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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."
Of course it can. It would take you about 5 seconds to google that.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chrome+adblock
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.
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When will it be available for my iPhone & iPad?
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.
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.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
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?
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.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
It ships with Flash, but Flash will never become available for you iPod/iPhone/iPad... ever. Forget it...
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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.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
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
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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.
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?
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.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
Yah, yah, great product. But what information is Google collecting as you browse?
I'm a Programmer. That's one level above Software Engineer and one level below Engineer.
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.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
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?
[...] nobody uses Flash for anything serious but YouTube use...
You mean you consider YouTube use as something serious?
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.
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.
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?)
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Which part of the word 'and' is confusing you?
No sig today...
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.
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
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.
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.
John
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
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
So when developers start making the same "extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney" stuff using HTML5/Javascript, what then?
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.
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?
We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.
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.
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 )
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
Interesting point. Of course, just as soon as someone got that working, the app would be banned from the iStore.
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.
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.
You don't have to vote for them, they already have the power.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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.
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.
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.
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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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!
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.
The iphone and ipad version will come bundled with duke nukem.
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.
Free... as long as your privacy is worth a smoking fast browser.
There, fixed that for you!
SSL renegotiation is a security hole unless both sides of the connection support secure renegotiation as described in a three-month-old RFC.
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.
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.
A patriot must always be ready to defend his country against his government. -edward abbey
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.
Camping on quad since 1996.
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
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 :)
Is this version still unable to open a PDF in Linux?
As soon as you install Android to it: http://apple.slashdot.org/story/10/04/22/1222221/Android-Ported-To-iPhone
I steal signatures. This one used to be yours.
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!
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.
Read: Rabbit Rue - Free serial nove
Yeah no one else uses browser search data or any other data they can get their hands on and only Google want your data.
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...
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.
___________________ I want to be free()!
Can / Will this be released into Chromium since Flash is proprietary?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Interesting thing about Youtube - the whole site runs on Flash Media Server - even the non Flash clients.
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.
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.
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.
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*
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.
Make sure everyone's vote counts: Verified Voting
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.
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...
Bad analogies are why I keep coming back to slashdot. Thanks for carrying the torch!
A slashdotter who didn't build his own computer is like a Jedi who didn't build his own lightsaber.
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.
...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.
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?
I just assumed that people would know the difference between 'and' and 'or' on Slashdot.
Mea culpa.
No sig today...
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.
Om, nomnomnom...
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.
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."
John
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.
Wierd: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/youtube-to-kill-ie6-support-on-march-13.ars
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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".
http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/02/youtube-to-kill-ie6-support-on-march-13.ars
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A dancing baloney that doesn't make the cooling fan in my laptop spin up is superior to one that does.
Google seems to.
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.
Whatever happened to Viewpoint Media Player? AOL used it to skin the AOL client for years.
Kriston
I was all the time writing about that old version of Opera.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
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.
Screw the rules, I have green hair!
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?
mvps.org hosts lists is a nice start.
I usually combine it with chrome ad hiding capabilities.
English is not my first language. Corrections and suggestions are welcome.
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.
Whoosh!
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.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Seems noscript is actually built-in, now.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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...
Is the integrated Flash part of Chromium, and is it therefore open-source ala Gnash? If so, this is huge news...
The wheel is turning, but the hamster is dead.
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.
"We invented personal computing." - Bill Gates
So what exactly do you think Microsoft is going to do that Google won't?
Thanks, I actually didn't know about that. Very nice.
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!
... 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.
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
I don't want acroread. I want plugins. Okular would be fine.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
-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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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..
"If you are going through hell, keep going." - Winston Churchill
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
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.
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.
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.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
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.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
What I want to know is have they implemented forward slash '/' for search?!?!?
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.
John
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
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.
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, /ads .experts-exchange.
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
banner
intellitxt
doubleclick
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
if by "fastest javascript browser available today" you mean, "excluding Opera, and all the other WebKit browsers"....
Stop sucking Google's wang, submitter.
"Champagne for my real friends - and real pain for my sham friends!" http://ericblade.postalboard.com/
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.
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?
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.
Common Sense
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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.
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.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
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:
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.
Opera mini does not include a JS engine.
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..
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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?
Dilbert RSS feed
Ah, what you need is the To Many Tabs extension. Just what the doctor ordered :)
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.
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.
...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.
"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
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).
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
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.
You are a fool.
No, see the linked video. The quote is exactly as I wrote it.
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.
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.
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.
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.
MediaWiki developer, Total War Center sysadmin
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."
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
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.
And once again, you completely ignore the Google Buzz controversy and Google Australia's admission of cooperation with the U.S. government.
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.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
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.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
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.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
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.
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.
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.
John
How is 300 2-3 times more than 250 ?
http://rareformnewmedia.com/
Bad example.. the memory consumption gets closer as you open more tabs.