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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.
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.
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.