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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
When will it be available for my iPhone & iPad?
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.
if no protocol is defines (say "http://") then their browser uses the default search engine. Of course this is Google by default, but it is realy easily changeable. Chrome (not Chromium!) asks you what search engine you want to use on the firts run.
After a while this one bar gets adiciting!
Here be signatures
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.
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
Here be signatures
The most casual of testing of Opera 10.53 on my own C2D e8400 just yielded a Sunspider result of...
"Total: 312.0ms +/- 13.9%"
If speed is such an important marketing factor then why aren't we hearing more about opera?
I don't really like Opera and don't use it because of my UI preferences, but about six months ago when I last compared html (not javascript) rendering speeds, Opera was the only browser that could smoothly scroll through the large text and image laden pages I used as benchmarks. Safari was the slowest, skipping entire screens of content as it experienced rendering hiccups, and Chrome (I tested Chrome 3) was pretty bad too. I tried Chrome 4 later and saw a lot of improvement, but it still didn't have the performance of Opera. This was all on an i7 system.
I'm hoping a newer version of Chrome will make up the difference, but then I still need it to run a real adblock, not the current "load the image and then hide it" version.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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)
I think GP is confused by the browser sending what you type in the omnibar to Google for search and url suggestions. If you're not comfortable with this (I find it quite useful) you can turn it off in Options. And of course it is always off in incognito mode.
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
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? ]=-
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
You're misinformed. That's just a (off by default) recently introduced function; Opera always was damn snappy overall.
One that hath name thou can not otter
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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
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!
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!
No, that is completely wrong. Opera was the fastest browser by far until some time after 9.5 was released. After that, Apple introduced their new JS engine. For a year or so Opera was no longer the fastest. Now Opera is the fastest at JS again.
So Opera has traditionally been the fastest, and now is the fastest again.
Clever signature text goes here.
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.
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.
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.
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.
300.0ms +/- 2.9% here on Opera 10.53 (3374) (with only 37 other tabs open :)
against chrome 4.1.249.1064 (45376)'s 423.0ms +/- 2.8% (with only two other tabs open)
Curious that Opera isn't compared within the speed tests but is within the market-share graph. Wonder why that would be...
Requiem for the American Dream
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.