Why would they care what Apple/Webkit supports? Um, besides the fact that 65% of mobile browsing is currently with a Webkit based browser, golly, I can't think of any.
WebKit supports Theora just as well as H.264. Chrome is WebKit and supports Theora. Theora support is just disabled in Safari.
Mod parent up. I have no idea how the grandparent got to +5; his suggestions are all either implemented, unreasonable, or flat-out unimplementable. (No browser vendor can massively break reverse compatibility. Period.)
I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.
The W3C is irrelevant. The WHATWG didn't start out as part of the W3C, and if the W3C tried to push it around it could just break off again. The contents of the HTML 5 spec are determined solely by Ian Hickson, currently employed by Google. His only oversight is a steering committee. I can't find who's on the steering committee, but I'm very certain that it includes no one from Microsoft or Adobe, and Mozilla plus Opera almost certainly have more votes than Apple.
The fact is, the HTML 5 standard is not meant to dictate anything, because that doesn't work. It's a forum for browser vendors to coordinate new features, and it documents the features that are agreed upon. If implementers refuse to implement it, the spec doesn't include it. That's how it works for everything, not just video. Try subscribing to the whatwg mailing list to see how it works.
Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial.
Then how does this explain the fact that Google supports both H.264 and Theora (despite the supposed patent risks)? Or the fact that Opera has stated that it refuses to support H.264 on principle (despite the fact that it's for-profit and certainly has enough money to pay licensing fees)?
The fact is that Mozilla and Opera refuse to support any new patented format if they can possibly avoid it, because they believe that patented formats are bad for the web. Google and Apple are evidently more compromising on that front.
As for patent risk, I don't know, but obviously Google thinks it's tolerable, and its pockets are almost as deep as Apple's. AFAIK, the nasty thing about patent trolling is usually that they can seek injunctions to basically kill your product. In the case of supporting Theora, the browser vendor could just immediately release a top-priority unavoidable update that drops support as soon as a suit is filed. In that case, given that they acted in good faith, would it be possible to get any significant amount of money out of them? My impression is no.
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
No, it is not. There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google and does not work with YouTube (AFAICT). Subsequent requests for clarification failed to elicit any official statement. Peter Kasting of the Chrome team stated:
I don't believe Chris was speaking in any official capacity for YT or Google any more than I am. I think it is inappropriate to conflate his opinion of the matter with Google's. I have not seen _any_ official statement from Google regarding codec quality.
This is a quote from an actual Google employee, who incidentally happens to work on their browser and quite possibly knows their exact reasons for supporting both Theora and H.264.
Could people please stop spreading the misinformation that Google/YouTube believes that they can't use Theora because of its bitrate? It's completely unsubstantiated. Period.
Yes, yes, just like those transparent PNG files I've heard so much about. Or that new CSS 2 thing. Any browser that doesn't support them will just fall by the wayside the moment a superior browser comes out.
Um . . . you know that the current versions of all browsers do support those, right? So those are actually decent reasons to believe that the GP is right. (Reasons to believe otherwise include, for instance, SVG.)
So it is alpha after all? Or is it still "Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome"??
Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome, as I've repeatedly said. I do happen to be using a developer version of Chromium, from nightly builds, but the features are the same as I'd get in the official dev channel of Chrome. "Chromium" is just the name for unofficial builds of Chrome, sort of like Iceweasel for Firefox. (Not quite, but close enough for the present discussion.)
You can have bleeding-edge Chromium builds, or you could have Chromium builds that track the Chrome stable versions, or whatever you like. Conversely, you can get stable, beta, and developer versions that are officially called Chrome — the dev versions are weekly builds.
And regarding RSS... YOU MUST BE [CENSORED] BLIND! to not to notice RSS in Opera which is like forever part of its mail client.
You must have been using Opera even less than I did Chrome.
Right, I don't use Opera, I just loaded it up for a quick check and didn't see it at a glance, then Googled and saw some discussion about how it wasn't there. (I guess they meant it wasn't in bookmarks, it was a separate feature.) I use Google Reader, so I don't care much.
AdBlock and FlashBlock are not part of FireFox precisely because they are extensions. They might have been a part or it - like Opera - but then it might have severed Mozilla's (which is non-profit) relationships with advertisers.
It still has nothing to do with your comparisons to vanilla Firefox plus Google Toolbar, let alone Mosaic. Chrome definitely does not have the features of Firefox plus whatever extensions you like: nothing does. But it's quite comparable to vanilla Firefox, even if it's somewhat slimmer.
2. "Four out of ten" apparently work in some developer build acquired somewhere else, but not from official source: http://www.google.com/chrome. Huh?
Everything I said will definitely work in the official developer builds of Chrome officially acquired from Google and officially called "Chrome", by switching from the stable channel to the developer channel. Dev builds are perfectly usable in my experience. (I also usually used pre-release versions of Firefox: I was using 3.5 for months before switching to Chromium.) I don't have a stable build handy to test with — I'd have to go find a Windows box — so it's possible that stable doesn't support some of these things yet. But in that case it will pretty soon, or you could try the dev channel.
I also have no idea why you bothered to write how everything is rosy in Chrome^WChromium land and at the same time mention number of times that some some stuff still doesn't work.
Browsers do not have to support every feature that Firefox does to be good browsers. I don't know if Chrome supports every feature you mentioned, but I never really used any of them in Firefox, so I frankly don't care. If you really really can't live without RSS feeds in bookmarks or whatever, then by all means say you dislike Chrome. But don't claim that means that Chrome is unusable. At most it's unusable to you.
