tons of Google fanboys here on /. But I don't trust them more than any other ad company.
(And of course, as they are fanboys, they will never ever tolerate the existence of another view, or... basic facts... So prepare for this to get modded into oblivion as proof. ^^)

Re:Why Chrome never can be my browser:

[nicholasjay]

Firefox doesn't include an ad blocker either. But Firefox has ad blockers available as a plug in. Oh, So does Chrome. http://www.chromeextensions.org/appearance-functioning/adblock/

I agree with you about trusting everything to Google, but your only complaint about Chrome just got shot down in flames.

Re:Why Chrome never can be my browser:

[AntiDragon]

It's like an echo in here....Chrome has ad blockers. It has extensions. And if you're concerned about data mining and letting google track your searches etc there's Chromium and Iron, which are the 100% open source based versions (no Google branding and extras).

Re:Why Chrome never can be my browser:

[Hurricane78]

WTF?? Some asshole with mod-points is on a down-modding spree! All my comments that are now modded into oblivion were higher than +2 Interesting yesterday! Boy there are some losers on this planet...

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

Only faggots use Linux and OS X.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

Erm, source?

Version 4 already?

[supersloshy]

Am I the only one that thinks Google's going a little too fast with its version numbering scheme? It isn't based on months or years but it keeps going up at a fast pace. Of course, this does make some non-educated folks want to use the software for stupid reasons.

"You use Firefox? Eww, Chrome's already on version 4 and Firefox is stuck on 3.5.whatever. Noob."
or
"Chrome has a higher version number than Firefox, so it must be more secure/mature; I'll start using it!"

I have a friend that won't use anything, I repeat /anything/ that doesn't have a version number over 1.0 (even if it's something like FFMPEG). Why are so many people trained to love high version numbers, when in reality they can mean anything?

Chrome as an enterprise browser

[Anonymous Coward]

So have they gotten Chrome to work properly with SSL proxies yet? The last 4 versions Ive tried don't and are therefore garbage as far as I am concerned.

If I can't use it at home AND at work, I won't be using it at home. If it isn't secure enough to use in my company, why would I trust it at home?

Re:Sucks To Be You

[slim]

I've not had a BSOD since a year or so after windows XP's release. So something like 7years?

I get about four a week, so you'll excuse me if your good luck doesn't cheer me up.

Dell laptop, XP Pro, never installed a driver from a dodgy source, RAM passes all Dell diagnostic tests, Symantec AV since the machine was built, STOP message gives a different .DLL or .SYS name every time.

I have no idea how to remedy this. The best advice I've had is to try replacing drivers pretty much at random. Given that there's a 48hour MTBF, this would be a very long and frustrating experiment.

I wish that they could focus all the energy

[Anonymous Coward]

on making Android a bit more snappy. Really like the OS but its laggy from time to time (even on the newer hardware).

Does anyone still use Chrome

[Anonymous Coward]

I started using Chrome right away and was surprised how mature it was. But I've stopped using it and have gone back to firefox because chrome is so unstable. The last straw was when it couldn't even render my igoogle home page correctly. I am not going to use a browser which breaks every few weeks and then I have to wait for a couple of days while they fix a regression bug. I like their architectural concepts and the great Javascript support and all but in the end I don't notice the speed and the stability is unacceptable.

Re:Does anyone still use Chrome

[brkello]

I started awhile ago with Chrome and never looked back. Rarely do I ever have an issue. The speed and how it maximizes the amount of screen space I get for my browser beats the pants off of anything else any browser has to offer.

Re:Smoking -bah hum bug!

[Reckless Visionary]

I'm been using it on Ubuntu for a while now. . .not sure what you mean.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[brkello]

It is hard to falsify because it isn't false. With a Mac you have specific hardware that your OS is going to run on. This makes it a lot easier to test and understand the whole system. With a PC, it isn't just all the different hardware, but all the different hardware combinations and their interactions that are the issue. Hardware/firmware/drivers all can be done just slightly different enough to make it a hard task. You can not falsify it, because it is obvious truth. You just wish it was false because you are heavily biased.

