Chrome 44 Launches With Tweaks To Push Messaging and Notifications

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.

Comments

Glad somebody is taking columns seriously

[jfengel]

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.

Re:Glad somebody is taking columns seriously

[aaron4801]

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.

Can we maybe fix the memory leaks?

[Hadlock]

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.

Firefox is falling so far behind now.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.