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Chrome 44 Launches With Tweaks To Push Messaging and Notifications

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

An anonymous reader writes: Google has launched Chrome 44 for Windows, Mac, and Linux with new developer tools. Aside from a host of security fixes, this release focuses mainly on developer features. The API for push notifications was updated to match the specification, a new implementation of multi-column layout was added, and they've extended support for Unicode escapes in strings. The full changelog notes a number of performance improvements as well.

67 comments

  1. Lets just hope by invictusvoyd · · Score: 0

    they are "doing no evil " there ...

    1. Re: Lets just hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Not doing no evil

    2. Re: Lets just hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I like the cut of your jib, AC.

    3. Re:Lets just hope by invictusvoyd · · Score: 0, Flamebait

      This is what pisses me off .. you want to say something say it you fucking AC piece of shit

    4. Re: Lets just hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I like the cut of your jib, AC.

      AC likes AC = GAY AS SHIT

    5. Re:Lets just hope by gstoddart · · Score: 1

      Honestly, reading the thread ... you posted something, got modded down, whined about it, and then got told to stop whining about it, and now you're acting like some outraged fool.

      Boo hoo, you got modded down on the intertubes. It's not some horrible tragedy, and your continuing to keep bitching about it makes you sound like a child.

      Seriously, grow a pair and stop whining about how tragic it is you got moderated down and then told to stop whining about it.

      Is that fucking clear enough? Or do you need a timeout so you can stop acting like a spoiled brat?

      Because it's way too damned annoying to see people whining about the injustices of the moderation system, because it tells us you haven't got a clue that it's a bunch of random monkeys banging on keys.

      Get over it already.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
    6. Re:Lets just hope by pla · · Score: 0

      Sure! Why, I can think of plenty of non-evil reasons for push notifications. Why, we have email (that I don't get through a PC browser), IMs (that I don't get through a browser)... Um... Stock alerts (that I don't get through a browser)... Hmm...

      Oh, and ads, lots and lots of ads - Ads just fucking everywhere, loves me some ads. Mmm-hmm. Don't you love ads, you commie bastard? How do you expect the economy to grow (wink wink nudge nudge) if you don't need to acknowledge an ad for Viagra every five minutes?

      Ahem. Yeah. At this rate, I'll need to start rolling my own Chrome builds just to keep the crap to a minimum.

    7. Re:Lets just hope by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1, Funny

      Are you a fucked-up moron in real life, or do you just play one on slashdot?

    8. Re:Lets just hope by pla · · Score: 1

      Did you actually have a point, or just wanted to play a flaming douchenozzle on Slashdot?

    9. Re:Lets just hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ~superfluous bullshit snipped~ it's a bunch of random monkeys banging on keys.

      It's drunk monkeys banging on keys, thank you very much.

  2. Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by jfengel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I find the lack of columns one of the more striking failures of CSS design. They don't appear to have consulted with anybody who actually knew anything about why things get laid on on a page the way they do. Line lengths are one of the more important factors in determining how easy it is to read something; the eye has a hard time tracking back on wide texts. Default layouts try to compensate with wide spacing, which just wastes a lot of space (and looks, at least to me, very unappealing).

    I look forward to other browsers implementing this, so that web page designers (especially for responsible web pages) start using it instead of the hacks and design compromises they're currently forced into.

    1. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by ArcadeMan · · Score: 2

      One striking failure of website design is to make it as large as the browser window. Up to a point it used to be a good thing until we reached 1024x768 displays. But with today's widescreen monitors it doesn't even make sense to have your browser window full-width to begin with...

      --
      Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
    2. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by aaron4801 · · Score: 1, Interesting

      This.
      Adding multi-column support will only encourage poorly designed websites to USE it. It may work in a few select scenarios, but most of the time, it will encourage one of two bad designs:
      A. Two columns that both extend down the page "below the fold," such that you have to scroll down to finish the first column, then back to the top to read the second. Ugh.
      B. Cutting off page content "at the fold" and forcing a slideshow on any content that extends beyond what's visible on one screen.
      Multi-columns might be useful for short content that's visible on a single screen, or two columns of independent content, but for the vast majority of what's out there, a single scrolling column with plenty of whitespace on both sides is the best layout.

