Slashdot Mirror
Google Updates Maps, Makes First Stable Chrome Release Using WebKit Fork
Two bits of Google news from today/yesterday. This morning, Google started rolling out a major update to mobile Maps. They've created a new tablet interface, improved integration with local places, integrated the Zagat guide, and enhanced navigation to automatically route you around traffic incidents. As usual lately, Google also removed a few features: Latitude and Check-ins. If you used those you'll have to use the Google+ application now. They also made a strange change to offline maps: instead of a menu option, you now access the area you want to make available offline and search for "OK Maps." On the Chrome front, Google released Chrome 28 yesterday, the first release featuring the WebKit fork Blink. The under-the-hood changes look promising, quoting the H: "The developers say that the increased speed is also thanks to the new threaded HTML parser, which frees up the JavaScript thread, allowing DOM content to be displayed faster. The HTML parser also takes fewer breaks, which is said to result in time savings of up to 40 per cent."
Hello Google Maps, good bye Apple Maps. Oh wait, why can't I uninstall Apple Maps or change it from being the default?
> The HTML parser also takes fewer breaks
I'm sure there's a better technical explanation for this, but I laughed at the thought of the HTML parser on a coffee break.
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
>> Google released Chrome 28 yesterday
Dup dup dup, dup-dup dup dup: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/2238233/google-chrome-28-is-out-rich-notifications-for-apps-extensions
Well, either you are silly or your dictionary is, because mine says pretty clearly, "percent also per cent".
You wouldn't have lied just now, and not actually looked it up in the dictionary, would you?
Apple doesn't seem to really care very much about Safari on Windows; Safari 4 failed some of the early speed comparisons, for example, because it crashed when too many tabs were opened simultaneously at the start of a browser session. You'd be better off if you were using a new version of IE. (Or, y'know, anything else.)
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
It's all KHTML! Never give up dreaming.
Bio questions? Ask me to start a Q&A journal. Computer analogies available for most topics!
Apple doesn't seem to really care very much about Safari on Windows
The fact that they discontinued it should be a clue.
and I hardly think that pages are getting that much more complex every year
Wirth's law, amendment of 2013: web page code get slower faster than browsers get faster.
Ezekiel 23:20
Your mention of caching reminded me of this:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=113754.0
"In a majority of web browsers, the size of the browser history and document cache is capped in one way or another: for example, if you have not visited facebook.com for a couple of weeks, any record of this will eventually disappear down the memory hole.
This is not the case for Chrome: the browser keeps all the cached information indefinitely; perhaps this is driven by some hypothetical assumptions about browsing performance, and perhaps it simply is driven by the desire to collect more information to provide you with more relevant ads. Whatever the reason, the outcome is simple: over time, cache lookups get progressively more expensive; some of this is unavoidable, and some may be made worse by a faulty hash map implementation in infinite_cache.cc."
That sounds Chrome specific to me.
Certainly I haven't noticed any cache oddities in Firefox, which I tend to leave running for weeks at a time.
-- perl -e'print pack"H*","6e656d6f406d38792e6f7267"'
Google fanboys populate this place. Or as they're known elsewhere, NSA agents.
Pages do in fact get much more complex over time. For example, cnn.com nowadays loads well north of a megabyte of JavaScript on every load...
If it routes around traffic incidents, then it'll be useless in Washington DC.
I don't want my phone to die with an error to the effect of "Unable to find path from Washington to Baltimore avoiding traffic incident WASHINGTON_BELTWAY_CLUSTERFUCK".
Now if it would automatically warn of known speed traps...
I don't understand why I'm not seeing the same slew of posts deriding Chrome's version numbering scheme that I see whenever there is a Firefox article.
Because Chrome started with the inflated numbering scheme and stuck with it. Firefox had a sane and useful numbering scheme and abandoned it.
It seems like that would be something that would have been complained about when it first happened and not every time that a story comes up. Otherwise, people would still be complaining about Google's decision to use such a scheme in the first place. In addition, the criticism to which I'm referring always takes the place of a joke about high high the numbering is going to get in the near future. That applies to Chrome as well as to Firefox.
They also removed the "My Maps" feature where you can pull up maps you've saved under your account within the desktop interface. Sad day for me, I use this for trip-planning all the time.
Chrome has always maintained a stable extension API, and have largely stuck with it (I'm not aware of any deviations, but I don't discount the possibility that they've existed.) Also, because they never exposed a version number in a prominent way, we haven't had web developers targeting versions of Chrome.
Firefox maintained a stable extension API, but then they also hosted third-party extensions which used unstable interfaces. By hosting them, they gave legitimacy to the unstable interfaces. With every Firefox version update, a handful of my extensions would break. When they first started the accelerated versioning, it was horrible. Now things have stabilized a bit, so there's that. Additionally, I spread my annoyance to both Mozilla and to Web devs when there's a "target" version of Firefox and later versions won't work with a website. For the web devs, "Dammit, write to the standard!" For Moz, why are they changing their rendering engine so much that it breaks compatibility with existing webpages?
But mostly, I think people just gripe at change. They didn't (seem) to complain that Chrome doesn't prominently display the version number, but they balk when Firefox decides to start doing that. Some of that may have been because of the issues related to versioning in the past--I don't know.