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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."
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Which is also why I must have a flashblocker plugin - flash is responsible for most of the extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney out there.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
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.
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.
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.
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.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
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.
:D
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!
**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?
Yeah, if you leave out Opera. However, if you do include Opera in the test it beats even Chrome 5.
No, again, that is Opera.
Clever signature text goes here.
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
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.