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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."
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.
Hmmm...I think saying that Flash is "about to die" and that "nobody uses Flash for anything serious" is...well...wrong.
As it stands now, Flash is, by far, the most popular and ubiquitous plug-in in use on the internet. It is used in many different places and can be relied on more than trying to rely on the fact that users will have new, up-to-date browsers. Yes, Apple won't be supporting Flash, and, yes, I hope HTML5 replaces a great deal of Flash (as I can't stand plug-ins). But, in no way is Flash going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Heck, even to get everybody to switch to HTML5 is going to take at least a few years, and probably more.
Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.
"The problem with socialism is eventually you run out of other people's money" - Thatcher.
If YouTube would switch perma to HTML5 vid, the very second about 60% of the world is going to want to have it running.
It is not new: YouTube already stopped supporting IE6 and it is... not working anymore =D
Here be signatures
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 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
PDFs displayed inside the browser window is a bug more than a feature. Almost 100% of the time, this causes problems, of all kinds. Whenever I install a browser, or get a new company computer/laptop, I disable PDF display in the browser window.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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); }
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? ]=-
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.
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.
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.
True, ad blockers on Chrome hide ads, but they don't prevent the ad from loading in the first place. This is important to people on satellite, 3G, or the Southern Hemisphere, all of which have transfer caps on the order of 5 GB per month per subscriber.
Blame the NPAPI and implementations of it on other platforms.
For example all Mac plugins are windowless which is why performance goes down the toilet. On Windows, plugins are usually windowed (although they can also be windowless) which means the browser creates the plugin, puts it somewhere and can more or less forget about it since the plugin will paint itself when it needs to. On the Mac, every plugin is windowless so it must shout "paint me" at the browser and then wait for browser to call back to repaint it. Picture a couple of plugins screaming "paint me" 30 times a second and it's not hard to see why there may be a performance impact.
Linux plugins support windowed & windowless plugins, but performance probably suffers there from the lack of decent accelerated hardware support and the complexities of X, what extensions are there etc.
Let it go. If you want to help out, partner with Adobe on writing HTML5 authoring tools that make replacing Flash easy and painless for web developer. Open standard web is good web.
It would be useful for such a tool to produce HTML/JS but it would still be machine generated spew. Also HTML5 is not some magic wand to better performance. JS / DOM performance is all over the shop from one browser to the next and virtually all JS / DOM / repainting in the page is running synchronously through a single thread.
So yes a tool would be nice, but you're deluded if you think HTML5 is an adequate replacement for all but the most sedentary content. Perhaps someone needs to define proper extensions to HTML, SVG, DOM etc. that allows content to be tweened with timing critical hinting, audio etc. that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.
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
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.
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.
Is this because of specific gripes you have with existing PDF plugins, or on a more general level?
Although I despise Adobe Reader, I find Safari's PDF implementation to be quite good on Macs (although this could be because OSX's treatment of PDF in general is top-notch, lightning-fast, and very deeply integrated into the windowing system)
You can also get similar functionality for Firefox on mac.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose