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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."
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.
Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
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
Here be signatures
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.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
Javascript is used for normal browsing. Websites that regular uses visit (Facebook, Google, etc) are full of it.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
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.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.