Now let's talk about stability. I do a lot of development on both Linux and Windows. Quite honestly I have no issues with XPs stability. I install it on all kinds of different hardware and it just works and stays up. I have worked a lot with Red Hat, Ubuntu, SuSE Linux and have had no end of trouble installing them. After hours of work, I am able to get around whatever issue it has and install it and then have to figure out why the sound doesn't work or issues like that. After all that, it is fairly stable, but not significantly more or less than XP. Of course, my experiences are anecdotal. But I find most other people like you don't even have anecdotal experience because you just don't have the opportunity to install OS's as much as I do. You just want to believe Unix is so much better because it isn't evil like MS.

But really, XP has been very stable and it is impressive considering all the different combinations of hardware it has to deal with.

Stored password encryption added?

[blahbooboo]

I love Chrome/Chromium/Iron. But I need to encrypt the stored passwords like Firefox does with the master password. Is this on track to be added?

uh...

[circletimessquare]

you seem to be left on an island in history. i remember that island, it was somewhere around 2003 i think:

the thinking was that javascript was unnecessary bloat and a properly written website didn't need any javascript, and a good netizen concerned about safety and privacy turned his/her javascript off. people were (and are) doing harebrained unnecessary things with javascript (whoa dude! look at the animated cursor!) and incompatibility between browsers in an era when firefox was still a cult and ie5 was king meant nobody thought to program for anything but ie. and ie's javascript quirks meant anyone using any other browser was getting nothing but error messages anyways. so just turn javascript off

sorry dude, but the functionality AJAX delivers and how it fundamentally changes the browsing experience in powerful and positive ways utterly washed away any validity to that kind of thinking

but, enjoy your craiglist. i think that's the only site of any heft that came out of that era of web philosophy that survives today with the "pure HTML 3.2 ought to be good enough for anybody" attitude still intact

i think that anti-<TABLE/> jihad from that era is still going strong though. all hail the holy <DIV/>!

Re:Sucks To Be You

[causality]

It is hard to falsify because it isn't false.

No, falsifying it would mean profiling all running OS and application code, including the driver code, to determine precisely where any faults occur. Perhaps running Windows as a guest OS in an emulator would make this feasible. It could also mean having the full source code and either locating defects or attempting to demonstrate its correctness (to whatever degree of confidence this latter option is possible).

You can not falsify it, because it is obvious truth. You just wish it was false because you are heavily biased.

I've repeatedly heard the claim that drivers are to blame for Windows instabilities. I've yet to ever see anyone perform this kind of research to prove it. Maybe someone somewhere has done this, but the people who make claims about drivers feel no need to back up those claims. If it's really so obvious, backing it up should be no problem.

So I am saying "I don't know, yet I repeatedly hear this unsubstantiated claim". I go on to provide an example of an OS that runs on a very wide range of hardware, everything from embedded devices to PCs to supercomputing clusters that does not have these issues, meaning it's quite possible to support a wide range of hardware without the problem that (it is claimed) brings down Windows. The purpose of that is not to compare epeen sizes of two OS's, but to show that hardware diversity alone does not guarantee instability. That makes me the biased one? Really?

Seems to me the biased ones are MS apologists. Blaming third-party drivers absolves Microsoft of blame, because after all they didn't create those drivers. Until they provide a shred of proof I cannot consider their claims to be obvious. I can only say I don't know. "I don't know because I have seen no proof but have seen a potential counter-example" is not bias unless you have a belief to protect. If you do, then I understand how inquiry might make you insecure, but at that point you leave the realm of claims and evidence and enter the realm of religious faith.

You just want to believe Unix is so much better because it isn't evil like MS.

I primarily work with Unix and Unix-like operating systems. Thus, I don't make too many claims about Windows. I leave that to people who use Windows. All I am asking them to do is substantiate a claim I frequently hear from them. For that, I am called "biased" or people who don't know me from Adam feel free to tell me what I think is evil instead of asking me, but that's just noise. I am not seeing any proof to back up those claims which is the only thing that would constitute signal. The weakness of that technique is amazing. The only thing more amazing is your blindness to it.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

Not sure what you mean about Windows being unstable. If you use a windows which is stripped down to (almost) the same level as you can a Unix, stability is not a problem with working hardware. At least, I haven't seen a properly maintained unstable win box in 10 years. I use Linux at home (mostly), but I have to say my Ubuntu is less stable (drivers) than my windows is, even though there's much less crap on it.