    3. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      But with today's widescreen monitors it doesn't even make sense to have your browser window full-width to begin with...

      Sure it does. Today's wide-screen monitors almost seem to have been designed for browsers with tabs on the side, but Google refuses to see that. In Firefox, I can allocate 20% of my wide screen to the browser tabs, which makes them wide enough to actually read the text within the tabs! Imagine that!

      Chrome will remain a 3rd-rate browser until it makes (at least) 3 changes:
      1) Natively allow tabs on the side (often called vertical tabs)
      2) Fix the shitty memory allocation
      3) Use/obey/follow DNS shortcuts instead of Googling unknown, single-word entries in the address bar

    4. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      The short response to this is: people can, and will, run their browsers however the hell they want to, and your opinion about that is utterly meaningless.

      What are you? The chief idiot in charge of telling people how to use their fucking computers?

    5. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Infinitely this.

      "Wah wah stop using Tables for Layout, it blows, use CSS!"
      And yet, here we are in 2015 and making a tables-for-layout emulation is a stupid amount of weird CSS.
      I have a perfect system for it, one that even stretches or stays fixed on each column selectively, with collapse ability, but it is still hacky as shit looking rules.

      Equally as Arcademan listed below, so many websites don't use fullscreen views because collapsing and expanding UIs are just a pain in 50 asses to make right.
      I have a system for doing that myself for various kinds of site layout, but it is still ridiculous.
      The easiest way I got it done was max widths on child containers for things like blog entries, articles and such.
      So if you typically had 1 news entry per row, if it goes over X width, the news item below would pop up.
      But you can see an issue there, there is going to be a huge gap. So now it requires even more complex rules using calc().
      Honestly, everyone should just learn to use Calc() and disown the rest of CSSs positioning bullshit. Calc() is the only thing you need.
      Just logically layout everything your site will do in a sequence diagram and it will flow nicely with basically no issue.
      Or use Tables for Layout and tell CSSkiddies to go to hell. Not like their opinion actually matters.

    6. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by jfengel · · Score: 1

      Especially with the large number of small devices in the mix. Increasingly, web sites are targeting tiny screens. Which actually makes the column feature moot; this feature would have come in handy a while ago.

      Fortunately, if done properly, it degrades nicely. Small screen, one column. Wide screen, several columns (which has advantages over scrolling, since it's easier for the eye to jump a column than to keep track of a position during a scroll.)

    7. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1

      The single column approach is implemented poorly too. Very often, my experience is that the white space on either side is not proportional to the width of the window. What happens is that the page extends past the left and right window borders and the page has to be scrolled horizontally to center the text within the window. Even worse is reading on the phone and having the column not shrink to the width of the window.

    8. Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      multi-column layout currently only workes if all the columned content fits on 1 screen, if it doesn't the columned layout is waaay worse in usability

  3. Let's welcome the slower web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Ever notice how web devs with the fastest browsers (and js implementations) in town produce dog slow websites?

    I do. But then, I don't (can't, really, for Reasons[tm]) upgrade my browser every other week. Now, you can blame me, but why? Why not produce fast sites instead?

    1. Re: Let's welcome the slower web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Because websites need to have a million JavaScript modules to load a million add so that you accidentally click on one somewhere along the way and the website makes a penny or two.

    2. Re:Let's welcome the slower web by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      1. Define "fast", are we talking 3 second load time or something else

      2. What Features you need vs what you want, why are you using that site

      3. Hardware, are you using a 10 year old computer to use something feature rich like Facebook?

      One solution is to write your own extension to block shit you don't want that's slowing your experience down.

      The final thing I can think of is maybe its the browser you're using. I used to think my old (8 yrs old) computer had some kind of problem, I was running Chrome and it was just maddening, I switched to Firefox and discovered much to my surprise that Chrome itself just didn't run well, all of a sudden sites came back to life.

      If you sit there waiting for devs to write better sites just for you, well, you'll be there a long time

    3. Re:Let's welcome the slower web by spauldo · · Score: 1

      I'm not a professional web designer, but I've taken a few jobs doing it.

      They do it because that's what their customers want.

      Most of the people wanting websites (and willing to pay for them) aren't tech savvy. They're business people, often small business people. And to them, all that flashy Javascript and animations look "professional."

      I once designed a website for a dialup ISP. The default page template I made for them had one small graphic - their logo. Everything else was standard HTML and CSS 1. It was well organized, with the links easy to find for both customers and prospective customers, and it was classy, if minimalist. I included setup pages for four versions of Windows, MacOS classic, MacOS X, and even a page with info for Linux users (if you've never dealt with the different distributions in the days of dialup, count yourself lucky. It was a crapshoot.).

      They used it for a couple months, and then paid someone else (probably a lot more) for a horrible, ugly clusterfuck that took a long time to load (I did mention this was dialup, right?), centered everything in a tiny column in the middle based on percentage (imagine that on an 800x600 screen, old but not uncommon at the time), had little information besides marketing bullshit, and required newer browsers than many of their customers had. They didn't even include email setup instructions.

      These guys ran an ISP (albeit in redneck central). They should have understood the issues. Someone running a pottery shop? No chance.

      --
      Those who can't do, teach. Those who can't teach either, do tech support.
  4. Meh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'll just wait two more weeks for Chrome 76.

    1. Re:Meh by invictusvoyd · · Score: 1

      I have no intention to wait for chrome 88

  5. Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Hadlock · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Sometime in the last five releases it feels like the number of memory leaks in Chrome have just skyrocketed. Maybe I'm not the normal use case, but I typically leave Chrome and various tabs open for days or weeks at a time, and eventually causes Windows to panic and close Chrome to recover that memory. My wild-ass-guess is that it's related to HTML5 video but maybe it's something else. I freakin' love chrome, but the memory leaks are seriously making me consider something a little more stable.
     
    Chrome is the only application I use that ever, ever has memory leaks now in 2015.

    --
    moox. for a new generation.
    1. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Eowaennor · · Score: 2

      I have been crashing more and more lately just trying to google something. That is the only thing that crashes chrome for me.. Cmon Google, get your own damn search to work with your own damn browser at least.

    2. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by p0p0 · · Score: 1

      Flash or another extension? Flash seems to be the only memory eater for me. I've left multiple tabs open for days and never had a problem. Next to Flash I think Adblock is the next biggest resource hog.

    3. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by CreatureComfort · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Well, that's just because you don't use Firefox any more. I just switched to Chrome from Firefox because it had become absolutely unusable due to memory leaks.

      Opening Firefox in the morning, it loads into ~250,000 K (!) on open. After a day of browsing, and closing back to my single home tab (Google.com), it would be using ~350,000 K. Leave it overnight, with just that home tab open, in the morning it would be using 800,000 K - 1,200,000 K and the entire OS would be at a crawl until I closed the process.

      BTW, Chrome always seems to use about 200,000 K - 250,000 K no matter what I'm doing.

      --
      "Unheard of means only it's undreamed of yet,
      Impossible means not yet done." ~~ Julia Ecklar
    4. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by asavage · · Score: 1

      You should look at how much memory chrome uses by visiting about:memory. I use both Firefox and Chrome and Firefox uses substantially less memory then Chrome to display the same web pages.

    5. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yep. It is awful.

      In fact, I had a rather nasty update installed once where memory leaked like crazy.
      Anything that had ANY kind of HTML-based animation, be it a GIF, VIDEO, anything native, even JS timers, memory just leaks and leaks.
      This update was live for months before it was "fixed".
      If you were to accidentally leave something open over night, enjoy your multi-gig-abusing tab.

      I remember actually opening Facebook once because someone messaged me instead of emailing me, moron, and I forgot to close it. It was like 3 in the morning.
      Wake up next day, it was using like 1.7GB and all the other open tabs had their active memory nerfed to swap.

