Looking At Google's Flashified Chrome

An anonymous reader writes "Google quietly released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which not only blows its rivals out of the water as far as performance is concerned, but comes with half a dozen new features, including direct integration of Adobe Flash. First benchmarks show that the new beta is about 10% faster than the previous beta in the SunSpider and V8 benchmark, and about 30% faster than Chrome 4, which remains the fastest JavaScript browser available today."

Comments

Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Joce640k]

Because if it can't....

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[TheKidWho]

Of course it can. It would take you about 5 seconds to google that.

http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chrome+adblock

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[V!NCENT]

Adblock is freely available from the Google Chrome website fro christs sake. Even easylist and a more or less hidden option to turn ON Google text adds.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

AdBlock is the least important of the 3. I used to run it, but can't be bothered any more.

NoScript is the deal breaker. Chrome has a clunky way to turn JavaScript on and off, It even looks like it has the ability to manage blacklist/whitelist. If it could add the ability to manage the exception list while you are looking at the page (without diving into menus) the way NoScript does, then I would switch to chrome in a heartbeat.

Otherwise, not so much.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Joce640k]

Which part of the word 'and' is confusing you?

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[egnop]

I hope the op means AdBlock+ (not hiding like adblock does, but not even downloading the ad like adblock+ does)

Because afaik the Plus version of adblock isn't available yet for chrome

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[multi io]

The main reason for needing flashblock in FF is that the flash plugin tends to lock up the whole browser on a regular basis, so you want to run the plugin only when needed to minimize the probability of that happening. Chrome runs the plugin in its own process, so the probability of Flash locking up the browser is zero to begin with. Ever since I started using Chrome, I have an icon in my freaking task bar that runs ps axu | grep libflashplayer | grep $LOGNAME | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill. Apart from Chrome itself, that icon is the single greatest productivity booster I've installed in years.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[plover]

Absolutely. NoScript is all the magic.

But think about it: you want NoScript from Google, considering that Chrome's only real claim-to-fame is to run JavaScript faster than everyone else.

For me, the only actual temptation to use Chrome is to get the independent processes in each tab, and the next version of Firefox will have that.

I would argue that Firefox with NoScript is faster than Chrome with scripts. Not rendering the crap at all makes for a much better web experience for both me and my browser.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Enderandrew]

The next version of Firefox with have plugins in a seperate process. The rest of the project is still going to take some more time.

https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[metamatic]

If it could add the ability to manage the exception list while you are looking at the page (without diving into menus) the way NoScript does, then I would switch to chrome in a heartbeat.

It already has that. Small icons appear to the right of the entry bar when cookies or scripts are blocked. You can click the icon to turn on scripts or cookies for the domain.

More info and screenshots at my web site.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[darrylo]

Chrome's adblock is nowhere near as good as firefox's, because chrome's is really an ad hider, and not an ad blocker. Chrome still downloads all of the ads, with all of the assorted performance and privacy issues.

Yes, yes, I know that people have been saying that this will be fixed someday, but I'll believe that when I see it. Google has a lot of incentive to disallow this and other features.

And, as others have said, lack of noscript is a deal breaker.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[shadowknot]

Chrome runs the plugin in its own process, so the probability of Flash locking up the browser is zero to begin with.

That's like saying the Titanic can't sink because the sealing bulkheads are part of the ship itself. All that happens is that the water overflows the compartments and the whole ship sinks. Such is the case with this, you said yourself that you have a taskbar icon to kill an unresponsive flash plugin process. Surely if the plugin is coded into the browser when that part of the program fails the entire browser will lock up and you'll have to kill chrome rather than just libflashplugin. I can't see this being a good thing.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[pitdingo]

problem is Adblock on Chrome does not block ads, it only hides them. All the ads still get loaded and all their tracking scripts still track you and run in the background.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[DarkAudit]

It doesn't, and that's why I dumped it. Chrome is susceptible to attacks like js:prontexi via poisoned ads that the user doesn't need to click on or even mouseover. The ad loads, the script runs, and if your antivirus is less than what it should be, you're toast. Even folks surfing the New York Times have been hit with this particular virus. The average user isn't going to catch on that the site they visited had nothing to do with what happened. But they will tell all their friends that "I went to so-and-so's site and got a virus." The Times has the resources to recover from that hit on their reputation, but what about some web forum struggling already to find a niche? A mom-and-pop retail/repair outlet in some strip mall somewhere?

Chrome can't be trusted as long as they insist on fetching ads from adservers that can't be trusted to get *their* house in order.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[drinkypoo]

But think about it: you want NoScript from Google, considering that Chrome's only real claim-to-fame is to run JavaScript faster than everyone else.

Why would that prevent me from deciding whose scripts I want to run? I run Chromium, and I would very much like to have NoScript. With that said, it seems like all that is needed on top of functionality recently added to chrome is a bit of GUI.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Jugalator]

NoScript is the deal breaker. Chrome has a clunky way to turn JavaScript on and off, It even looks like it has the ability to manage blacklist/whitelist. If it could add the ability to manage the exception list while you are looking at the page (without diving into menus) the way NoScript does, then I would switch to chrome in a heartbeat.

I wonder if Chrome extensions can now manipulate said white/blacklist, like Chrome 5 indeed now has for both pictures, javascript (for Noscript-like functionality), and plugins (for Flashblock-like functionality)? It even does simple pattern-matching to block entire sub/domains... Seems like a wasted effort if there's no better UI than this however.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[siloko]

Which part of the word 'and' is confusing you?

FYI: The word 'and' is monosyllabic and therefore consists of only one 'part'. If you presume that this word is confusing the GP then maybe you could have taken the next intuitive step and insinuated that it is the whole word that is causing issues and not any 'part' of it. Unfortunately by not making this leap you are proving yourself to be a bit of a forum noob.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Omestes]

Quick question aimed at no one in particular:

Chrome is based on Chromium, Chromium is open source, meaning the code is available to anyone who wants it. So why hasn't anyone massed around with Chromium to kludge together a true ad blocker, which may (or may not) be portable to Google's flavor, Chrome?

There really should be a thrid-party ad-blocker for Chromium by now, or at least some decent documentation on the web on why there isn't, or why it isn't possible. Google doesn't seem to give any evidence, outside of the fact that most users can't tell the difference between Firefox's "true" ad-blocking, and Chrome/Chromium's ad-hiding.

Chrome has 6% of the browser market, about the same as Firefox had a couple years ago. I am guessing the Chrome's user base is mostly geeks. When Firefox was at around 6% there was plenty of people playing with it and making neat extensions. Why isn't this the story with Chrome?

I know that Chrome/Chromium's API doesn't really allow ad-blocking, but it seems odd that someone hasn't found a way around this hurdle yet.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[lena_10326]

Process isolation prevents a malfunctioning flash script in process A from affecting process B. Even if both processes have flash integrated, they won't interfere because the state of the flash engines are also isolated. The GP's point is valid.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[value_added]

ps axu | grep libflashplayer | grep $LOGNAME | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

Err, you might want to consider replacing all that nonsense with something like

    ps -U username | awk '/[l]ibflashplayer/ {print $2}"

Better yet, use pgrep/pkill

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[malloc]

The main reason for needing flashblock in FF is that the flash plugin tends to lock up the whole browser

That's a good reason, but for me the *main* reason is flash advertisements are so annoying. They often make "punch the monkey" look tame.

That, and IMO anything that pushes web designers to stop treating flash as a web standard is a good thing.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[spyrochaete]

For me, the only actual temptation to use Chrome is to get the independent processes in each tab

My only problem with this is that, with several tabs open, Chrome uses 2-3 times more memory than other browsers. There's a huge footprint to enable its performance.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[init100]

But think about it: you want NoScript from Google, considering that Chrome's only real claim-to-fame is to run JavaScript faster than everyone else.

There is really no conflict here. I want to use Javascript on certain web sites, and when I do I want good Javascript performance, but on the other hand I don't want any random site to be able to run Javascript (or any other executable content) in my browser without me first expressly approving it.

*Remembers malicious scripts from the nineties that pop up a dialog box that moves around when you try to close it, or just open a new dialog box when you close the first one, etc, etc*

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[spyrochaete]

pitdingo's previous comment is absolutely correct. What he implies but doesn't say outright as that even with AdBlock from Chrome enabled you still have to wait for ad banners and scripts to do their thing, so you often must wait and wait for the last pixels of an ad to show before you can start downloading the actual content. Firefox's AdBlock+ is superior in many ways.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Lord Ender]

Bad analogies are why I keep coming back to slashdot. Thanks for carrying the torch!

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Joce640k]

I just assumed that people would know the difference between 'and' and 'or' on Slashdot.

Mea culpa.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Mashiki]

Once this changes I'll give chrome a go again. As long as it remains, I'll stick to firefox. My only other option is to continue expanding my hosts file to include domains outside of the usual .ru/cn blocks.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[plover]

My point is simply that Google is pimping Chrome partly based on its JavaScript performance, without concern for whether JavaScript is good or bad. By that metric alone the more JavaScript you encounter, the better Chrome looks.

But NoScript's philosophy is pretty much the opposite: "JavaScript sucks out loud because it's primarily used by advertisers to annoy you, marketers to track you, and spammers to XSS redirect you to corrupted web sites where they'll install drive-by botnet installers; but we'll still let you run it easily if you say you need it."

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Runefox]

Probably not quite as effective as you want it to be, but if you have Javascript off by default, the Address Bar will have an icon on any pages with JS; Click that, hit Allow, refresh, and that site's on the whitelist. It's fairly well-streamlined, and designed with a different paradigm in mind than NoScript in that you probably just want to set it and forget it. It would be nice to be able to access the lists with a few clicks (there might be an extension for that), but it isn't as though the menu is exactly convoluted. I think the approach is pretty user-friendly overall, minimalist in the same way the interface is.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[vbraga]

mvps.org hosts lists is a nice start.

I usually combine it with chrome ad hiding capabilities.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Are you sure? Keep in mind that it shares a lot of that memory between processes.

Either measure the total amount of RAM your system is using, or maybe try Chrome's own about:memory.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Seems noscript is actually built-in, now.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[SanityInAnarchy]

ps axu | grep libflashplayer | grep $LOGNAME | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill

For those who don't want to do that -- or a saner option involving killall or pkill, or some Windows port -- there's a much simpler solution:

Shift+escape inside Chrome, or page -> Developer -> Task Manager. Now you can kill individual tabs, extensions, or plugins at will.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[DJRumpy]

Actually I don't block flash because it locks up the browser. I block it because it's annoying, is typically used for ads and other irrelevant info, takes too much bandwidth, and is processor intensive. I'm also not shy about complaining to web masters who substitute Flash 'text' for actual text, and who don't offer a Text Only or some other access method that doesn't involve a proprietary plugin.

I don't know if I'm in the minority, but I wouldn't consider flash integrated into the browser a 'feature'. I would prefer to control that by installing it myself if needed.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[multi io]

Thanks, I actually didn't know about that. Very nice.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[masshuu]

There is a really fancy file in windows called the HOST file.
Mine contains about 20000 hosts that point to 0.0.0.0. Most of it is advertisement sub domains, along with malware, phishing, and tracking sites.

After putting that up chrome is faster, and combined with chromes adblock, i don't see the iframes that say "this page could not be loaded"

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[spyrochaete]

I made this conclusion based on the Windows task manager. It showed Chrome using upwards of 300MB of RAM or even more, seconds after starting up with 7 or 8 tabs open. This is in stark contrast with Firefox which sometimes gets as high as 250MB with the same number of tabs open, but drops considerably if I close and restart the browser.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

That is a very interesting addition, but not good enough.

The options for scripts are: keep blocking and unblock permanently. There is no "unblock for this session." I'm not 100% sure what it is doing, but it does not seem to be managing scripts that were pulled onto the page from other domains. I can only unblock the site I'm on. If the page has a link that pulls in scripts from other domains, I can't manage that without figureing out what is going on myself (reading the page source?)

Cookies are even worse. There is no option to add the current site to the whitelist, just to open the cookie manager where you can type the current site into the whitelist by hand. There is no "allow cookie for session."

This is a step in the right direction, but it is a baby step, and doesn't reach the level of: usable yet.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[mister_playboy]

Chrome is based on Chromium, Chromium is open source, meaning the code is available to anyone who wants it. So why hasn't anyone massed around with Chromium to kludge together a true ad blocker, which may (or may not) be portable to Google's flavor, Chrome?

This has been done, actually. SRWare Iron is primarily concerned with privacy modifications to the Chromium source, but it also has ad blocking baked in.

I stopped following the project closely when I began to have trouble compiling Iron for 64bit Linux, but I recommend you check it out.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Rather than using a system that inspects the HTML and simply doesn’t load parts of the page that you don’t want to see, you prefer that your browser should try to look up those domains and then you’ll break the DNS for those sites so that the browser thinks their servers don’t exist.

Makes complete sense.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[dubbreak]

Really? Personally, I come for the car analogies, not the general superset of bad analogies. Note: I take it for granted that all car analogies are bad, those two states are obviously mutual.

Work some cars into that Titanic analogy and get rid of the boat references and you may have something there..

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

This is somewhat incorrect. This particular chrome addon https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/chmimgmjdabgiilljdjfbonifbhiglao?hl=en has ability to convert the firefox adblock+ lists into a sort of native chrome version of the lists that can actually block ads, as you can see from this screenshot https://chrome.google.com/extensions/img/chmimgmjdabgiilljdjfbonifbhiglao/1269556063.0/screenshot_big/1?hl=en (use blocking rules). It does have a simpler interface than adblock+ for Firefox, however.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome has been able to block ads for a while now, the adblock+ lists just need to be converted to a native chrome version. More info here: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1641842&cid=32102446

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[xtracto]

Which part of the word 'and' is confusing you?

FYI: The word 'and' is monosyllabic and therefore consists of only one 'part'....

Well, when you learn to count you will realize that the word and is formed by 3 WHOLE LETTERS in total!

I know some people get confused by the 'n'. For me, the 'd' is the one that gives trouble sometimes.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[plover]

Perhaps you missed the word "easily" in my comment, which is a critical (but often overlooked) attribute of a useful and successful product. In most cases it's far more important than performance.

I used to block ad servers in my hosts file back in the 1990s. It was a manual waste of time back then, and I don't see that it got any faster just because we're doing it in 2010. With NoScript I'm no longer wasting time opening the source to a web page, finding the offending javascript reference, navigating to a file, opening it in an editor, typing the host name of the offender, and saving it. Yes, that's a lot of work to maintain when you multiply it by the continual inflow of spammers and scammers.

NoScript is different. It isn't blindly context-insensitive, like a hosts file. It analyzes the links and automatically blocks any scripts from sites that don't share a domain with the site being viewed. That means with no extra effort on my part, current and future third party scripts are blocked. That means crap like google-analytics, hitstat, crazyegg, whatever, all gone and not slowing me down. I can't even remember all the sites I used to have to learn about, then go block. They're gone from my memory, and gone from my browser.

And if there's a page that doesn't deliver something because a third party site is blocked, a quick click and marking it as "trusted" whitelists it, and the page automatically reloads with the desired content. Vimeo and youtube are in the whitelist, as are many other useful places.

The hosts file solution doesn't compare in terms of usability or function. It's not even close.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[pwnies]

I do a global block of ad-servers via self-inflicted DNS poisoning. Essentially I use dnsmasq to redirect all ad-server requests to 127.0.0.1, then default all other dns requests to google's dns servers. You can find the ad server lists here.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[rtfa-troll]

Note: I take it for granted that all car analogies are bad, those two states are obviously mutual.

I want you to think of it like this. The bad analogies are the cars without V8 engines. The car analogies are like the cars with full stereo systems. Most analogies don't have V8 engines (are bad) and most analogies are car analogies (have a stereo). However, there are some analogies which have both stereos and v8 engines. Most importantly, there are only a few analogies which have V8 engines, but no stereo (good, non-car analogies).

There; a perfect example of a good car analogy. Vrooommm..

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

RAM is cheap these days. I haven't worried about whether an app uses 200MB or 300MB of RAM for years. These days, I pick my apps based on utility, not on resource usage (which is trivial for most apps anyway).

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

Then install something like Hostsman which will automatically update the hosts file for you. It sounds to me like you're just trying to make excuses.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Protoslo]

...The whole point of NoScript is that it lets you turn scripts on sometimes. And right now with Firefox 3.6.3, the only problems I have are with javascript lockup. It just freezes for .5-15 minutes (I waited it out to 15 minutes once because I had just typed in an extremely long and unsaved forum post). In fact, Slashdot is intermittently responsible for these incidents. If NoScript were ported to Chrome, I would switch immediately, just based on javascript performance.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[konohitowa]

"forum noob?" Damn, that's funny as hell.

For a minute there I thought I was in AV and some kid that had spent the last year leveling his first 55 had just gotten his DK to 60 and immediately jumped into bg to show us noobs/nubs how it's done. Well it used to be 60 anyway. I suppose 59 is correct now.

(I was also confused by the reference to this 'forum' of which he speaks. Then again, those Slavic guys with mono or whatever it was had already strained my tiny brain.)

afkautoshot brb

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[darrylo]

Not really. AFAICT, javascript can only be turned on or off for an entire page. That is, if a page references UI javascript, web marketing javascript, user tracking javascript, and bad-guy-hacked-this-website-to-install-bad-trojan-crud javascript, you can only choose to disable them all, or enable them all. It's an all-or-nothing thing.

Noscript, on the other hand, allows you to individually enable/disable each of them.

If I'm wrong, I'd really, really like to know about how I can disable javascript and then individually enable each javascript site simply by clicking on a script name (like noscript -- manually typing in site names and patterns to match is unbelievably user hostile).

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

To block ads like Adblock Plus, use AdThwart: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccddilifddb

You can use AdThwart for flash blocking as well, or you can use https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/gofhjkjmkpinhpoiabjplobcaignabnl

Blocking JavaScript is native in Chrome, and you can configure it to block everything, and then allow certain sites using a whitelist. This it not the default out of the box configuration, for obvious reasons.

Really, please try to at least do a little research before spouting complete nonsense and spreading disinformation around.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Itninja]

Allowing NoScript will never happen. Google makes most of its revenue from javascript-presented ads. They are not about to allow something that can block them.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[dwinks616]

So that's there are DOZENS of add-ons that ALREADY block google's ads in Chrome?? Right... And that's why Chrome ALREADY allows you to shut off JS? Right... Perhaps you should spend less time posting here, and more time removing your foot from your mouth.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

I would argue that Firefox with NoScript is faster than Chrome with scripts. Not rendering the crap at all makes for a much better web experience for both me and my browser.

What sites do you use? Not a rhetorical question: I honestly want to know what part of the internet works without javascript.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[joelpt]

Chrome's JS blocker seems pretty easy to use to me. When it's enabled, an icon appears in the address bar indicating JS blocking, and it can be clicked to whitelist the current site.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[plover]

NoScript is set to not disable JavaScript on the base domains and children, so if I were browsing on www.example.com, it would permit javascript from example.com and scripts.example.com.

Most advertising is not self-hosted, because the advertisers can't trust web site owners to fairly report traffic. That makes it simple to segregate ads via a rule based system.

So to answer your question, just about every site out there works just fine without the third-party javascript. Every time I use a browser that doesn't have NoScript, I find myself appalled at the crap other people have to put up with -- exceedingly slow page load times, ads wrapping themselves around the cursor, fake popups trying to get me to install fake anti-virus programs.

Most of the "slow" seems to come from waiting on the third party to deliver their uselessness. I don't really notice perceptible delays during the actual rendering of the self-hosted scripts.

If it doesn't trust the domain, NoScript also blocks a lot of other stuff, too. Flash, Java, Silverlight, <AUDIO> and <VIDEO>, and objects. And as a bonus, it complains bitterly about XSS attacks.

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[joss]

How is 300 2-3 times more than 250 ?

Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript?

[spyrochaete]

Bad example.. the memory consumption gets closer as you open more tabs.

Thanks Google!

[V!NCENT]

You provide HTML5 for your Chrome, Apple does't support it. It is about to die and nobody uses Flash for anything serious but YouTube use...

Fsck you!

*Writing form Rekonq*

Re:Thanks Google!

[D Ninja]

Hmmm...I think saying that Flash is "about to die" and that "nobody uses Flash for anything serious" is...well...wrong.

As it stands now, Flash is, by far, the most popular and ubiquitous plug-in in use on the internet. It is used in many different places and can be relied on more than trying to rely on the fact that users will have new, up-to-date browsers. Yes, Apple won't be supporting Flash, and, yes, I hope HTML5 replaces a great deal of Flash (as I can't stand plug-ins). But, in no way is Flash going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Heck, even to get everybody to switch to HTML5 is going to take at least a few years, and probably more.

Re:Thanks Google!

[V!NCENT]

If YouTube would switch perma to HTML5 vid, the very second about 60% of the world is going to want to have it running.

It is not new: YouTube already stopped supporting IE6 and it is... not working anymore =D

Re:Thanks Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

=D

XD

LOL!!1~

Re:Thanks Google!

[Rhaban]

[...] nobody uses Flash for anything serious but YouTube use...

You mean you consider YouTube use as something serious?

Re:Thanks Google!

[ch-chuck]

Which is also why I must have a flashblocker plugin - flash is responsible for most of the extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney out there.

Re:Thanks Google!

[D Ninja]

That's exactly my point. YouTube *won't* switch to HTML5 completely - at least not yet. Too much of the world is still using browsers that don't support HTML5. While I'm sure Google engineers would love to have to not support Flash, it doesn't make sense for them to just dump it. They want as many eyes as possible on their websites - particularly YouTube. This is, in my opinion, exactly why Flash was integrated in with the Chrome browser. It ensures that every person who uses Chrome will be able to see Flash websites, thus improving the overall web-browsing experience of its users. As Google is a company who is investing heavily into the web (understatement of the year), it is only smart for them to support as many users as possible.

In addition, the integration of Flash also allows Chrome developers to do some neat tricks to better sandbox Flash (as it is a primary source of security issues, followed by Javascript) which further increases the security of the Chrome browser. Of course, one could argue that they could not include Flash at all and really increase the security of their browser, but, see my previous point. Therefore, they are taking a proactive approach and including Flash, but doing it so that security is heightened around it.

Re:Thanks Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

So when developers start making the same "extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney" stuff using HTML5/Javascript, what then?

Re:Thanks Google!

[sznupi]

BTW, funny thing with dropping ie6 on yt - I have one old machine around here, on which I keep also an older Opera version, 9.27 (typically works even better than recent releases on ram restricted machine). Recently, around the time of changes which supposedly broke ie6, I noticed that this old version suddenly started working better on yt... (and I doubt it was tested / optimized for; it will be quite cute if, with sites going more and more towards proper web standards, this old Opera will continue to "improve" ;p )

Re:Thanks Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

I still use ie6 because of some ancient web apps for work which only run in ie6. I also use youtube. Except for the annoying banners that say I use an outdated browser, I haven't run into a single issue with youtube. Granted my youtube watching is limited to a couple videos a week, and I might just be lucky.

Re:Thanks Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

Hmmm...I think saying that Flash is "about to die" and that "nobody uses Flash for anything serious" is...well...wrong.

It might be wrong, but that doesn't stop a whole lot of us from thinking flash is a steaming pile of shit that should never have been allowed to exist.

If I hit a web-site and it requires me to use flash to look at some stupid fucking interface, I will immediately decide I don't need that site.

I simply don't install flash on my machines. Personally, I'd like to see flash wiped out of existence.

Re:Thanks Google!

[delinear]

I was about to say the same thing - I use a VM of XP with IE6 for testing purposes, and there are huge banners all over Youtube saying "Your browser is not supported", but everything I've tried to do still works. My guess is, although they no longer officially support it, they'll still at least attempt to not break the site in IE6 while there's still a not-insignificant number of people using it. This is on a ten year old browser that even MS have disowned, so all those people who think Google should suddenly switch to HTML5 are dreaming - it's not even a formal standard yet, and we've yet to see how well it will be implemented cross browser, or what the adoption rate will be. Unless the vast majority of users switch to HTML5-supporting browsers, don't expect the change to happen any time soon...

Re:Thanks Google!

[Skuld-Chan]

Interesting thing about Youtube - the whole site runs on Flash Media Server - even the non Flash clients.

Re:Thanks Google!

[__aapspi39]

If you think that Flash is dead or about to die then maybe you need to have a look around... ...for example the websites that won each category in the webby awards (announced yesterday http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php) are almost all made entirely in flash. The same goes for the peoples award for each category.

For anyone in the real world it looks very much like Flash is going from strength to strength, both in terms of what it is capable of and usage.

Re:Thanks Google!

[eldepeche]

In addition, the integration of Flash also allows Chrome developers to do some neat tricks to better sandbox Flash

Can they do some neat tricks to stop Flash from stealing my keyboard and mouse focus? As soon as there is a browser/flash plugin combination that works with YouTube/Vimeo/FunnyOrDie and doesn't prevent me from using keyboard shortcuts to switch tabs or stop me from scrolling past a video, I'm using it, and I'm going to tell all my non-geek friends to use it as well.

Re:Thanks Google!

[V!NCENT]

Wierd: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/youtube-to-kill-ie6-support-on-march-13.ars

Re:Thanks Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

Youtube is serious by generating many millions of dollars in advertising revenue.

Besides that, some content that's on youtube is in fact serious.
Just search for ie "science" instead of "boobies" or "lolcat".

Re:Thanks Google!

[V!NCENT]

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/youtube-to-kill-ie6-support-on-march-13.ars

Re:Thanks Google!

[eldepeche]

A dancing baloney that doesn't make the cooling fan in my laptop spin up is superior to one that does.

Re:Thanks Google!

[eldepeche]

Google seems to.

Re:Thanks Google!

[sznupi]

I was all the time writing about that old version of Opera.

Re:Thanks Google!

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, you could turn on HTML5 for YouTube. I think Vimeo might have an HTML5 player also. That would give you your keyboard focus back.

Re:Thanks Google!

[Anonymous Coward]

Personally, I'd like to see flash wiped out of existence.

I'd like that too, and I'd also like it to take Apple with it.

If I had to choose, I'd rather see Apple disappear. I can always flashblock, but it's impossible to block the Apple users without great trouble.

Re:Thanks Google!

[david_thornley]

That's one reason why I see all the advice about looking for awards at web design companies, and leaving immediately if you see one.

Re:Thanks Google!

[Quantumstate]

I just had a look at one of them, http://www.stemcellfoundation.ca/ to be precise, I was definitely underwhelmed. For a start it took over 30 seconds to load, I am connected to a University network which gets over 80 mbits so either their servers can't cope with the large page or the page is very large. Either way it is unacceptably slow. Transitions are animated making them slow compared to a normal html page.

There is a scrollable box of text which can be scrolled in precisely one way which is to drag the little round thing on the scrollbar. This compares to a fully functional scrollbar with three navigation options, using my mouses scroll wheel, using cursor keys or Page Up/Down and autoscroll (middle mouse click and scroll). If I am on their web page my mouses back button breaks as does equivalent keyboard shortcuts. I can't open a new tab using ctrl-T. Middle clicking links does nothing when it should open in a new tab. They even made a small text heading the same color as a link (links aren't underlined of course) so it is indistinguishable without rolling over with a mouse (which causes a non standard fade effect on actual links). Hopefully you never want to copy any text because you won't be able to select it. Also the scrolling problems are exacerbated by the fact that on my 1680x1050 monitor I have a nice 530*330 box to read the text in.

So in conclusion usability is a joke since it breaks the vast majority of UI conventions.

There is a useless gimmick of having looping videos of the peoples faces rather than a still photo, adds nothing other than a slightly cool factor when you first visit which I would say is outweighed by the annoyances of the people in the videos shifting uncomfortably plus increased download time.

Trying to sign the charter brings up a nice form which conveniently has none of my saved data like an html form so I have to type everything in myself. You can copy/paste to these boxes though, although with the caveat of my Linux middle click paste not working (I would have been shocked if it had. The auto country filler is quite nice I will admit except for the minor thing where it wipes the box if you click it once it has been filled. Also the font rendering is horrible on the form page for some reason, there seem to be small patches on letter which are faded.

After thoroughly browsing this usability disaster I somehow don't feel much respect for the webbyawards. This is precisely why Flash websites are such a bad move. Flash itself is great for those things which need a richer environment than html can provide, such as games and video and some web applications.

Re:Thanks Google!

[sootman]

Go read Norman's The Design of Everyday Things and be on the lookout for the phrase "design award." Many things that truly, measurably, objectively, demonstrably suck have won design awards.

Yay for Google

[MountainMan101]

Google are simply the best. They've given me free e-mail, free browser, free phone OS, free maps, and so much more.

If only everyone was as wonderful as Google. What a shame I can't vote for them in tomorrow's election.

Re:Yay for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Agreed!

We give our blood and souls to you Google!

Re:Yay for Google

[ducomputergeek]

Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

Firefox uses Google by default for search and suggestion.

IE uses Bing.

I trust Google infinitely more than I trust Microsoft. And if you're really paranoid, then run Iron, which is a privacy-freak version of Chromium. But if that isn't enough, Google added tons of privacy features into Chrome/Chromium starting with version 5.

But keep wearing that tin-foil hat.

Re:Yay for Google

[RAMMS EIN]

You don't have to vote for them, they already have the power.

Re:Yay for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.

So your problem is.... what? That partial URLs, when typed manually, if you selected Google as your default search, if you leave predictive search on, will be .... wait for it ... searched on. Of course, that assumes you're not using private browsing mode.

Yeah, I don't know how such violations of privacy can be brooked. What's that? AT&T is installing an upgraded tap to send all of my data to the NSA? Well, Google isn't involved, so it sounds legit.

Re:Yay for Google

[Youngbull]

Free... as long as your privacy is worth a smoking fast browser.

There, fixed that for you!

Re:Yay for Google

[thetoadwarrior]

Yeah no one else uses browser search data or any other data they can get their hands on and only Google want your data.

Re:Yay for Google

[Antiocheian]

In matters of security yes. In matters of privacy no. Microsoft isn't running a global network of connected search, advertising and analytics where your every move can be tracked. Ethics aside, Google has far more power to play games with your privacy than Microsoft has.

But then comes the issue of ethics. It is Google who said: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- not Microsoft.

Apparently Google does have the appropriate ethics, or lack thereof, to invade your privacy. You'll be more private with Microsoft I think.

Re:Yay for Google

[spyrochaete]

I trust Google infinitely more than I trust Microsoft.

So you trust a tiger infinitely more with your steak than a lion?

Seriously though, between Microsoft and Google, which company's revenue is more reliant upon user profiling for advertising networks? If I were to make a rash (and perhaps outdated) generalization I'd say that Google is more dangerous to individual privacy, whereas Microsoft is more dangerous to ethical competition with other businesses.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

Your analogy fails. Both a tiger and a shark want to steal your steak.

Microsoft has a patent to sell your information to the highest bidder, and has already shown a willingness to just fork your private data over.