Your argument might have held some water 10+ years ago, but this has not been the case for a very long time.

Then again, I'm not a great sysadmin, but the promise is that you don't need to be one either.

Choosing your data?

[earnest murderer]

Excuse me, but really?

There are countless examples of trash drivers blowing up unix boxes. Just as there is a wide variety of hardware and drivers that are rock solid under Windows.

The bitter truth is that there is little information on what hardware and which driver rev. is the good one. Unix/Linux is a little better in that respect with lesser known hardware, but it's hardly a won battle.

Comparison Tests

[Lawrence_Bird]

For the heck of it I ran the sunspider tests for chrome 4.0 beta and three versions of firefox - 3.7a1pre, 3.6b and 3.5.5 I also tested on opera 10 and ie 8 but omit those as they were very slow. Tests are on an aging athlon mp dual cpu system.

Chrome came in at 1315
Firefox 3.7a at 1818
Firefox 3.6b at 2045
Firefox 3.5.5 at 2472

Observations - the fannkuch test ran 25% slower on 3.7a then on 3.5.5, something odd there.

When comparing Chrome to 3.7a Chrome pulls ahead primarily on the regexp and date functions and to a lesser extent on the strings.
3.7a however is significantly faster on the math tests.

I wonder if we are getting to the point where on a modern cpu the actual perceived differences in speed will be negligible.

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Idiomatick]

O.o wtf, have you been hitting the thing with a shovel or something? Just call dell and make them replace the whole goddamn thing. BSODs are almost entirely caused by hardware issues. And dells are fairly standard. It might be that it is your own damn fault unless it came with XP. I can see dell just assuming their drivers work on XP and they don't. Even then there would be a work around. All I can say is either you are horribly unlucky or you're doing it wrong. Even in a computer repair shop I rarely see BSODs anymore. And when you do it is on like a windows 98 machine that you are shocked still exists.

Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolutely

[rsborg]

But they should not pretend it is because Google has shown any pattern of abuse. If anything, they have been much better than most companies.

The quote in my subject from Lord Acton, has been proven time and again, that despite the purest of intentions, a concentration of power will corrupt any person, organization or company. This is the reason that "smaller government" is a desirable thing; We have examples time and again from history that overpowerful organizations aren't trustworthy (current example: US "intelligence community"). It's also the reason we have things like seperation of powers in governmental structures.

This applies equally to companies, and is the reason we have anti-trust laws (not to punish success, but to maintain free markets). In this vein, I think Google may be able to stay "non-evil" for some time (or maintain that illusion for the cynics), but eventually like enough concentrated mass creates a black hole, the power will collapse the regulatory structures. It's a matter of time, and that's why people (even Googlers) want to prevent this from happening.

Re:Smoking -bah hum bug!

[Thinboy00]

Chrome for Linux is in a development/unstable state (i.e. it's in the alpha stage right now, AFAICT). That means it could e.g. randomly segfault or something (hypothetically anyway; I have no experience with Google products in the alpha stage so I wouldn't know how stable their stuff is.).

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

note how you specified "properly-installed Linux".

Because only 1/1000 is, and Macs aim for 1/1.

Re:Power corrupts; absolute power corrupts absolut

[SuperAlgae]

It seems like we are in agreement. So far, Google has behaved well (not perfectly). The reasons for avoiding Google are to generally avoid concentrating too much power in one entity. That justifies caution. It does not justify the kind of hatred I have seen expressed in multiple forums.

Google is in business

[mahadiga]

Business? It's quite simple. It's other people's money. --Alexandre Dumas

Re:Sucks To Be You

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you suggetsing that any kind of OS could be able to magically make all your drivers work correctly?
GP is talking about system stability - clicks'n'pops != bsod.

Re:I see google fanboys modded you down

[DaVince21]

I didn't realize there was such a thing as a Google fanboy.

Re:Smoking -bah hum bug!

[Virtual_Raider]

I'm running Chromium right this second. What are you on about?

That we, not being Google, can't see where are you running it at. Chromium runs in windows too :P