      And speaking of that, when Chrome does that, when it throws other tabs memory to swap, holy crap is it slow to recover.
      That isn't even the worst part either, it swaps out UI features. The damn toolbar gets swapped out, as does bookmarks, as does the address bar, as does the context menu. WHY IS THAT A THING?! Who thought that was even remotely a good idea?
      It is seemingly even worse on newer machines than older machines as well. Something that just boggles the mind.

      But it still doesn't beat the thing Google are best at, corrupting files!
      I can't count how many times I have had to deal with peoples Chrome profiles being corrupted due to updates.
      And I mean actually corrupted, not some weird version mismatch. (another common issue!)
      And the constant times where Google Update itself just plain doesn't work.
      It was the same with Picasa. All 3 times I have tried and then uninstalled it later, it corrupted its own image database.
      LEARN TO WRITE NON-CORRUPTABLE FILE FORMATS.

      Why are Google the worst at doing everything these days?
      Where the hell did all the smart people go?
      Did they replace their entire company with college-tier kiddies or something?

    6. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by tomxor · · Score: 1

      If you don't actually know what the memory leak is then how do you know if it's in chromium and not the page you are looking at... memory leaks can exist in a piece of javascript code, in which case all chrome can do is limit it's maximum size and warn you about it.

    7. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Speaking of Chromium memory leaks, there's a nasty memory leak on Linux. Start playing an HTML5 video, switch to another VT and watch your memory usage go through the roof (several gigabytes within a minute). Closing the tab recovers the memory.

      Funny thing is that v44 has a completely new video renderer, and it has actually made the leak worse (obviously the bug isn't there, but it obviously does something that exacerbates the problem).

      Enabling VAAPI with a patch seems to solve it (libva uses X11/DRI, so switching VT stalls the decoder and there are no frames to be leaked).

    8. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Hadlock · · Score: 1

      Yeah you're right, an acknowledged bug directly reproducible by using one of Google's core revenue-generating products (YouTube, you may not have heard of it, it's kind of new) is mostly irrelevant and won't cause issues for anyone else. Sorry to make such a fuss.

      --
      moox. for a new generation.
    9. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by aliquis · · Score: 1

      Maybe you upgraded to 64 bit?
      Use 32 bit Chrome instead?

      Then again now with the version I have (likely 43) Chrome crashes in Windows without Windows ever saying it's running out of RAM.

    10. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by thegarbz · · Score: 1

      I just switched to Chrome from Firefox because it had become absolutely unusable due to memory leaks.

      Marty McFly? Welcome back to the future!

      Maybe you should look into this whole memory thing as your complaints are very 2005. Sounds like you have a badly behaving plugin given that Chrome uses more memory than any other browser across the board and Firefox hasn't had a decent memory leak for at least as long as the USA has had a black president.

      Oh sorry for spoiling that for you.

    11. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1

      You seem to be under the apprehension that Chrome has any control at all over what gets swapped out. Perhaps you should become less ignorant before spouting off.

    12. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      you might check what crappy javascript is running on your home tab

    13. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by bemymonkey · · Score: 1

      >Chrome is the only application I use that ever, ever has memory leaks now in 2015.

      Have you tried Firefox with Adblock Plus lately? Very fun.

    14. Re:Can we maybe fix the memory leaks? by Endlisnis · · Score: 1

      Chrome uses 100M *per tab*. I just checked about:memory, and I saw my Chrome at 2.5G with about 20 tabs open. My Gmail tab uses 210M. I don't see how your entire Chrome can use the same amount of memory as just one of my Chrome tabs.

  6. Firefox is falling so far behind now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0, Interesting

    As a webdev, I use Firefox, Chrome and IE all day long. I just upgraded to Chrome 44 this morning, and I can already feel the performance improvements. It really is so much faster than Firefox these days. Even IE, which I never found particularly fast, is lightning quick compared to Firefox.

    I know it isn't a problem with any Firefox extensions, because I don't have any installed. In fact, I don't have any installed in any of the browsers I test with.

    It isn't a problem with ads, either, because the same ads I see in Firefox I see in Chrome and IE, and both Chrome and IE perform just fine. I've even completely uninstalled and reinstalled Firefox from scratch numerous times, including deleting all profiles, but none of that helped.