Google has a history of fighting to protect your private data. An automated process serves up ads to you that have a contextual relationship to your private data, but that data is not being handed out. Nor is anyone just sitting around reading it.

There is a world of difference between the two approaches.

Your second statement is even more flawed. You suggest you can trust Microsoft more, because Google is inherently more likely to screw you over to preserve their business model.

Again, history demonstrates that Microsoft doesn't mind screwing users, where as Google is all about providing free services to users and then protecting them.

It is because Google's revenue comes from advertising that they can't afford to screw their users over. If they lose their users, they lose their business model. It is in Google's best intereest to keep their users happy.

Microsoft can piss off most individual end users (like they have with Hotmail fiascos, Vista, etc) and it doesn't matter. Microsoft lives and dies with big contracts in the enterprise world. They can care less what the individual consumer thinks.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

Except Microsoft does have a global network of connected search, advertising and analytics. And again, they just secured a patent to sell your personal information (including calendar dates, photos, etc.) to the highest bidder. Read that sentence a few more times until it sinks in.

Microsoft handed over your search data without a warrant to the US government. Google did not.

And since Microsoft now provides Yahoo's search as well, they've got 28% of the market between Bing and Yahoo. Yes, Google is king of the hill at 65%, but this isn't David vs Goliah here.

In fact, Google's share of the search market is declining while Bing's share is rising.

Re:Yay for Google

[edelholz]

There's quite a bit of controversy around Iron, but I'm too lazy to be bothered to google the discussions for you, sorry. I think it essentially states that there was no reason for a fork and Chromium performs just as well, concerning privacy.

Re:Yay for Google

[spyrochaete]

Your analogy fails. Both a tiger and a shark want to steal your steak.

Thanks for correcting me. I mean, my analogy was about a tiger and a lion, and that your steak would be safe with neither, but you cleverly inferred my hidden implication that a shark would deftly steal your steak and place it in the nearest freezer.

Re:Yay for Google

[Antiocheian]

In fact, Google's share of the search market is declining while Bing's share is rising.

Yes. And privacy might be one of the reasons.

Re:Yay for Google

[gmuslera]

I feel disturbing that people prefer to give "real bad" status to Google because they have the knowledge, but had proved to not have the will all/most of this years, and prefer going with Microsoft that if anything has proved in 30+ years of existence (probably would be very few missing years in that period without a big example) is that have the will do to evil every time they had a chance.

Look, that professor will be with our daughters a lot of time, and something weird could pass for his head this time, so instead will bring for that role that other guy that was already convicted for rape several times.

Re:Yay for Google

[bonch]

Google has a history of fighting to protect your private data.

What the hell? No, they don't. They have a history of fighting to index all of your private data for their advertising platform, and CEO Eric Schmidt said people who want privacy have something to hide.

Re:Yay for Google

[Antiocheian]

I am not giving a "real bad" status to Google. I do have a problem with the stuff Google knows about me when so many sites use Google analytics, adwords, embedded youtube videos to the point of Google being able to track most of the web pages I visit.

This is too much power.

My dealings with Microsoft are much more restricted. I use XP, I sometimes use Bing and thats it. I have no other relations with them. So, even if they were evil -- they couldn't really compromise my privacy (I keep all operating system components firewalled, BTW).

I understand your example, but I'd say that the role of the other guy is serving fries in a public place and I'd have little problem with that. That professor on the other hand could turn up more dangerous if he wished to...

Re:Yay for Google

[oddfox]

SRWare Iron is a scam advertised by spreading FUD about Chrome and Chromium. The creator has admitted publicly that he created the project in order to gain ad revenue by appealing to people who want more privacy by bashing Google's browser, both the open source and "official" versions.

There is absolutely no reason to use it unless you would rather trust some random guy who makes it hard to get at the source code (Multiple parts of an archive upped to Rapidshare? Are you serious?), or are too unwilling to install AdBlock by yourself (The AdBlock Iron uses is at least supposed to block ads from loading altogether but it's not nearly as easy to setup or problem-free compared to the AdBlock extension) and turn off the features in the "Under The Hood" tab that some find unsavory. Not to mention the fact that development seriously lags behind since the person behind it can't be bothered apparently to create a simple rebranding script (Because that's effectively all it is).

And yes, I realize I used a lot of parentheses, and I apologize for that.

Further reading and insight on the topic.

Re:Yay for Google

[welcher]

I trust Google infinitely more than I trust Microsoft.

So what exactly do you think Microsoft is going to do that Google won't?

Re:Yay for Google

[FloydTheDroid]

From the iron website

... it also gets critic from data protection specialists , for reasons such as creating a unique user ID ...

So there is something to be genuinely concerned about. I'm not sure if you can turn this off or not in chrome and really, it probably doesn't matter anyway since there are other ways to track you such as this one. But that unique id makes it very easy for google and its partners to track you and hence bug you with ads.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

Except people leaving Google over privacy concerns are idiots.

Everyone is focusing on an opinion statement from one individual as opposed to actual track records of the companies.

Which company decided to anonymize their logs sooner to protect users? Oh, that would be Google. Which company has fought court orders to protect privacy? Oh, that would be Google. What company fought China? Oh, what would be Google. What company said they wouldn't have over user IPs linked to search results to George W. Bush? Oh, what would be Google?

Which company handed over your personal data without a warrant? Oh, that would be Microsoft. Which company never objected to censoring results in China? Oh, that would be Microsoft. Which company just secured a new patent to sell your personal data to the highest bidder? Oh, that would be Microsoft.

Encouraging people to move over to Bing to protect your privacy flies in the fact of every fact we know.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

While they want to index all information in the world, they aren't handing your information out to others, which is why they anonymize your search data even sooner now.

The other search companies are in fact handing over your data to others.

Google has fought multiple governments to protect privacy. No other search company can say the same thing.

Re:Yay for Google

[Anonymous Coward]

Bing's privacy statement is MUCH better than Google. In fact, MS is very respectful of personal data and they always display fully if there is anything personal used. The only service i double-checked in on was Zune but they explicitly state they use analytics to talor the shopping experience to better match your history.

Re:Yay for Google

[j_l_cgull]

Which company decided to anonymize their logs sooner to protect users? Oh, that would be Google.

May have to reconsider:
http://www.google.com/privacy_faq.html#toc-anonymize
http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2008/12/yahoo-anonymize-logs-after-90-days-compared-google

Re:Yay for Google

[bonch]

Did you not read my post? Eric Schmidt, one of the CEOs, doesn't believe in privacy of information and feels that if you want privacy, you've done something wrong that you're trying to hide.

You don't know who's handing what to whom. Why do you think they index your data? It's for their targeted ad platform. Which, like their search engine, is as closed source as Windows.

Re:Yay for Google

[xtracto]

Microsoft profits by selling YOU software (broken or not).

Google profits by selling SOMEONE ELSE your data (or some form of it).

You might consider to trust them in one way or another.

Re:Yay for Google

[Antiocheian]

Which company decided to anonymize their logs sooner to protect users? Oh, that would be Google.

In addition to j_l_cgull's posting, also

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/bing-makes-moves-to-comply-with-eu-anonymization-directive-does-google-006505.php

Which company handed over your personal data without a warrant? Oh, that would be Microsoft.

Please cite references.

Which company never objected to censoring results in China? Oh, that would be Microsoft.

That's not a privacy issue.

Which company just secured a new patent to sell your personal data to the highest bidder? Oh, that would be Microsoft.

Until they use it it's not an issue

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

I've seen the statement quoted over and over and over again.

That doesn't change the fact that AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft just handed search data over to the US government. Yahoo handed over data on a Chinese journalist to the government. Microsoft has a patent to sell your information.

Google meanwhile anonymizes logs and has a record of fighting government agencies to protect privacy.

Again, ignore actual factual evidence all day long. Instead, trust companies who have a known record of handing your data over. That clearly is the way to go.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

In addition to j_l_cgull's posting, also

http://www.cmswire.com/cms/web-content/bing-makes-moves-to-comply-with-eu-anonymization-directive-does-google-006505.php [cmswire.com]

Google was the first to make this move of their own accord. If the EU forces Bing to anonymize data for EU users, that does nothing for users outside the EU.

Please cite references.

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060119-060352

It was kind of a big deal, but since many Slashdot editors only post stories insisting that Google is evil, it was somewhat overlooked on Slashdot.

That's not a privacy issue.

If you're looking to see which company protects its users, only Google has a positive track record here. However, if you only want to focus on privacy specifically, then Google has refused to hand over user data to China, where as Yahoo has. Again, Google is leading the pack on protecting users.

Until they use it it's not an issue

What? You're not concerned that Microsoft pursued the patent in the first place?

When Mozilla suggested users would be better off using Bing, they did so in the overwhelming face of evidence to the contrary.

Re:Yay for Google

[david_thornley]

Why don't you look up exactly what that quote is? It states that if you're worried that Google might turn over evidence of you doing something wrong, don't do it. If you're not doing anything wrong, be aware that no online service, including Google, can keep your privacy against appropriate government actions.

It's descriptive, not prescriptive, and it applies to all online services.

Re:Yay for Google

[bonch]

You don't know what you're talking about. Google has given the U.S. government access to Gmail.

It's interesting that you don't offer any response to their CEO's statement on privacy. Here's Schmidt's full statement:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.

Note that it directly refutes your claim that Google fights hard to avoid giving data to the government. The CEO himself is telling you that your data could be given to the government.

Keep on defending Google if you want. They're more than happy to index the private data of loyal customers like you. They've already shown that privacy is not a real concern for them.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

No, Google asked the NSA to better secure Gmail because Chinese hackers compromised Gmail. They didn't hand over email to anyone.

Compare that to Microsoft and Yahoo just handing data over.

You're paranoid that Google could hand over data, and you miss the fact that every other competitor already has handed data over.

Did Google tell George W. Bush to screw himself when he asked for search data? Oh, yeah, they did. They are required to abide by laws (like the Patriot Act) but when they had multiple court orders from Brazil, they fought as long as they could so they wouldn't have to hand over information. Just like they fought against China to protect their users.

Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo just handed over your data.

Which company should you trust to do searches on?

Go ahead and trust the others. It demonstrates an amazing command of logic on your part.

Re:Yay for Google

[Antiocheian]

http://blog.searchenginewatch.com/060119-060352

You are probably correct here although the nature of the data requested wasn't a serious privacy issue. It was data private to Google and the rest, but without the IP addresses, the invasion to personal privacy was minimal. Also it is not certain that MS has provided the data, but I will accept they did as the most probable scenario.

However you are generalizing too much. For example when you say "if you're looking to see which company protects its users" you miss the point by generalization. Yes, it's nice to have a company that protects its users but the issue here is privacy.

Google controls huge amounts of personal data; their success is already a privacy problem because the more Google grows, the more data it can take from me. As Google urges me to sign in for most of its services it can make out a perfect report of what I like, what I watch, what turns me on, what I buy. Microsoft (and really, all the other search services) knows nothing of these. That makes Microsoft and the rest harmless in front of Google.

Thus I believe Mozilla is right. When you control such an amount of data, you have a great responsibility. Schmidt's statement has a huge impact because it gives the message that pursuing privacy (and of course encryption) is a sign of illegal activities which is exactly what oppressive governments dictate.

Google needs to really understand the importance of privacy and the increasing awareness of it; until then, relying on a competitor will be sending them a strong message.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

There were follow-up articles as well that mention Microsoft, AOL and Yahoo did hand over data. Bush ended up asking for search data cross-referenced with IP addresses.

Microsoft isn't harmless because they track information from just as many sources with Hotmail, Bing, MSN, Live services, etc.

Not to mention that Microsoft owns 10% of Facebook who change policies as often as they can to make it extremely difficult to keep up with privacy options. Facebook's latest move was to start sharing your details with other websites without asking you.

Again, as a 10% owner, Microsoft may have been in on that move. I don't use Bing or Live Services, but I wouldn't be shocked to see Microsoft and Facebook sharing user information across their myriad of sites and services.

Again, you insist you're safer with a company that owns a patent on selling your information, and one that has a history of handing information over.

Which is worse, a company that has no history of doing that, but could, or the company you know will in fact do that?

This is a no brainer.

Re:Yay for Google

[plan10]

It's amazing how you can take someone out of context even while providing the full quotation.

Is it so hard to comprehend that if you really need serious privacy, NO major search engine provider in the world will give you that?

And this doesn't refute anything. Just because they may be forced into handing over data doesn't mean they won't put up a fight. Which is exactly what Google does, and exactly the opposite of Yahoo and MS, who are very pliable in their dealings with governments.

Re:Yay for Google

[mxh83]

You are an idiot if you believe that.

Microsoft has been handing private data for 30 years without privacy fiascoes like what we saw with Buzz. Google thrives on your data and using it to make money. The only difference between google and fb is that google hasn't sold out on your data yet.

Re:Yay for Google

[mxh83]

You are a fool.

Re:Yay for Google

[Antiocheian]

No, see the linked video. The quote is exactly as I wrote it.

Re:Yay for Google

[bonch]

It's bizarre how you keep going back to Microsoft and Yahoo, as if I ever expressed any support for them. I never even mentioned them.

This debate is about you claiming Google is some bastion of privacy, even when the CEO is flat-out telling you not to expect any privacy and that they're beholden to the Patriot Act. Privacy International gave Google a ranking of "Hostile to Privacy" in 2007.

Notice that you completely ignored the Google Buzz controversy I mentioned. Notice that you completely ignored that Eric Schmidt said they are compelled to share data with the government and the subsequent confirmation from Google Australia. You ignore all the indexing Google does of your private data solely for their advertising platform.

I don't know if you have a vested interest in Google (many employees astroturf around here), but it's obvious you don't care at all about privacy, despite your claims to the contrary. As before, I expect you to ignore Schmidt's statements and Google's recent privacy blunders.

I'll quote Eric Schmidt again since you have yet to address it:

"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines - including Google - do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities."

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

Who are you going to use for a search engine? Largely your options fall to those three, or two these days given that Microsoft provides Yahoo's search.

So your options are Microsoft or Google.

My original point is that I trust Google more than Microsoft because Microsoft has already proven they will hand my data over, where as Google has not.

You're worried Google *might*, except Microsoft already does.

At some point this might sink in. However, I'm not sure it ever will.

As for the quote, I've addressed it about five times in this thread. That is his personal opinion. However, I'd rather judge a company based on facts. I look at the track record of the official policies of Google. What have they done in the history of their company?

They fought the US government and refused to hand over data. They fought China. They fought Brazil. They anonymize their logs sooner, of their own volition, as opposed to Microsoft now being forced to do so in the EU. They added fine-grained privacy controls to Chrome.

Name one action Google has taken as a company that demonstrates I should trust them less than the available alternatives for major search engines.

Re:Yay for Google

[bonch]

I didn't take anything "out of context." Eric Schmidt doesn't believe you should care about your privacy.

Just like the other guy, you for some reason mention Microsoft and Yahoo, as if I ever supported them either.

Re:Yay for Google

[bonch]

I'll use Google without being logged in or allowing them to store a cookie. I won't use Gmail, which indexes all my email. That guy whose personal opinion you're dismissing is CEO Eric Schmidt.

Again, I don't know what Microsoft has to do with this or why they justify Google's lack of concern for user privacy. It's bizarre that you keep bringing them up, as if they justify Google's actions.

Name one action Google has taken as a company that demonstrates I should trust them less than the available alternatives for major search engines.

And once again, you completely ignore the Google Buzz controversy and Google Australia's admission of cooperation with the U.S. government.