    So the only explanation left is that Firefox is just a lot slower than Chrome and IE are. I know somebody will probably bring up those Are We Fast Yet benchmarks that show that Firefox is faster than Chrome, but I don't think that matters, because I and other normal people spend our time browsing real websites, not microbenchmarks.

    Firefox needs to make some major changes if it wants to stay relevant. I know its usage is dwindling (only about 7% of the users on my many websites use Firefox, and others I've talked to have similar stats for their sites), and I think this is because they've done a lot of stupid stuff lately like breaking the UI, not fixing their performance problems, and adding stuff that people just don't want like that Pocket stuff.

    I really don't want Firefox to die out, but unless it starts competing with Chrome and IE, which are getting better with each release, then I just can't see how Firefox will have a future.

    1. Re:Firefox is falling so far behind now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Obvious troll is obvious.

    2. Re:Firefox is falling so far behind now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It's just a shame that this bizarre misinformation seems to have taken root. Of all the projects out there deserving of such uninformed nonsense and hatred of irrelevant frills, Firefox is far from the one that deserves it the most. They've been bringing an ancient browser up to modernity, and it's already competitive with Chrome, but listening to the trolls you'd think Firefox hasn't changed at all since Firefox 3, except some features that are apparently the end of the world just because they exist. If only we held these concern trolls up to the same standards they hold Firefox up to.

    3. Re:Firefox is falling so far behind now. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      the same standards they hold Firefox up to

      The standards being used here are those set by modern versions of Chrome and IE. You know, Firefox's main competitors. Google and Microsoft have set the bar so high by providing fast, useful browsers. If Mozilla can't compete with Google and Microsoft when it comes to providing a modern web browser, there is only one group of people to blame: Mozilla.

    4. Re:Firefox is falling so far behind now. by iampiti · · Score: 1

      I don't think those are the reasons people have stopped using Firefox. As far as I remember people started migrating en masse towars Chrome a long time ago, much earlier than the controversial UI changes and the Pocket stuff. In fact, all the controversial Firefox changes are quite recent.

  7. Re:Chrome is for cows. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    Hi user:sexconker (1179573), we know it's you, you forgot to check the "Post Anonymously" box earlier:

    http://news.slashdot.org/comme...

  8. Re:Push Notifications by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Surely you meant "mooooooooo"?

  9. Am I being paranoid... by wwalker · · Score: 2

    ... or it's actually not possible to implement Push Messaging and Notifications without every message going through Google's servers (or GCM, Google Cloud Messaging)? Somehow I don't see this "feature" being all that popular, considering tracking/snooping and Google's discontinuing its services willy-nilly. And it looks like you have to actually pay Google if you want to send more than 10,000 notifications per day.

    1. Re:Am I being paranoid... by Dog-Cow · · Score: 1

      Have you been living under a rock for the past 7 years?

  10. Something less NSA friendly? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    there seems to be a trend of centralising and linking all our communications through the likes of NSA friendly google.

    this looks to be more centralisation...

  11. +1 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    +1, Pathetic but true

  12. Dammit, Mozilla! by brianerst · · Score: 1

    Geez, another release? Why do they insist on revving the release numbers so often? Mozilla really jumped the shark when they made Chrome match the ridiculous version numbering scheme of Google's Firefox browser.

    Every flipping couple of weeks, Mozilla comes out with another version of Chrome with a list of "improvements" that no one wants while ignoring the obvious memory bloat and CPU utilization problems caused by their stupid multiprocess tab browsing. I remember when Mozilla Chrome was a sleek, fast browser - now it's a bloated mess. And when are they ever going to have the rich Add-Ons ecosystem that Google has had for-freaking-ever?

    I swear to God I'm going to switch to Google Firefox if this crap keeps up.

  13. Chrome 44 launches without... by lhowaf · · Score: 1

    ...support for Java. No Webmin. Piss off.

    1. Re: Chrome 44 launches without... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Fuck chrome in the ass. I'll use anything but their shit.

  14. What about Logjam vulnerability? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    What about Logjam vulnerability? Is Chrome still vulnerable to Logjam attack?