Re:Yay for Google

[Enderandrew]

I make a comment that I trust Google more than Microsoft.

You take affront.

You then repeat later that you're not sure how Microsoft is relevant.

Look back to the first sentence of this post.

Repeat until you get it.

You are willfully ignorant. You're going on my block list.

Should be a new iPhone App

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple should allow it to become available in the App store.

OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flash!!

[Bearhouse]

When will it be available for my iPhone & iPad?

I could really use proper CSS3 multicolumn support

[mozumder]

So much flakiness in the WebKit support of CSS multi-column layout... don't even know where to begin. Firefox is much farther ahead in this case.

Eventually DIVs are going to have to go away completely, so that all HTML is semantic.

Does it still spy on you

[goombah99]

Since google merged the google-bar and URL bar into one, it sends all your browsing to google does it not? If so, I really wonder why people use this.

Re:Does it still spy on you

[V!NCENT]

if no protocol is defines (say "http://") then their browser uses the default search engine. Of course this is Google by default, but it is realy easily changeable. Chrome (not Chromium!) asks you what search engine you want to use on the firts run.

After a while this one bar gets adiciting!

Re:Does it still spy on you

[The MAZZTer]

I think GP is confused by the browser sending what you type in the omnibar to Google for search and url suggestions. If you're not comfortable with this (I find it quite useful) you can turn it off in Options. And of course it is always off in incognito mode.

Re:Does it still spy on you

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it still install in the user profile folder (%LOCALAPPDATA%) on Windows?

Chrome has to be the only application I've ever seen (other than spyware) to install executable content in the profile directories.
I liken it to putting binaries in the /etc/ directory on *nix platforms in terms of rareness.

Re:Does it still spy on you

[Anonymous Coward]

Because it crashes far less and is 800X faster than firefox.

Some of us simply want to get things done instead of waiting and restarting the browser.

Re:Does it still spy on you

[spyrochaete]

Your browsing history doesn't get sent to Google, but every keystroke you type into the address bar gets sent to Google, even if you don't press Enter to submit it. This applies even to internal addresses and IP addresses typed, character by character, into the address bar.

Re:Does it still spy on you

[SanityInAnarchy]

Well, it's more like installing an app to /home on *nix. Rare and wrong, but not unheard of.

Interestingly, Chrome gets this right on Linux.

Re:Does it still spy on you

[icebraining]

Firefox is slower, no doubt, but crashing? Mine never does, not on Windows nor Linux.

Its just not the fastest browser...

[sumdewd]

The most casual of testing of Opera 10.53 on my own C2D e8400 just yielded a Sunspider result of... "Total: 312.0ms +/- 13.9%" If speed is such an important marketing factor then why aren't we hearing more about opera?

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[Colonel Korn]

The most casual of testing of Opera 10.53 on my own C2D e8400 just yielded a Sunspider result of...
  "Total: 312.0ms +/- 13.9%"

If speed is such an important marketing factor then why aren't we hearing more about opera?

I don't really like Opera and don't use it because of my UI preferences, but about six months ago when I last compared html (not javascript) rendering speeds, Opera was the only browser that could smoothly scroll through the large text and image laden pages I used as benchmarks. Safari was the slowest, skipping entire screens of content as it experienced rendering hiccups, and Chrome (I tested Chrome 3) was pretty bad too. I tried Chrome 4 later and saw a lot of improvement, but it still didn't have the performance of Opera. This was all on an i7 system.

I'm hoping a newer version of Chrome will make up the difference, but then I still need it to run a real adblock, not the current "load the image and then hide it" version.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[Enderandrew]

Opera has a lot going for it in the speed department. But part of that is because you're basically using an Opera proxy. Everything you do on the internet gets routed through them.

For all the "privacy" concerns about Chrome having auto-suggest for search, Opera has some very legitimate privacy concerns.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[sznupi]

You're misinformed. That's just a (off by default) recently introduced function; Opera always was damn snappy overall.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[clone53421]

Are you talking about the mobile version?

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[Lumpy]

then install a adblocking hosts file.

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[ColdWetDog]

Likely not as he was running it on an i7 processor.

But of course, an i7 iPhone would be pretty hot....

'Smokem if you've got em'.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[clone53421]

I was referring to this post. No mention of an i7... but his sig does mention reviews of iPhone apps.

Opera has a lot going for it in the speed department. But part of that is because you're basically using an Opera proxy. Everything you do on the internet gets routed through them.

For all the "privacy" concerns about Chrome having auto-suggest for search, Opera has some very legitimate privacy concerns.
--
http://www.iphoneappreviews.net/

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[shutdown -p now]

Opera has historically been very fast at HTML parsing and DOM manipulation - while lagging behind the leaders at JS interpreting speed.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[hkmwbz]

Opera has historically been very fast at HTML parsing and DOM manipulation - while lagging behind the leaders at JS interpreting speed.

No, that is completely wrong. Opera was the fastest browser by far until some time after 9.5 was released. After that, Apple introduced their new JS engine. For a year or so Opera was no longer the fastest. Now Opera is the fastest at JS again.

So Opera has traditionally been the fastest, and now is the fastest again.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[hkmwbz]

No, you are not using any proxies. You can use something called "Opera Turbo", but it is completely optional, and disabled by default. Quit spreading FUD.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[Anonymous Coward]

Opera looks better than Chrome, and is far more customisable. You need to check it out again, 10.5x is a whole world apart from 10.10. It's 7x quicker and the UI is much slimmed down with all the good power-user stuff hidden away.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[sznupi]

It just feels weird to use as an example a review of Opera Mini made on iPhone; from quickly looking at this list there is some number of mobile phones which cost 60-70 bucks, without contract, and...give essentially the same functionality with Opera Mini.

And a review which forgets that you don't have to use Mini for few sites where privacy is of any importance; and that you already trust many parties...

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[clone53421]

My point was that this started off as a discussion of speed on desktop machines and Enderandrew came along talking about an Opera proxy. I think he’s a bit confused because that sounds like the mobile version he’s referring to, and we weren’t talking about it.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[haruchai]

As a long time Opera user ( version 2, if memory serves ), I can tell you that they have long been the speed king as well as the most conformant to Web standards. Apple raised the speed bar with Safari 3 although I found that gunmetal interface hard on the eyes and Google really boosted the perception of what Javascript is capable of.
But, with the release of the Carakan JS engine, Opera is right up there with them. We'll see if IE9's hardware accel raises the bar again and if the browsers-that-be can step up.
Truth to tell, I find the current browser wars to be much more exciting than the long-running Win-Mac-Linux fracas.

Opera has also been truly innovative - the widgets are cool although I find Firefox ( and now Chrome ) extensions to be more useful day-to-day, which is why Opera isn't my primary browser; they included a servicable torrent client years ago but nothing can touch uTorrent on Wintel, it seems and their multipage print feature, over ten years old, has yet to be matched by any of the mainstream browsers I've used.
And lets not forget Opera Mail and the new Unite embedded web server.
I've also found Opera to be the most scalable of the current crop of browsers - I'm working on benchmarking several to see where they start crapping out and what quirks show up when under extreme load.
A scalable browser gets high marks from me as I tend to be a voracious serial browser - I frequently run up Firefox sessions of 5+ windows and 100+ tabs.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[easyTree]

300.0ms +/- 2.9% here on Opera 10.53 (3374) (with only 37 other tabs open :)

against chrome 4.1.249.1064 (45376)'s 423.0ms +/- 2.8% (with only two other tabs open)

Curious that Opera isn't compared within the speed tests but is within the market-share graph. Wonder why that would be...

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[hkmwbz]

About widgets, they aren't really supposed to be like extensions. I think what Opera is trying to do is to create an environment for cross-platform applications. They have some pretty big players (like Nokia, Vodafone, etc.) betting on widgets (using web technology) for applications rather than proprietary stuff like the App Store or Android Market.

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[sznupi]

Too bad the scalability of Opera went seriously downhill after 9.27 (releases from 9.5 to pre-10.5 were generally a bit meh IMHO); it was of course necessitated by progress in other areas, can be justified by them and the browser still remains, from my experience, by far the most scalable. But in 9.27 (generally 8.x and early 9.x line) it is so great on limited resources that I decided to go back on one older machine I have around here (except for js heavy sites...)

A bit over 100 tabs? That's a small number ;p

Re:Its just not the fastest browser...

[hkmwbz]

Scalability went downhill? How?

But Father Steve says no Flash

[elrous0]

Is it a sin if I download this? I mean a lot of Catholics use birth control, right? So will I be excommunicated from the Apple store for this? Will I be forced to commune with infidel Windows users? I'm conflicted here.

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[ubergamer1337]

NONE SHALL FLASH!

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[plover]

NONE SHALL FLASH!

You mean Gandalf is really Steve Jobs?

Damn. You made Baby Frodo cry.

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

No, wrong reference. Steve Jobs is the Black Knight.

You cut off his pancreas and he just keeps coming.

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[MBGMorden]

Yeah - if you picture that movie exactly the same but with Ian McKellan sporting jeans + black turtleneck instead of the robes, that movie would take on a whole new meaning.

"Mobile is mine!" - Saruman via Theodin
"You did not kill me, you will not kill RIM!" - Stevedalf

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[Anonymous Coward]

This is an app beyond any of you.

Fly, you fools, fly!

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[nschubach]

If I remember correctly, Apple did go from gray to white! So I would say Apple is Gandolf. :p

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[mounthood]

Will we see Chrome Frame for Safari?

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[skudenfaugen]

No, wrong reference. Steve Jobs is the Black Knight.

NONE SHALL FLASH!

I have no quarrel with you, good Sir Knight. But I must cross this bridge.

Re:But Father Steve says no Flash

[silverglade00]

So I would say Apple is Gandolf. :p

Blasphemy AND misspelling that name... I just threw up a little in my mouth.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[V!NCENT]

It ships with Flash, but Flash will never become available for you iPod/iPhone/iPad... ever. Forget it...

Can it display PDFs?

[swillden]

This is the one thing that prevents me from using Chrome regularly, at least on my desktop machine (64-but Ubuntu 9.10). I haven't looked into the reasons why, but FF will display PDFs using the browser plugin provided by acroread, and Chrome just gives me a blank page.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[blind biker]

PDFs displayed inside the browser window is a bug more than a feature. Almost 100% of the time, this causes problems, of all kinds. Whenever I install a browser, or get a new company computer/laptop, I disable PDF display in the browser window.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[plover]

I use PDF Download to solve that problem under Firefox. But with Chrome, each browser tab is an independent process. Load up something in a tab (such as a PDF) and it's borked? Close the tab, problem solved. Doesn't seem like it would be a big issue for Chrome.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[swillden]

PDFs displayed inside the browser window is a bug more than a feature. Almost 100% of the time, this causes problems, of all kinds.

I don't have any problems with it.

And a couple of the banks I do business with make it very hard to get a downloadable PDF. It's nearly impossible to look at my statements with Chrome.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[P-Nuts]

Yes, but while I like the PDFs to open in a separate window, I don't like being left with a pointless tab showing a blank page, which seems to happen quite often (but not all the time) on Chrome.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's certainly not a bug, and we're displaying PDFs in the browser in both IE and Firefox for about 80 users of our web-based document management system.

This works very well because the user stays on the site and stays integrated into the UI of the webapp (which has visible controls for selecting related documents among other features). We've never had any browser-specific issues in the 5+ years we've been doing it, with thousands of documents now in the system (we've had Adobe Reader issues, but these have always affected both the stand-alone app and the browser plugin, and have usually been solved by a reinstall and/or update).

Regardless of that, the Chrome problem he's talking about is that it doesn't even launch the reader separately or offer to save the file. You just get a plain blank gray page and that's all. This is extremely annoying.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[drinkypoo]

I have the same problem with chromium, I don't know what the deal is. Even mozplugger doesn't fix it (and chrome/chromium will use mozilla plugins automagically these days. and they often work — flash does.)

mostly I try to quick view PDFs these days, but that's even worse than downloading the PDF if you have poor bandwidth.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Coffee4cr]

This is the one thing that prevents me from using Chrome regularly, at least on my desktop machine (64-but Ubuntu 9.10). I haven't looked into the reasons why, but FF will display PDFs using the browser plugin provided by acroread, and Chrome just gives me a blank page.

Grab the extension that uses google's pdf viewer. http://goo.gl/GqNg Hope this helps

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Jugalator]

I suggest using a Google Chrome extension to let Google Docs parse the PDF and display it inline.

Yes, you'll lose some PDF features, but often it's good enough, and it's a much more stable method than using PDF Reader online.

The extension:

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[clone53421]

It is a bug because it means that every new drive-by PDF exploit has a chance to hit me if my browser automatically loads the PDFs.

Your system is nice, but you have control over the content. That “feature” shouldn’t be enabled for PDFs from the web in general.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[farble1670]

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't want to look at PDFs from the browser. I want to use an external viewer. I like the quick page-turning and the real full-screen mode. I read math and physics journal articles all day at work. Believe it or not, I like Acrobat Reader. Here's what I did to kill the plugin:

1) hunt down and remove all instances of npdf.so
2) make sure it doesn't show up in 'about:plugins'
3) now, when you open a PDF, it will go to an external viewer instead of the plugin.

This is my biggest complaint about Chrome. I wish it had some controls on how to handle filetypes (i.e., use the plugin, always save to some specific folder, use an external viewer, etc.)

I love-love-love Chrome's Javascript execution speed. I develop some scientific webtools with GWT that are useful under Chrome and completely unusable under Firefox.

Under Windows, you can use Process Explorer to look at where Chrome is finding the browser plugin. Hint: Chrome will find Firefox's npdf.dll also.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Anonymous Coward]

Docs PDF/PowerPoint Viewer (by Google)

Working fine on 64bit arch linux and chromium.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[swillden]

Tried that. Doesn't work on all sites.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[isaacbowen]

There's an extension for that. Not a fully-qualified pdf viewer by any stretch, but rendering the document in Google's doc viewer is usually sufficient.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[vbraga]

It works the way you want both on Windows XP 32-bits and Windows 7 64-bits, at least for me. Maybe it's something specific to your configuration?

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Leto-II]

I have the same problem with chromium, I don't know what the deal is. Even mozplugger doesn't fix it (and chrome/chromium will use mozilla plugins automagically these days. and they often work — flash does.)

mostly I try to quick view PDFs these days, but that's even worse than downloading the PDF if you have poor bandwidth.

Mozplugger does fix it as long as you use a recent version. Anything 1.13.1 or greater works (returning XEmbed = true to the browser is what fixed it I think).

I have been using xpdf to view PDFs in Chromium for quite a while now.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[moosesocks]

Is this because of specific gripes you have with existing PDF plugins, or on a more general level?

Although I despise Adobe Reader, I find Safari's PDF implementation to be quite good on Macs (although this could be because OSX's treatment of PDF in general is top-notch, lightning-fast, and very deeply integrated into the windowing system)

You can also get similar functionality for Firefox on mac.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[iamnotaclown]

It works fine in Safari.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[vitaflo]

Google makes an extension to do this in gDocs for just this purpose.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[swillden]

...which doesn't work with many sites. Yes, I installed that extension the same day I installed Chrome.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[drinkypoo]

I'm trying to use evince in lucid which uses mozplugger 1.13.3, and on chromium 5.0.342.9 I get a charcoal-colored screen (tab, anyway) rather than evince.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Leto-II]

Hmm... I don't know what to tell you. I'm using 1.13.2 and I've successfully used evince, xpdf, and acroread. This is on Gentoo using various nightly chromium builds. When I used older (1.12) versions of mozplugger I had the same result you describe.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Leto-II]

Oh, I just noticed this:

(mozplugger changelog)

Version 1.13.3 adds functionality to allow possible working around mozdev bugs 22065, 22715 and 22723 by adding a new flag needs_xembed. The flag needs to be added or removed from mozpluggerc to allow application keyboard focus for the combination of browser and application used. The default mozpluggerrc does not use the flag so add were required.

Have you tried setting the needs_xembed flag? I think that is linked to why it works correctly in Chromium, so it must be set.

See this bug:

https://www.mozdev.org/bugs/show_bug.cgi?id=22737

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[drinkypoo]

That's for acroread, which I don't permit on my systems. I use evince. It doesn't work either. Or do you think the same is applicable? I just get "missing plugin" now that I have only the stock line for evince. Very wacky.

Re:Can it display PDFs?

[Leto-II]

I do not normally use acroread either (although I do have it installed). I am currently using xpdf, and have used evince successfully as well. I think the same thing is applicable. It isn't because it is acroread that it requires XEmbed, it is because we're trying to use it in Chromium that it requires XEmbed. Try adding the needs_xembed for evince.

Opera 10.53 faster for me...

[Zoidbot]

Opera 10.53 is faster than it on my Quad Core Q8300 with 4GB RAM and Win7 x64...

So I take any claims of it "blowing everything else out the water" as just Chrome fanboy talk.

I hope this is only an early example

[Stan Vassilev]

Chrome has long been one of the browsers with worse Flash integration. Right-click flash menu refusing to disappear, very slow Flash plugin startup, high resource usage, Chrome starting and running Flash at full priority in background pages.

I don't see any of these resolved. So far all that has materialized from the "advanced integration" is the bundling.

Re:I hope this is only an early example

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of your complaints are the nature of Flash, and not something that can be controlled in the browser.

The other two - startup time and background pages - well, they may or may not be able to do something about the former. For the latter, Flash doesn't need to be running full priority to use tons of CPU time, if little else is running on the machine. Maybe they could do something to delay the startup, a la Flashblock type extensions, but some websites error out if it looks like the browser doesn't support flash.

does this fix flash sandboxing?

[yincrash]

previously plugins were not sandboxed, meaning that both regular and incognitos windows using flash shared the same flash cookies and cache. is this fixed with integrated flash?

Re:does this fix flash sandboxing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, I like having everything sharing the same flash cookies and cache. That made my "/usr/local/bin/fuckFlash" script much easier to write: just
#!/bin/sh
rm -rf ~/Library/Preferences/Macromedia

Re:does this fix flash sandboxing?

[Anonymous Coward]

Probably not. These days "integration" apparently means "it's bundled in the installer and added to the updater".

Re:does this fix flash sandboxing?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd bet something of the sorts have been happening as the Chrome task manager now shows the tabs with flash player as separate processes, or tasks, instead of clumping the flash tabs in single task, apparently. There are now suggestive boundaries between the "flash tabs" in the task manager, which induced this speculation.

Re:I could really use proper CSS3 multicolumn supp

[Colonel Korn]

So much flakiness in the WebKit support of CSS multi-column layout... don't even know where to begin. Firefox is much farther ahead in this case.

Eventually DIVs are going to have to go away completely, so that all HTML is semantic.

Silence! Real web users spend all day continually refreshing the ACID3 test. Nothing else matters.

Chrome isn't the fastest Javascript browser

[Anonymous Coward]

At least not on OS X...not definitively as the poster suggests. A quick run of Chrome beta vs. WebKit nightly (if we are comparing betas), shows that WebKit nightly is faster than Chrome on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. Chrome is faster than WebKit nightly on the V8 benchmark.

Still do not want

[Anonymous Coward]

Unless Google rewrote the Flash runtime to not suck donkey balls on anything but 32-bit Windows, and has built in Flash blocking by default, this alleged feature isn't anything I want.

Guys, Flash is a fucking cancer. If you think you're somehow advancing your fight with Google by bundling it into Chrome and Android, you're sadly fucktarded.

Let it go. If you want to help out, partner with Adobe on writing HTML5 authoring tools that make replacing Flash easy and painless for web developer. Open standard web is good web.

Re:Still do not want

[DrXym]

Unless Google rewrote the Flash runtime to not suck donkey balls on anything but 32-bit Windows, and has built in Flash blocking by default, this alleged feature isn't anything I want.

Blame the NPAPI and implementations of it on other platforms.

For example all Mac plugins are windowless which is why performance goes down the toilet. On Windows, plugins are usually windowed (although they can also be windowless) which means the browser creates the plugin, puts it somewhere and can more or less forget about it since the plugin will paint itself when it needs to. On the Mac, every plugin is windowless so it must shout "paint me" at the browser and then wait for browser to call back to repaint it. Picture a couple of plugins screaming "paint me" 30 times a second and it's not hard to see why there may be a performance impact.

Linux plugins support windowed & windowless plugins, but performance probably suffers there from the lack of decent accelerated hardware support and the complexities of X, what extensions are there etc.

Let it go. If you want to help out, partner with Adobe on writing HTML5 authoring tools that make replacing Flash easy and painless for web developer. Open standard web is good web.

It would be useful for such a tool to produce HTML/JS but it would still be machine generated spew. Also HTML5 is not some magic wand to better performance. JS / DOM performance is all over the shop from one browser to the next and virtually all JS / DOM / repainting in the page is running synchronously through a single thread.

So yes a tool would be nice, but you're deluded if you think HTML5 is an adequate replacement for all but the most sedentary content. Perhaps someone needs to define proper extensions to HTML, SVG, DOM etc. that allows content to be tweened with timing critical hinting, audio etc. that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.

Re:Still do not want

[delinear]

You make it sound like either/or. I'm all for more work towards open web standards, but some of us have to sometimes live and interact in the real world, which sometimes requires the use of Flash, painful as it frequently is. For those times, it's nice to know there's a solution and not just a brick wall response. And if these companies can ease the pain of Flash even a little, I'm all for it as an interim solution.

Re:Still do not want

[icebraining]

Linux plugins support windowed & windowless plugins, but performance probably suffers there from the lack of decent accelerated hardware support and the complexities of X, what extensions are there etc.

If the plugin draws a normal window, it should be able to run as fast as any other app, no? Why can mplayer display 1080p video without any problems and Flash stutters with QVGA resolution videos?

Re:Still do not want

[Anonymous Coward]

that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.

Yes but the fact you are missing is that most people don't want that kind of annoying flashy content. We are surfing the web for the information, not for glittery hollywood flashyness. Especially as the vast vast majority of flash on the net is advertisement. Incredibly annoying advertisement.

We don't want that crap.

Re:Still do not want

[DrXym]

So says you. Lots of people quite enjoy watching video content, or playing games or watching animations that were created with Flash. If you don't like Flash don't install it or use a blocker to selectively choose your content and quit whining.

Re:Still do not want

[DrXym]

If the plugin draws a normal window, it should be able to run as fast as any other app, no? Why can mplayer display 1080p video without any problems and Flash stutters with QVGA resolution videos?

MPlayer can take advantage of some extensions that Flash can not. For example MPlayer can dump out video via X Video because most video content is in the YUV colour space. Flash works in RGB so it can't use X Video. Even if Flash is playing YUV video it has to be converted to RGB to be mixed with other graphical elements which in turn are sitting inside a plugin which may or may not be windowed. Flash does benefit from OpenGL hardware acceleration but as I mentioned, Linux hardware acceleration sucks. Even with hardware acceleration are caveats that it doesn't work compositing extensions like compiz.

This is a good article on the issue of video playback and flash.

BTW I sound like a Flash apologist - I'm not and I hate Flash ads as much as the next person. But I think it's fair to counter the "Flash sucks" arguments when there are plenty of technical issues imposed by various platform that deserve their fair share of the blame. It's more prevalent when discussing OS X, but as I hope the article makes clear, Linux is not absolved either. I think Flash works a lot better on Windows simply because the platform is a better host for it.

Re:Still do not want

[Simetrical]

So yes a tool would be nice, but you're deluded if you think HTML5 is an adequate replacement for all but the most sedentary content. Perhaps someone needs to define proper extensions to HTML, SVG, DOM etc. that allows content to be tweened with timing critical hinting, audio etc. that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.

That's basically what's happening. HTML5 as it stands defines a basic set of APIs that let you do 90% of what you want to do with Flash in practice (although sometimes with more effort). As people try out the new APIs, they report things that are missing and can't be faked, and the most common requests will get prioritized for future versions of the standard.

For instance, HTML5 doesn't yet support reading from a webcam or microphone, but there are rough sketches in that direction (hitherto unimplemented). Another recent thing someone pointed out is that games need a way to lock your mouse cursor to their box, so you can use your mouse as you expect for FPSes without throwing the cursor out of the browser window when you do a sharp turn. WebKit has already implemented an experimental API to fullscreen video, which is missing from the current spec. These things are getting handled, in time.

What about for us normal folks?

[Anonymous Coward]

...which remains the fastest JavaScript browser available today.

OK fine, it has fast JavaScript. But how does it perform/compare to regular Web browsing, and how much better is it for us normal people who just want to use a Web browser to read Web pages instead of having remote Web sites perform executable actions on our computers. And how much less bloat does Chrome have compared to other Web browsers?

Re:What about for us normal folks?

[armanox]

Javascript is used for normal browsing. Websites that regular uses visit (Facebook, Google, etc) are full of it.

Re:What about for us normal folks?

[Anonymous Coward]

You're obviously so out of touch of what the actual web uses to do much of anything that's of use to "normal" users that you really ought to spend some time refreshing your knowledge of modern web technology. Besides, Javascript is an amazingly cool language to learn in it's own right.

But... Trust Issues

[thethibs]

Yah, yah, great product. But what information is Google collecting as you browse?

Re:But... Trust Issues

[Tuan121]

What information is Microsoft collecting as you browse?
What information is Mozilla collecting as you browse?
What information is AOL collection as you browse?

Wireshark and run them or stfu.

Re:But... Trust Issues

[Yvanhoe]

Well, just check by yourself :
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/

Re:But... Trust Issues

[thethibs]

Those companies aren't in the business of selling data. Google is.

Re:But... Trust Issues

[Anonymous Coward]

This is a fair comment. Why is it being marked as 'Troll'?

Re:But... Trust Issues

[drinkypoo]

Well, just check by yourself :
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/

chromium uses the same engine but it ain't the same browser; chrome is chromium plus some stuff to spy on you. on the other hand, you can run chromium so that you don't have to worry about being spied on by chrome. This is what I'm doing; I use the archived beta version from the dailies PPA on Ubuntu (first Karmic, now Lucid) and have so far found it to be generally more performant than Firefox. On the down side, plugin integration is not perfect, so for example mouse wheel events don't seem to go to flash apps. for windows there's srware iron.

Re:But... Trust Issues

[thethibs]

Some people think "troll" means "disagree".

I think it does spy on you

[goombah99]

Every keystroke in the address bar is sent to google by default according to microsoft. How else are they supposed to do google-suggest?

Re:I think it does spy on you

[spyrochaete]

Every keystroke in the address bar is sent to google by default according to microsoft. How else are they supposed to do google-suggest?

Obviously, by separating search from the address bar. That's how IE and every other browser does Google and Bing suggest. Do you really want to inform Google every time you test your private, internal web staging server at 127.0.0.1 or 192.168.11.22? How does that add value to the user?

Re:I think it does spy on you

[SanityInAnarchy]

Is informing Google of my private, internal staging server at some random IP address really infringing on my privacy?

Moreover, if you really don't like it, you can disable suggestions. If you then want suggestions, you can simply go to Google and start typing there. I think the point is that as you start typing, it is genuinely helpful to have relevant stuff randomly pop up, even if you are just typing into the URL bar.

Re:I think it does spy on you

[spyrochaete]

Is informing Google of my private, internal staging server at some random IP address really infringing on my privacy?

Moreover, if you really don't like it, you can disable suggestions. If you then want suggestions, you can simply go to Google and start typing there. I think the point is that as you start typing, it is genuinely helpful to have relevant stuff randomly pop up, even if you are just typing into the URL bar.

I agree with your alternatives, but I still attest that your privacy is unquestionably comporomised to some degree by joining the address and search bars. Other browsers have the same functionality while retaining your privacy by breaking these bars apart. All I'm saying is that there are some URLs people will not want to share with Google.

Re:I think it does spy on you

[badboy_tw2002]

Ctrl-Shift-N, problem solved. And if you say "I don't want to use incognito mode" I really have to question caring about some anonymous statistics with an IP and URL in a data warehouse somewhere vs having that URL in your history bar. One of them ties the query to you, one of them doesn't. For myself, Google is my starting point anyways, I don't even bother with URLs since moving to chrome. My major annoyance with web browsers now is that they _don't_ have this feature and I always end up with some "page not found" when I type in my request.

Re:I think it does spy on you

[SanityInAnarchy]

your privacy is unquestionably comporomised to some degree by joining the address and search bars.

Not really, given you can (again) disable this functionality and go with the more traditional mode of pointing a new tab at Google itself and typing in there for search. Maybe I'm weird, but ctrl+t, hit 'g', hit enter as it suggests google.com from your history, and then start typing, really doesn't seem that much more difficult than clicking on a separate search bar.

Other browsers have the same functionality while retaining your privacy by breaking these bars apart.

I don't agree that it's the same functionality. Again, the current mode is, "Go to the single bar and type where you want to go." It'll pull suggestions from everywhere -- history, search, everywhere -- and unless you end up typing a full URL, you can hit enter at any point to just take the top suggestion.

Still has the same old problems

[Daetrin]

I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it, but it looks like it still suffers from all of the "problems" (ie things i don't like) that i've complained about before.

In particular, it's still lacking a lot of options that i think ought to be available, like making new tabs open at the end of the list, having a minimum size that tabs can shrink to and a scrollable tab bar, having a drop-down list of all open tabs, and the ability to move the tab bar below the rest of the toolbars. Which is mostly just a list of all the fixes that the Firefox browser has already introduced. There's no shame in benefiting from the experience of those who have come before if you're unable to think of a way to improve the interface yourself.

Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options. Unfortunately Google's view towards user customability remains... unencouraging at best. (Or, IMHO, "stupidly wrong.") Luckily _some_ of those changes can be implemented by extensions, but not all of them.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Xzzy]

SSL renegotiation is still broken as well (under mac at least, haven't tried the others).

This is a deal breaker, if I can't use my certificates, I can't use the browser for work.

Is a shame, because I really like everything else about the browser.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[swb]

I'm guessing this still means no adblock plus and no noscript for Chrome? Without those I have no interest.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Adblock has been available for Chrome for the past little while. I think you are just a wee bit behind the times :)

Re:Still has the same old problems

[sznupi]

The scrollable tab bar is, arguably, not only not the best idea necessarily...but, most importantly, redundant if you have drop-down list of open tabs - potentially much more clear with much less action required if you really have lots of tabs open. But that's the thing, "potentially"...because the way FF implements it totally blows - it shouldn't be a scrolling menu if the list doesn't fit, it should be a nested menu; much faster again, much more clear.
FF also has problems with those elements of the interface, also needs fixes.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome has had these available as addons for well over 6 months now, get with the program.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Fnkmaster]

Does it still require switching to a "developer channel", a procedure that was fundamentally broken when I tried it the last time? It simply never worked - I repeatedly ran the "channel switcher" app, and nonetheless my browser never switched into the developer channel, and thus no extensions would work.

Does your browser still download ads, slowing page loads down, and just hide them? Or is actual blocking of ad loads now possible?

I know these things exist, but there is still a lot of work to be done on them.

I know fast Javascript is awesome, but it's not the entirety of a web browser. But at least this puts some competitive pressure on Firefox to optimize their Javascript engine further.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Though from my understanding, the AdBlock equivalent can only hide ads, not prevent them from downloading in the first place. I like AdBlock on Firefox because it actually makes the web faster by avoiding unnecessary downloads, not just because it removes screen clutter.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Omestes]

Nope. Only something call Adblock, which has no affiliation with the actual Adblock on Firefox. Also, Adblock on Chrome doesn't actually BLOCK ads, it only hides them, meaning it still downloads them, and runs any scripts attached to them.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[aardvarkjoe]

I'm guessing this still means no adblock plus and no noscript for Chrome? Without those I have no interest.

There are various filtering web proxies that work with Chrome, and are a good replacement for Adblock Plus. I've been using BFilter, which was the simplest and most effective one I tried, although it's no longer being developed, so I expect that it will become less and less effective. It's much, much better than the (rather poor) ad blockers available as extensions to Chrome, although perhaps not quite up to the level of Adblock Plus, and of course there's no real browser integration.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[samkass]

I'm guessing this still means no adblock plus and no noscript for Chrome? Without those I have no interest.

Yes, does it also let you steal from online stores, take money from other people's bank accounts, misappropriate bandwidth you haven't paid for or pirate software, too? Without that I'm not interested either.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[oddfox]

Chrome allows you to hide ads through extensions but if you really don't want any bandwidth used on them at all why not use Privoxy, eliminate AdBlock extensions in all the web browsers you use, and enjoy an ad-free web experience? That way whatever browser you decide you want to use at any given time has ad-blocking because Privoxy filters it all out. I realize there are some certain scenarios where an extension would be preferable (or the only option) but for most cases Privoxy is by far the better solution rather than adding more on top of your web browser, introducing more possible points of weakness in performance or anything else.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[slapys]

In particular, [Chrome] is still lacking a lot of options that i think ought to be available like having a drop-down list of all open tabs

That's available as one of my favorite extensions: here.

If I could ask for any Chrome feature, I'd like to see multiple rows of tabs. That used to be my favorite Firefox extension (Tab Mix Plus) but I'm willing to give it up in favor of Chrome's performance.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Apple disabled it, it is not broken. It has a security issue and they just disabled it instead of just fixing it. They will enable it again once OpenSSL fixed the flaw. Check some security (aka, hacker) blogs for more infos.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[argStyopa]

Meh, I'll just wait for the SRWare Iron version.

Most of the complaints people have about Chrome are gone in Iron (or, as your esthetic complaints) don't matter enough to me to want to go back to Firefox (which was almost as bloated and slow as IE by the time I departed using it after many years of happy use) or *shudder* IE.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Switch to "ChromePlus"... nothing to do with Google, but based on the same Chromium code, but with a whole host of extra goodies... integrated IE Tab, gestures etc plus a whole range of customisable behaviours that vanilla Chrome doesn't deign to provide.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[ShadowRangerRIT]

Privoxy saves you some download bandwidth, but now you have to wait on the proxy itself. And of course, I use AdBlock for non-ad related purposes such as:

• Removing NSFW or just plain unpleasant images from webpages
• Disabling annoying "helpful" JavaScript (like the idiotic word lookup JavaScript used in New York Times articles)

AdBlock, for me, isn't just about ads, it's about making web surfing faster, more convenient and less aggravating. I use Greasemonkey to rewrite pages at frequently used websites (e.g. I go straight from the main page to the print friendly version at every news site I frequent). All of this relies on some level of local control. Sure, Privoxy is a nice fire-and-forget solution for non-technical people you are helping out, and it even provides a layer of privacy that AdBlock can't, but you could get that with any proxy service. If you want more control and more flexibility, Firefox extensions are the best option available at present.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Use a hosts file. It's how ads were meant to be blocked. I for one won't run some bloated-ass extension that causes page load times to increase by 500ms (minus 2s for the ads, so a net gain, but still - slower overall than hosts redirection).

Re:Still has the same old problems

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I do use a hosts file. But again, not as flexible. If I want the page but not a specific image, hosts won't do me much good (and no good at all on my work computer where I don't have the privileges to edit it).

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Anonymous Coward]

Well if you're really intent on blocking an image, there's this new (pain in the ass) Chrome blocking feature:

http://i40.tinypic.com/9r2b14.png

Honestly, I don't see the point. I can't ever remember wanting to block a specific image. Literally, never. And with a hosts file, I've only seen maybe ~100 ads in the last three years. I usually manually add those that aren't blacklisted.

Re:Still has the same old problems

[Daetrin]

Ahh! That extension didn't exist the last time i searched for solutions, thank you!

Re:Still has the same old problems

[slapys]

No problem, glad I could help :) I just wish they'd put a real adblock and multiple rows of tabs in the beta, but I downloaded it after reading the article and it works pretty well on my netbook. Let's see how the final version turns out!

Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

If Flash didn't give users and developers the freedom to get around Apple and Jobs' absurd app store restrictions and Apple getting a cut of every sale it would be a non-issue.

If Flash somehow was useful for Apple and Jobs to enforce their crazy ass control they would be babbling about how 'Flash runs best on Apple products' and how 'it just feels better' on Apple hardware.

And if Jobs walked up on stage and announced that his farts smell the best the same idiots running their mouths off about Flash would be instead furiously claiming Steve Jobs' farts smell better than anything else in the world.

Faster and faster

[hedleyroos]

I've been following these browser press releases for years now and every time the Javascript is X% faster. Does that mean that it was horrendously crap to start with or do they conveniently benchmark it on whatever the latest and greatest available hardware is?

Re:Faster and faster

[Anonymous Coward]

It means it was interpreted before, and so as slow as an interpreted system would be. Then they made optimized interpreters, and then JIT compilers, and then better JIT compilers.

Re:Faster and faster

[extrasolar]

Mathematically, if every release the javascript is 10% faster, that is 10% faster than the last fastest release, so maybe we're talking about smaller and smaller values of fasterness.

IOW, if it takes 10 seconds to complete a javascript script, then it takes 9 seconds because 1 second is 10% of 10 seconds; then it takes 8.1 seconds because .9 seconds is 10% of 9 seconds; then 7.29 seconds; then 6.561; and so on.

Re:Faster and faster

[RAMMS EIN]

``I've been following these browser press releases for years now and every time the Javascript is X% faster. Does that mean that it was horrendously crap to start with''

Yes. As long as people were using JavaScript to add little bits of interactivity and dynamism to web pages, speed was not an issue and browser makers didn't make their JavaScript implementations fast. Now that people are writing entire applications in JavaScript, speed is an issue and browser makers use JavaScript speed as a major selling point.

Re:Faster and faster

[thetoadwarrior]

Seeing how it's faster on my computer compared to all other browsers on my computer then I would assume they are genuinely making it faster. I doubt JS was much of a priority for anyone until recently and Google has the most interest in making it super fast since they're all about web apps.

Well

[kenp2002]

DO NOT WANT. I don't need any more proprietary crap rolled into a browser. Lean, mean, and a solid plug in architecture. Great now how the fuck am I supposed to block all those fucking retarded flash ads with the damn flash engine embedded... grr.... on the other hand:

I for one welcome out cowboyNeal worshipping Dancing Baby overlords but question their ability to run Earth better then a borg augmented Bill Gates. WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong besides Steve Ballmer throwing a chair and breaking the series of tubes we call the Internet. The only thing worse then a suddenOutbreakOfCommonSense coupled with the release of Duke Nukem Forver is the return of Charlie the Unicorn during a Chocolate Rain. In Soviet Russia Snakes on a plane get You but under the new rulership we are as screwed as the Star Wars Kid getting the hookup with a Wii Fit Girl. If you don't think things can get worse, I am fine with that, OK Go, but all your bases are belong to us then. See if I care. But when Dear Leader forces you to do the Hampster Dance in front of the Saugeen Stripper after the JK Wedding Entrance Dance you will beg to be thrown in with those Snakes on a Plane flying to the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny! I know that CorrelationNoCausation may apply here but I am certain that the new overlords computer will be superior to our current technology, but does it run Linux and can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of their computers! My Epeen is huge thinking about it to the point of a joygasm! Perhaps with their technology we could getyourasstomars in the time it takes to watch the Last Lecture! Imagine the number of Libraries of Congress we could store using their technology! Mod me Troll? How dare you you insensitive clod! Now to distract you while I steal the Netcraft report confirming Gentoo
Linux is dying. LOOK OVER THERE! OMG!!! PONIES!!

(Did I miss anything there?)

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Did I miss anything there?

Thrust vectoring rules the skies?

Re:Well

[Dracker]

1) Post tons of memes
2) Forget to list the "Profit?" meme
3) ???
4) Profit?

Re:Well

[clone53421]

Just nuke it from orbit.

Re:Well

[natehoy]

(Did I miss anything there?)

4. Profit?

Re:Well

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

Meme overload Captain!! She'll fly apart!

Re:Well

[Abstrackt]

Wow. Just wow. My nipples exploded with joy.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

You're missing a Natalie Portman/hot grits reference...

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

facepalm.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm allergic to memes, you insensitive clod!

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah
gtfo my lawn!

-1

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

Cultural contributions such as these will be featured in MoMA some day.

Re:Well

[cfeedback]

Engineering. No casualties, Captain, but trouble aplenty with the memes. Every dilithium crystal connection smashed in the warp engine circuitry. We're trying to bypass them now.

Re:Well

[Anonymous Coward]

PONIES EATING HOT GRITS!! No wait, don't look over there; it's a trap! Can you grok it?

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Bearhouse]

Sense of humour failure, mods?
More seriously, I'm sure that this is one of many ways that Google will use to drive adoption of Android & Chrome/web-interface.
You wanna Flash? We havva Flash! And all the funny Flash videos you can eat!!
Until they're big enough to 'fuck off' Adobe, that is, just like MSFT & Apple are trying to do.
Of course, the hope is that the 'not evil' boys will achieve this with open, standards-based stuff instead of, for example, Silverlight.

Doesn't feel any faster

[Anonymous Coward]

Then again those ad sites are always as slow as dead snails which entirely negates any speed advantage for Chrome, or at least until they can get proper blocking v. merely hiding elements.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Mage99]

Might be a work around if you can use the browser in iPhone and iPad
if the integration with flash is tight enough and the iPhone/iPad OS doesn't recognize the process
as flash due to the integration. So in other words the browser would have to mask the flash execution as some "other" software process not flash,
essentially hiding it from the OS?

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Bearhouse]

Interesting point. Of course, just as soon as someone got that working, the app would be banned from the iStore.

Does the UI still suck?

[Anonymous Coward]

-Fixed buttons in the toolbar being one of the most retarded aspects of chrome.
-Only part of the default browser theme uses aero, making it look very inconsistent depending on what your aero theme looks like.
-Bad tab behavior defaults, like if I open a new tab in firefox, by default the tab is focused. Not so in chrome; not without holding shift.
-Wide, overlapping tabs aren't very appealing, nor is the uncustomizable positioning of all tabs being above the address bar.

I don't care if it's faster. It's not fast enough to make a noticeable difference in my day to day browsing.

Re:Does the UI still suck?

[SanityInAnarchy]

-Fixed buttons in the toolbar being one of the most retarded aspects of chrome.

Who uses toolbar buttons? Seriously? That's what keyboard shortcuts are for.

-Only part of the default browser theme uses aero, making it look very inconsistent depending on what your aero theme looks like.

You can turn on native window decorations, if you really want.

-Bad tab behavior defaults, like if I open a new tab in firefox, by default the tab is focused. Not so in chrome; not without holding shift.

What?

In Firefox, if I middle-click on a link, by default, it opens in a new background tab. If I press the "new tab" button or hit ctrl+T, I get a new tab, with focus on the new tab.

This is exactly the same as the default Chrome behavior.

-Wide, overlapping tabs aren't very appealing,

They resize when you get enough of them. I find the way this is handled to be much more appealing than Firefox's habit of having a minimum tab length, and eventually starting a new row of tabs.

uncustomizable positioning of all tabs being above the address bar.

Meh. I think if this is the one thing holding you back, you're a bit too picky.

Re:Does the UI still suck?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm generally using a mouse for browsing the web, I rarely use my keyboard unless I'm posting something like this, searching for something, entering login credentials, or entering an address. For all other cases, including accessing most of the sites I frequent, I need only my mouse and would rather not have to use the keyboard (as I don't in firefox).

Following your train of thought why not just get rid of all of the toolbar buttons? The fact that you don't use them isn't an excuse for them to be unmoveable. Their positioning is visually off balance and frankly messy, especially with additional buttons added by extensions.

As for tabs, if I middle click my home button (since my iGoogle homepage has RSS feeds to various other sites) in firefox that tab is automatically given focus. Try this in chrome - it won't work.

I've done what I could to emulate the convenient experience I've had in FF within Chrome. Tab positioning was the last of my complaints. Regardless, if other programs allow this to be customized, why can't Chrome?

Re:Does the UI still suck?

[SanityInAnarchy]

As for tabs, if I middle click my home button (since my iGoogle homepage has RSS feeds to various other sites) in firefox that tab is automatically given focus.

Unless you're using some other definition of "middle click", that's not what Firefox does for me.

if other programs allow this to be customized, why can't Chrome?

I actually agree with you on this point. It's not high on my list of things I want customized, and I much prefer a browser that's easy (for me) to extend, but Firefox does seem to let me customize more.

NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[Alphathon]

I think you'll find that while a large proportion of the vocal Flash haters are parrots for Jobs (Apple zealots seem pretty vocal on all issues even remotely Apple related), there are also a lot of others who dislike flash because it's proprietary or because they dislike plug-ins (those people will probably like this news up to a point) or because it's a CPU hog or whatever.

Re:NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[delinear]

I'm one of the people who dislikes Flash for it's own (de)merits. However, all the people baying for its death need to think through the consequences, even as a Flash hater I realise there are some things that currently can only be done with Flash, and while there are a lot of people stuck on older browsers, this will continue to be the case. We should be using this time to think through and cement a strong replacement, not making knee-jerk decisions which might turn out to be as bad as the technology they're replacing.

Re:NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[Alphathon]

Oh, don't worry I totally agree. The AC said that it is "Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs". I was just saying that such a claim is patently false.

Re:NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[LWATCDR]

Hey I am a Flash hater and the only Apple device I own is an iPod touch.
Allow me to point out why Flash sucks and is a really bad idea :)
1. Flash on mobile sucks. Adobe likes to flame Apple for not allowing Flash on the iPhone but Adobe has not delivered Flash for Android, WebOS, or RIM. Flash Lite is terrible and out of date and is the only current "Mobile Flash" solution for most people. Yes I know Adobe has Mobile Flash in Beta but that isn't delivered now is it?
2. The Flash player is closed. Everyone is dependent on Adobe to port Flash to their platform. Gnash is not a replacement and pretty much proves my point. If Adobe decided that your platform isn't worth the effort you are out of luck.
3. Flash has a less than stellar security record as do Adobe plugins as a whole.
4. It really will have issues with a touch interface.
5. It does have performance issues. It really does use a lot of CPU cycles.
Those are the technical reasons.
Now the other reasons.
How Flash is used!
Flash Ads! Crap!
Flash menus! What??? Did your heart break when Java buttons when out of fashion?
Flash Intros! Good grief where is the skip?
Idiot Flash "developers"! Okay this is personal and no not all flash developers are idiots but if your an idiot odds are you will use Flash to fix a problem that isn't broken.
I needed to be replaced as the web person at my company. It was taking too much of my time from other tasks. The owners son though that one of his teachers from College was good we hired him.
He COULDN"T DO ANYTHING.
Yes I am picky. I required that our website load fast, be secure, and work on IE, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.
He produced this terrible site with FLASH MENUS! I know that at least one of our customers is blind and uses a braile device to read our site. His flash prevented that!
Then HE FREAKING USED FLASH FOR PAGES OF TEXT!
YES FREAKING TEXT!
He couldn't get it to look good using CSS!
Then when we told him that he couldn't use FLASH FOR TEXT he made a big GIF of the page and posted a huge IMAGE!
and IMAGE OF TEXT!
Then he had the nerve to tell me that in his opinion that FLASH was as much of a standard way to publish text as HTML and CSS!
FREAKING HELL!
So yes the day that Flash is only used for silly web games I do not play will be a happy day for me!

Re:NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[kimvette]

No Flash for android?!

http://www.pcworld.com/article/194465/adobe_announces_flash_for_android_beta_testing.html

http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/android-flash/

Or hell, just a few days ago here on slashdot, with the typical slashdot-delayed reports ;) :

http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/05/01/1426209/Flash-Support-Confirmed-For-Android-22?from=rss

Re:NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[LWATCDR]

Nope and your links all agree with me.
http://www.pcworld.com/article/194465/adobe_announces_flash_for_android_beta_testing.html
"Adobe Announces Flash for Android Beta Testing" aka it isn't released yet and it is not an open beta.

http://mashable.com/2010/04/27/android-flash/ [mashable.com]

"Google Confirms Android 2.2 Will Support Flash"
Will and 2.2 has not shipped yet.
AKA it doesn't exist yet.

"http://mobile.slashdot.org/story/10/05/01/1426209/Flash-Support-Confirmed-For-Android-22?from=rss [slashdot.org]"
  "Flash Support Confirmed For Android 2.2"
Let me explain. Will have, announces beta, and confirmed for an unreleased OS all mean that it doesn't exists yet.
At least not in the hands of the customer base.
And I really guess you didn't bother to read my post so let me show you.
"1. Flash on mobile sucks. Adobe likes to flame Apple for not allowing Flash on the iPhone but Adobe has not delivered Flash for Android, WebOS, or RIM. Flash Lite is terrible and out of date and is the only current "Mobile Flash" solution for most people. Yes I know Adobe has Mobile Flash in Beta but that isn't delivered now is it?"
Read the last bit. It covers your entire post in a nut shell. A closed beta == not delivered it is vaporware until it ships.
Is that really so hard to understand?

Re:NOT Just Apple Fanboys Parroting Jobs

[Alphathon]

You really are a Flash hater :). That guy you talk about certainly sounds like a moron, no doubt about it. I don't think that is a case that proves Flash is bad though, only that any tool in the wrong hands is evil. Take HTML tables for example - not evil in themselves but when an idiot designs a sites layout purely from tables they create something horrible. The same goes for things like animated .gifs *thinks back to the 90s when they were all the rage with (mostly) amateurs...bad times*. When you take everything you said together though; then you have a case for hating Flash.

uh, noscript?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the more open nature of Javascript would allow greater control over what you filter.

Also, if I have to put up with annoying dancing crap, I'd at least like it based on an open standard.

Chromium doesn't simulate Xt for plugins

[Sits]

Apparently acroread depends on the browser implementing Xt (a really old toolkit) support for its plugins which Chrome/Chromium doesn't do. Further, acroread is 32 bit only on Linux which also acts as a disincentive for devs to work on the issue. You can read the details in the Chromium bug report about why the acroread plugin does not work on Linux.

Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[tepples]

True, ad blockers on Chrome hide ads, but they don't prevent the ad from loading in the first place. This is important to people on satellite, 3G, or the Southern Hemisphere, all of which have transfer caps on the order of 5 GB per month per subscriber.

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[krelian]

This is important to people on satellite, 3G, or the Southern Hemisphere, all of which have transfer caps on the order of 5 GB per month per subscriber.

That tells me a lot about the way you process and distribute information. I can personally vouch that there is definitely no transfer cap for the absolute majority of people in the country where I live, which is in the southern hemisphere. I am pretty certain the 5 GB number was also pulled from the same area of your ass where the rest of your "information" exists.

I will not comment on satellite connections or 3G(although unlimited bandwidth plans are fairly common) since unlike you I try to make sure that I have reliable information at hand before spreading it around as if it was fact.

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[vbraga]

From Wikipedia page on bandwidth cap:

Many broadband Internet Service Providers in North America and Europe introduced bandwidth caps in the early 21st century. The same practice has been in place in Australia, New Zealand, Malaysia and South Africa since the release of broadband.

Isn't this a sizable sample of the Southern Hemisphere population?

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[Dumnezeu]

Try Privoxy if you're that poor on bandwidth.

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't this a sizable sample of the Southern Hemisphere population?

Not really, unless you mean the Anglo population. South America and Africa have a lot more population not represented there. Australia has lots of land but hardly any people.

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[Anonymous Coward]

Disable the loading of images, execution of scripts and plugins by default for all sites. That might help a little with any browser supporting these restrictions.

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[krelian]

According to the way you are interpreting the quote most people in the U.S are under bandwidth caps. Is this correct or not?

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[tepples]

Not really, unless you mean the Anglo population.

My bad. Slashdot is an anglophone web site, so I was thinking of three anglophone countries (NZ, ZA, AU). But then again, most popular web sites are hosted in the temperate north, and the connection to the temperate south has to cross thousands of miles of ocean or poorly-developed countries.

Re:Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap

[Compaqt]

Best solution to that is to just run with JavaScript off. The JavaScript blocker is integrated in the latest Chrome and Chromium for Linux. (You may or may not have to use the Development channel for Windows).

Anyway, after you turn JavaScript (and plugins) off, you can turn it on for individual sites (like YouTube) just by clicking in the URL bar.

If JavaScript and Flash are off, the vast majority of ads are simply not loaded.

Preference overload

[tepples]

Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options.

This is the path to preference overload.

Awesome

[MBGMorden]

Given that Chrome is the only browser I've found on Linux that actually feels fast (well, Midori is speedy too but it crashed constantly), I'm happy to see innovation on that front.

I've never figured out why Chrome is as fast as it is on Linux while Firefox feels like driving an 18-wheeler dragging a stadium behind it (while on Windows and Mac it feels just fine), but alas, I found something that works and that's all that matters.

Re:Awesome

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I've never figured out why Chrome is as fast as it is on Linux while Firefox feels like driving an 18-wheeler dragging a stadium behind it (while on Windows and Mac it feels just fine)

Probably because Google spent the money on developers to optimize the Linux specific portions of the code. Mozilla has less reliable developer support, and needs to direct it to the areas that get the most use.

Re:Awesome

[BZ]

Well, for one thing Firefox made the mistake of listening to what the Linux users and distros were telling it and actually integrated with the GTK theme system, fontconfig, offloads graphics ops to the X server, etc. Chrome does none of that, rolling its own instead.

Unfortunately, the GTK theme system and fontconfig are slow, and the X server version of pixman tends to be several years behind the one shipping in cairo (which Firefox also includes, of course... but doesn't use because the Linux folks all claimed that using the X server is the Right Thing(tm)).

Just not trying to do the whole native theming business through GTK dramatically speeds up the Firefox UI.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[ninjacheeseburger]

The iphone and ipad version will come bundled with duke nukem.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Anonymous Coward]

As soon as you get Android on your iPhone/iPad, here is how to run Android on iPhone 2G http://bit.ly/bL1yly

SSL renegotiation is a security hole unless...

[tepples]

SSL renegotiation is a security hole unless both sides of the connection support secure renegotiation as described in a three-month-old RFC.

Opera is actually faster

[twilightblue]

It's not the fasest javascript engine, that title is held by Opera. TFA lists Opera for browser market share (not much) but excludes it for performace testing.

Re:Opera is actually faster

[oddfox]

It will be interesting to see if Opera is able to maintain that crown. Chrome and Opera both are getting faster and faster with JavaScript and other things but I really wish that the Linux version wasn't lagging behind the Windows/Mac version.

It has genuinely become faster

[Sits]

Javascript used to always be interpreted whereas these days it tends there are various methods to JIT it into native binary instructions with various improvements being added as time progresses. So yes, early implementations were weak compared to what we have today. Just compare how IE8 performs on javascript compared to modern browsers (note IE9 improves things dramatically).

As you pointed out, a software comparison benchmark that changes hardware between comparisions is next to useless so thankfully that's not what's happening :)

PDFs in linux?

[siwelwerd]

Is this version still unable to open a PDF in Linux?

Re:PDFs in linux?

[thetoadwarrior]

I think that's a value added feature not a bug.

Re:PDFs in linux?

[Leto-II]

Use mozplugger (version 1.13.1 or newer). It works with xpdf, acrobat, or any other pdf viewer.

Re:PDFs in linux?

[selven]

https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn

Re:PDFs in linux?

[siwelwerd]

Thank you so much. I had tried the mozplugger workaround to no avail. There's an open bug on the issue that Google does not seem inclined to do anything about: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=19587

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[theaceoffire]

As soon as you install Android to it: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/22/1222221/Android-Ported-To-iPhone

Chrome Flash: Crashy McCrashington

[Trifthen]

I actually thought this was a good idea, at least for heavy users of Facebook, as we all know is awash in Flash games of all description.

Unfortunately it's easily the crashiest Chrome beta I've tested. In fact, it's very easy to replicate!

1. Open Google Chrome.
2. Find a Flash-driven game/page.
3. Right-click to try and pull up the settings menu.
4. Get a "kill this unresponding page" dialog.

I'll call this a reversion, because a similar bug was supposedly fixed back in December.

I've really wanted to like Chrome. It really is much faster on my netbook, but right now it's just a curiosity.

Chromium

[MonsterTrimble]

Can / Will this be released into Chromium since Flash is proprietary?

Actually...

[Sits]

It's more like saying saying if ship 1 sinks it won't also sink ship 2 when they are only communicating via radio and sailing parallel to each other with large amounts of water between them (or something). Hmm this analogy seems overstretched...

The plugin isn't running inside the browser any more - it is run in a separate process (like say Excel and Word). Killing Chrome should kill the plugin but the plugin really can be killed via process explorer (or chrome's mini processor explorer) and Chrome continues to run. You can try this for yourself...

That's not to say that there couldn't be flaws in your OS' process isolation or that communication method doesn't have a in it but it's dramatically better in much the same way having an OS with memory protection often prevents one non privileged app killing other apps when it crashes (contrast "normal" app crashes in 3.11 to XP).

Out of process plugins really are a Good Thing in this case.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[rsborg]

So in other words the browser would have to mask the flash execution as some "other" software process not flash, essentially hiding it from the OS?

Execution of arbitrary code (ie, including an interpreter) is forbidden according to the rules of the App Store... so even if Google did manage to "disguise" it, the flash interpreter would be immediate grounds for revocation.

To be clear

[Anonymous Coward]

90% of flash use on the web is actually misuse. This is why a blocking flash by default is good practice: most of the time, you're not missing a damn thing. For the rare occasion when somebody actually has a good reason to use flash -- or (more commonly) when the web designer is inexperienced enough to "require" flash just to view the site -- simply turn it on and reload the page. And then turn it back off.

For this purpose, I find the QuickJava extension more useful than flashblock. Instead of working on a per-applet basis, it works per-webpage. It's the same thing as simply disabling the flash plugin in the firefox preferences, and it works the same even if javascript is disabled.

No master password so still not usable

[blahbooboo]

Shocks me that a master password is STILL missing from Chrome. Until it adds this feature, it's just not usable for me in a shared environment. Shame because the browser is wicked fast to use compared to everything else out there...

Re:No master password so still not usable

[SanityInAnarchy]

If it really bothers you, it should be trivial to add as an extension.

Re:No master password so still not usable

[blahbooboo]

even less work to just use Firefox...

Re:No master password so still not usable

[SanityInAnarchy]

I suppose, but more work to use a master password.

The way I solved this back when I cared was by using full-disk encryption.

Re:No master password so still not usable

[blahbooboo]

Not an option since using corporate owned computer.

Re:No master password so still not usable

[SanityInAnarchy]

Odd. The smarter corporations require it.

Also odd that they won't allow FDE, but they'll allow you to install whatever web browser you want, apparently...

Oh well. I'll definitely add an extension for that at some point. By "trivial" I mean maybe half an hour.

Tab overflow

[Anonymous Coward]

Does it have tab overflow yet?

Oh.

Well, I guess it's cool that it's very fast. The tabs that I can't read or actually get back to will surely be loading at blazing speed.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Anonymous Coward]

The iphone and ipad version will come bundled with duke nukem

, like, forever!

With Google's history for over-collecting data....

[xandercash]

...I'm not sure I'm very comfortable with using Chrome as a browser. I didn't detect any network traffic from Chrome other than what I requested of it, but that could quietly change in the future.

Whatever happened to Viewpoint Media Player?

[kriston]

Whatever happened to Viewpoint Media Player? AOL used it to skin the AOL client for years.

Speed tests

[Anonymous Coward]

They've done some pretty cool tests : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nCgQDjiotG0&feature=channel

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Anonymous Coward]

The problem isn't hiding it from the OS, the problem is hiding it from Apple so that it actually gets accepted into the app store (which it won't).

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[eldepeche]

Is it flash that is banned, or just software created through flash authoring tools?

A web browser that included a flash runtime would be ok, as long as it was authored using the correct tools (and didn't compete with Safari, blah blah blah. I don't have an iPhone or an iPad, and I'm not getting one because of their bullshit rules.)

You go girl!

[Anonymous Coward]

Google is free just so long as your privacy is worth nothing!
Just like Linux is free just so long as your time is worth nothing!

It's much better to use not-free Apple and Microsoft products because neither of them even bother trying to be free in any way.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Zaiff Urgulbunger]

I don't understand exactly how all this hangs together, but since Adobe open-sourced the Tamarin VM, would it be possible for Flash to instead use Chromes V8 engine? And if so, then Flash would benefit from performance improvements courtesy of Google.

And... (and this is the biggie)... since Apple have already allowed Opera with it's own JavaScript engine**, and Apple already include their own JS engine, what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?

It's clear [to me anyway] that Google are including Flash not to piss Apple off, but to (1). ensure stability of Chrome Browser and by extension, Android and ChromeOS, and (2). to make it easier for OEMs to include Android/ChromeOS as well as Flash and have everything manage updates automatically.

Since Google is doing all the leg-work to make Flash fast and stable, this would seem to address all of Steve Jobs'es issues with Flash.

I predict fun interesting times ahead! :D

**except... as I'm writing this, I've just remembered that Opera on iPhone is Opera Mini, and I'm not 100% sure that does include any JS engine?

Re:OMG!

[kurt_harlan]

Whoosh!

What about Greasemonkey

[dragisha]

Chrome can be verrry fast, but why is it so hard to support as simple extension as Greasemonkey?

Last time I checked it, they lacked GM persistent data calls from API. Shame.

Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[hkmwbz]

Google quietly released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which not only blows its rivals out of the water as far as performance is concerned

Yeah, if you leave out Opera. However, if you do include Opera in the test it beats even Chrome 5.

First benchmarks show that the new beta is about 10% faster than the previous beta in the SunSpider and V8 benchmark, and about 30% faster than Chrome 4, which remains the fastest Javascript browser available today.

No, again, that is Opera.

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[Anonymous Coward]

Well..let's face it, Opera is the Linux of web browsers; far superior and yet continually maligned by naysayers who simply don`t know any better.

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[XO]

totally agree. Although I'm having problems with current Opera in gmail and it still doesn't work in Wave. :(

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[fermion]

Furthermore, any browser that includes flash but does not include a built in flash blocker is useless for any everyday tasks. While I know that Google is unlikely to promote such blocking, as Google seems to have settled on flash a method or tracking users, probably because Flash cookies are outside the purview of the 'block cookie' options, they could at least be honest enough to include the option. If they did, I could take the browser seriously as user centric tool, as opposed to a method of tricking users to share private data.

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[Anonymous Coward]

Chrome has built-in Flash (and all plugins) white-listing, as well as for JavaScript, popups, images, and cookies. It even conveniently includes an integrated link to the Flash settings webpage (that enables you to delete Flash cookies).

Or you could just download an extension like FlashBlock that manages Flash/Silverlight/Java. ...but I understand, it's easier to complain about something that you yourself have never used.

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[UpnAtom]

Are trade description laws valid for products which you pay for by selling your profile data to marketeers? I saw this Chrome faster BS spammed everywhere. Took me a good 10 mins to find out it wasn't true.

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[Anonymous Coward]

I just ran the sunspider benchmark in chrome (5.0.375.29-r46008) and opera (10.53.6330)
the time taken are as follows

chrome - 450.4ms
opera - 561.0ms

and for what it's worth V8's results are as follows

chrome - 3784
opera - 2471

in other words, opera is not the fastest; I don't deny that opera is fast, chrome is simply faster as far as javascript is concerned

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to agree; they're one of the few browsers to innovate since inception - they have done more for web standards than any other browser. Chrome is best used on Windows, but Opera works best on every OS. Sadly the latest Opera seems to have a memory leak, although it takes about 2 days with many tabs open before Opera becomes unusable (and that's only on my Linux setup, so this is purely anecdotal) - strangely enough Seamonkey works perfectly, although it was integrated by default so I suspect some tweaking, while Firefox is the slowest browser on the market now. :( Why is Internet Explorer faster than Firefox?

Re:Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[hkmwbz]

Your Sunspider results do not match other tests, so there seems to be a problem with your computer. Opera is definitely faster at JS.

The V8 benchmark is useless since it basically cheats. It skips the parts Chrome is slow at. So it just looks like Chrome is faster.

Where the hell is print preview??!!

[pdxaaron]

Why can't I do a print preview, print selected, or adjust orientation in Chrome? This is basic functionality that every other browser does just fine. I'm glad that 18 months after print preview being requested in chrome, that it's been catagorized behind things like domain specific zoom level memory. Way to prioritize things Google....

http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=29ea05faa34bade4&hl=en

Re:Where the hell is print preview??!!

[Ant P.]

Print to file, open in PDF viewer. There's your print preview.

Re:Where the hell is print preview??!!

[xtracto]

Ah, so there is not print preview. Good to know :)

Re:Where the hell is print preview??!!

[xianthax]

its 2010, what da hell is a printer?

Flash is not available everywhere

[Anonymous Coward]

This guy is lying.
Flash is NOT available on any computer running any operating system.

Open Source Flash?

[ink]

Is the integrated Flash part of Chromium, and is it therefore open-source ala Gnash? If so, this is huge news...

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[SanityInAnarchy]

would it be possible for Flash to instead use Chromes V8 engine [google.com]?

Most likely not. It would be possible for Chrome to instead use Tamarin, if it really wanted, but v8 itself is very Javascript-specific at the moment. ActionScript is a superset of that, so it might be possible, but it'd take a lot of work.

what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?

Whatever excuse they want.

This is what people don't understand about iPhone/iPad/iPod -- it's not up to you. It's entirely up to Apple whether or not they're consistent or fair, and so far, they've been neither.

And yet, people keep simultaneously buying these things and whining that they can't do stuff. It's like buying fertilizer and complaining that it's shit.

Since Google is doing all the leg-work to make Flash fast and stable,

What? No, Google is doing the leg-work to make Flash contained. It's still going to be dog-slow, unstable, and evil, but at least it'll be more secure and won't lock up or crash your browser, just itself.

If you want a fast, stable Flash, petition Adobe to open it up. That, or accept that the fastest, stablest Flash ever is not Flash, but HTML5.

Blame Acrobat.

[SanityInAnarchy]

PDF itself is an open format, perfectly capable of being displayed efficiently and safely. What's the problem with putting it in a browser Window?

Remember, GP was talking about Linux. While we could use acroread, there's also things like Okular, which opens nearly instantaneously to display PDFs. On OS X, there's Preview -- same situation. Both display PDFs at least as accurately as Acrobat.

Re:Blame Acrobat.

[xtracto]

But the question is WHY would you like to open a PDF inside a browser window...

I have never understood that and personally I also always disable that "feature" from my web browsers.

Really, can someone tell me what am I missing by opening a PDF file in a specific pdf reader (like pdfxchange viewer or foxit, or even acrobat reader) instead of inside a web browser window?

Re:Blame Acrobat.

[SanityInAnarchy]

But the question is WHY would you like to open a PDF inside a browser window...

I don't know. Why would you want to view a PNG inside a browser window?

can someone tell me what am I missing by opening a PDF file in a specific pdf reader

Same thing you'd miss by disabling images and forcing everything to an external viewer. Think about sites like SlideShare. Flash is bad, right? So one obvious way to implement SlideShare without Flash would be with an iframe'd PDF. I know I've written at least one web app which depends on PDFs.

In Chrome's case, it's especially annoying, as Chrome wants to download everything to the Downloads folder before viewing, and (for obvious reasons) never cleans up after that folder. I'd probably care a lot less if it went to a temporary file, but there's still no particular reason for it to open in a separate application, rather than a new tab.

When I was using Konqueror, it made sense -- Okular was the external PDF viewer, and it was also (via a KPart) the in-browser PDF viewer. Now, that same process consists of watching the browser go to some random blank page, or even a blank page in a new tab, then save, then I click the downloaded file from the download bar, then I have to remember to go delete it when I'm done -- that's a major regression.

So what?

[SanityInAnarchy]

I don't want acroread. I want plugins. Okular would be fine.

Re:So what?

[Sits]

Fair enough - I was only answering the original query which mentioned acroread. Perhaps the okular plugin problem is a different issue - have you tried filing a bug on the Chromium issue database?

Re:So what?

[SanityInAnarchy]

Tricky -- I'm not sure whether Okular provides an actual plugin. I'll look into it later.

And that was a typo on my part -- it's not "plugins" per se, but I want PDF in the browser, from acroread or otherwise.

Tab bar at top is wise gui design

[Drenaran]

One aspect of gui design is considering the landing area of buttons - this means how much work it is to get the mouse to land over an element. Objects that are along the edge of the screen are considered to have finite width but infinite depth (think about it, you need only aim at the side of the element, and can move your mouse as deep into it as you want). Additionally, having the tab bar be at the top - where we mentally delineate a discrete window, helps in thinking of the tabs as not really bonded to a particular window (as in Firefox), but capable of being pulled away and reconnected to a grouping of windows quickly and easily. Lastly, when not full screened, the tab bar buttons take roughly the same amount of effort to use as if placed elsewhere on the window, if only a bit unintuitive to users who are used to it being done differently.

When Chrome is full screen, you need only toss the mouse pointer in the general direction of the tab, and you are there.

Webkit is also getting faster

[pwagland]

See this comparison for example. This beta is slower than the webkit, which is also effectively a beta release. Long story short, all of the javascript engines are getting faster, but we are about to hit a new roadblock with dramatically slower devices, this iPads, notebooks, and mobile phones.

Genius

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh my god, that's genius. I absolutely want to see that parody done. Professionally with lots of money would be best.

- Gandalf stares at the Adobe Flash beast, with its flaming whip.
- "YOOOU. SHALLL. NOTTT. FLAAAAAAAAASSSSHHHH".

Missing Feature

[agent_vee]

What I want to know is have they implemented forward slash '/' for search?!?!?

Great - add an extra 50MB to the source...

[Rich0]

The chromium source is already enormous - upwards of 500MB. Building it takes forever. Why? Simple - Google bundles every library already on your system in the source.

Now it looks like they're tossing flash on the pile.

Maybe we should throw in OpenOffice so that we can edit documents simply by browsing to them. Plus, then if I have openoffice open outside of chromium they can each use half a gig of RAM since the OS can't share the pages!

What is wrong with using shared libraries and plugins? If Google wants to write their own flash plugin and maybe bundle it by default, I have no issues with that. However, there is no reason this needs to be hard-coded into the browser.

Iron has Adblock

[u64]

There's no NoScript, that i'm aware of.

But there is Adblock for Iron (Iron=Chrome without Google-spyware)
http://fanboy.co.nz/adblock/iron/adblock.ini

Here's a few entries that i add,
google.com/favicon.ico
video.google.com/img/logo
images.google.com/intl/
images.google.com/images/isr_g.p
images.google.com/images/nav_logo
www.google.com/logos/
www.google.com/images/isr_g.p
www.google.com/images/nav_logo
upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/b/bc/Wiki.p /ads
banner
intellitxt
doubleclick .experts-exchange.
s.ytimg.com/yt/img/master-vfl
s.ytimg.com/yt/img/no_videos_140-vfl
rapidshare.com/img2/dl_
rapidshare.com/img2/rslogo
rapidshare.com/img2/download_file

oh, whatever

[XO]

if by "fastest javascript browser available today" you mean, "excluding Opera, and all the other WebKit browsers"....

Stop sucking Google's wang, submitter.

Chrome now with Flash SuperCookies (.SOL files)

[swhalen]

Does anyone know if the new Chrome with embedded Flash puts "Local Shared Objects" (aka Flash SuperCookies or .SOL files) on your machine?

Or has Google removed this scourge from their flash viewer?

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[bigngamer92]

Opera has the benefit of not being a large company in the app market. You might see Firefox at some point, but Internet Explorer and Chrome are going to get rejected into oblivion (see: Google Voice vs. Skype).

I think the point of integrated Flash is so that they can just keep it updated and account for its problems automatically. They don't have to worry about whether a user has it or not, they just do. Similar to including a browser and other content viewers in an OS, you know that your users will probably need it, and it makes it easier to maintain for them.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[BZ]

Opera mini does not include a JS engine.

Flash benchmark

[Anonymous Coward]

Does anybody know about some flash benchmarks to see if the tight integration helped with flash performance as well? How do the browsers stack up?

Javascript execution has gotten so good that I rarely have to wait for it, but some flash games and websites still take my computer down to its knees.

Or even better, remotely hosted privoxy!

[Anonymous Coward]

My cure for slow GPRS web browsing and slow foreign networks (when on travel) was to run privoxy on a remote host with a reasonable Internet connection, then use ssh port-forwarding to connect my browser to the remote filtering proxy over a compressed TCP connection with HTTP pipelining enabled in the browser.

Privoxy removes extraneous ad content. The ssh connection compresses all the text HTTP, whether or not a web server is serving in gzip encoding. And the re-used ssh TCP connection gets better flow-control, having lots of requests pipelined over it, rather than lots of new connection handshakes and slow-start over your slow WAN link.

Too Many Tabs

[Macka]

...having a minimum size that tabs can shrink to and a scrollable tab bar, having a drop-down list of all open tabs...

Ah, what you need is the To Many Tabs extension. Just what the doctor ordered :)

Re:Too Many Tabs

[Daetrin]

I tried that one out for awhile, but the interface seemed way too cluttered. Luckily someone else above pointed out the Tab Menu extension, which seems like exactly what i want in that regard.

Flash integrated? Eww.

[Anonymous Coward]

Flash? I sure hope they let you disable it (kinda like the flashblock FF addon does), because I hate the stuff - in fact I hate any executable that gets launched automatically through a web page. Besides the security issues, who wants to look at stupid flash advertisements all day while surfing?

Googleupdate

[dugeen]

Google's malware-esque update methods have killed my interest in Chrome. Last time I installed it it silently created no less than three scheduled tasks devoted to updating itself. Cram it Google! If I want to know about updates I'll check your website myself, I'm sure I can remember the address.

Re:Googleupdate

[Anonymous Coward]

Google's malware-esque update methods have killed my interest in Chrome. Last time I installed it it silently created no less than three scheduled tasks devoted to updating itself. Cram it Google! If I want to know about updates I'll check your website myself, I'm sure I can remember the address.

What percent of users check for and install updates regularly? A web browser downloads untrusted data from the internet every time you use it. A browser that allows normal users to be out of date is a real problem. What alternate solution do you propose?

On www.speed-battle.com even 25% faster! But...

[Anonymous Coward]

... who cares for JavaScript? Microsoft does! They announced IE9 to be the fastest Javascript Browser.
My problem here is Flash speed. And load speed. My connection is fine but somehow sites load slower than 1 or 2 years before. Is the internet again jammed like it was in 1996/97/98? Does anybody remember the term "World Wide Waiting"? Does anybody remember that Googles success is based on the fact that the site (the search form) loaded within 2 seconds because of nearly no content (ok, the result page loaded fast, too). Lycos.com took ages to display the same thing - and they are now gone...

other annoying new "feature" in latest Beta

[rduke15]

I got the latest Chrome beta, and was met with a very annoying new "feature": it constantly asks me if I want the page I'm viewing translated into it's incomprehensible English-like gibberish.

NO I don't want any ridiculous automated translation. Either I understand the language or I search for another page in a language I understand. I don't mind Google playing with automated translations, and letting people use them. I really appreciate all the cool stuff they offer unobtrusively through their search (calculator, conversions, exchange rates, definitions, ...). That's great. But their trying to push their stupid translations down my throat is really annoying.

Saddly: Won't work

[DrYak]

It won't happen for 2 reasons :

First and foremost : Adobe only opened their JS engine. And there's a great deal more in flash than just the VM. In fact the JS engine is one of the easiest piece to get mostly working (Gnash already has its own and doesn't need tamarin to get better compatibility). The art in a JS engine is the speed (which is why Google's V8 shines, and why Firefox starded working from Tamarin to create their latest JS VM engine) not the compatibility.

What's even more important than the JS engine is all the API, all the function calls, etc. And that's something which is NOT open. And quite hard to get right, down to bug-compatibility. Gnash's support of recent version of ActionScript and versions of flash is only partial at the moment. So it's not possible to create easily a new flash player running on V8 underneath.

You can't also easily swap JS engines, simply because the current flash player plugin is a single file. If it relied on a separate "TAMARIN.DLL/libtamarin.so" for it's JS engine, someone could attempt to write a Tamarin-to-V8 wrapper.

Last but not least the summary is badly worded. Chrome is *not* creating a native support of flash into the chromium engine. Instead they just started packaging the regular flash plugin together with Chrome, and will provide updates through the regular channel, so that Chrome users always have the necessary plugin to play flash and it will always be up-to-date to avoid some security problems.

But perhaps if someone threw enough resources at the Gnash project, perhaps we could see sooner an opensource (and embeddable) flash implementation. And that's indeed possible : There's regularly GSoC projects and other sponsored development. For exemple to get it working with OpenStreetMaps. So there's some hope for the future.

Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas

[Anonymous Coward]

what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?

Whatever excuse they want.

This is what people don't understand about iPhone/iPad/iPod -- it's not up to you. It's entirely up to Apple whether or not they're consistent or fair, and so far, they've been neither.

And yet, people keep simultaneously buying these things and whining that they can't do stuff. It's like buying fertilizer and complaining that it's shit.

To be fair, virtually none of apple's customers are whining about this. You see a lot of whining on Slashdot, but the number of people who care is microscopic compared to the number of people who have an ipad. The whiners are a lot louder, but this is typical of any issue you hear about on the internet.