For some examples of features Chrome has but default Firefox doesn't: a "new tab" page that's useful, like Opera's but better than the versions of Opera I've tried; a unified search+URL bar so you don't have to tab over to the search box or manually enable shortcuts like "g" for Google; multi-process model means better stability and security; nothing slows or freezes the interface, ever, due to essentially no blocking on the interface thread; downloading doesn't pop up a separate window, it displays unobtrusively at the bottom of the screen; vastly less clutter in everything (right-click menus, prefs, etc.); much more responsive in my subjective experience, at least on Linux
RTFA. We are talking here about official piece of alpha software released by Google called Chrome.
I did RTFA. Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome in terms of functionality; I have no idea what your point is.
1. AdBlock
2. FlashBlock
Not part of "vanilla Firefox + Google Toolbar". Of course Chrome doesn't have as many extensions as Firefox yet, that's not what you originally said. What you said is: "They do not even have usable bookmark", "Even Mosaic 10+ years ago was more useful than Chrome is now", "I have to install something extra to get [bookmarks]". These all go far beyond the fact that Chrome doesn't have many good extensions yet, and all those statements are patently absurd.
3. Bookmarks toolbar
Chrome has this. Hit Ctrl-B, or select "Always show bookmarks bar" from the wrench menu. It's disabled by default in Chrome to save space.
4. Bookmarks menu
If you have the bookmark bar visible (Ctrl-B), you can click "Other bookmarks" to get the same functionality as Firefox's bookmarks menu.
5. Keyword searches
For what, where? Chrome's Omnibox allows you to search the web and your browser history.
6. Preserving text zoom level per domain
I don't know if Chrome does this, but frankly I had no idea Firefox did either. I also note that Opera doesn't seem to do it, and you apparently think Opera is a usable browser.
7. RSS feeds as bookmark folders
Yes, this is a feature Chrome doesn't provide. As far as I can tell, again, Opera doesn't either.
8. Searchable browsing history
Chrome has searchable history. Go to the history menu (Ctrl-H or via wrench) and you'll see a big prominent "Search history" box at the top. It also searches your history when you type in the Omnibox, although this doesn't seem to work as well as in Firefox 3 yet.
9. Proxy configuration
On Windows, Chrome uses the Windows default proxy configuration, according to Chrome help. You can change that just fine.
10. Page Info screen which allows to save e.g. images used on the page.
Chrome has a "view page info" option in context menus, right-click on any page. I don't know what it actually does, though, since it seems not to work yet on Linux. In any event, I once more don't see this option in Opera either.
So of your criticisms of Chrome:
Two out of ten related to lack of extension support, which has nothing to do with your original claims.
Four out of ten Chrome actually has, and you apparently didn't bother to look hard enough to figure that out.
Three it might not have, but neither does Opera, so if they're reason to condemn Chrome, you're contradicting your earlier statement that Opera is featureful and useful.
One I couldn't even understand.
In short, you apparently did not bother seriously trying to use any recent version of Chrome, and consider anything you use regularly in Firefox to be essential without bothering to give alternative ways of doing things a chance. Not a very good basis for criticism at all, let alone absurdly over-the-top claims like that Chrome has fewer features than Mosaic. I have no idea why I bothered writing out such a detailed response to such patent nonsense, but here you go anyway.
Oh, ick, that's horrible. I've never seen hardware-accelerated Theora playback, but hardware-accelerated H.264 is all over the place.
Only because it's so popular, though. If Theora becomes the de facto video format for the web, which is what Mozilla and Opera are aiming for, then devices could have hardware-accelerated Theora too.
From my perspective, this seems like Firefox making a boneheaded anti-consumer move that's going to have the practical real-world effect of handing video on the web over to Adobe and Microsoft, regardless of what they might intend. Thanks, Mozilla!
I don't know about that. We'll have to see. Mozilla might not be able to get a patent license anyway if they want to continue distributing under the GPL. I'm hoping that Theora will take off, personally. It might stand a real chance if Apple would back it, especially if it commissioned hardware Theora acceleration for the iPhone. Requiring the use of patented formats to get video to work is just a terrible idea.
Yes, because bookmarks are such an exotic feature that I have to install something extra to get them.
I honestly am not sure what you're talking about. Bookmarks work perfectly fine for me in Chromium, with nothing else installed. Chromium is identical to Chrome in effectively every respect except branding, so I find it extremely implausible that this doesn't hold just as well for Chrome. What about bookmarks doesn't work for you?
Until I have in Chrome the same functionality I have in vanilla FireFox + Google Toolbar, for me it is in deep "alpha", least 2.0 release.
But you aren't able to name specific, exact things that you can do in Firefox but can't in Chrome?
That benchmark is worthless. Especially for Chrome. Quote: "When a process with the same name such as 'chrome.exe' is encountered more than once, its total size is accumulated, yielding a total of all the 'chrome.exe' figures together." Apparently the author has never heard of shared memory! See Google Chrome Memory Usage - Good and Bad on the Chromium blog for some discussion on this.
The other browsers might not be using multiple processes, but the same flaws apply to a lesser degree. Every library they load will count against them, even if another app is using the library and so it would be in memory anyway. The only reliable way to tell how much memory a process is really using is to check memory usage, use program, check memory usage, kill program, check memory usage. If the first and third figures are equal, then you can get a correct figure by subtracting the second figure from their common value. (If they aren't equal, either the app hasn't actually exited fully, or some other program has eaten up more memory in the meantime and the results are no good.)
Granted, I doubt Firefox is such a comparative memory hog as people paint it to be, but the benchmark proves nothing either way.
So far I haven't been able to get this to just work. If I point Safari at the YouTube HTML5 video demo, it all just works. But Firefox 3.5 doesn't have the x264 code, and fails silently, and I can find no mechanism to install that codec.
So, any pointers?
As far as I know (could be wrong), Firefox deliberately refuses to allow H.264 to be used on the basis that it's a patented format and therefore poisonous to the web. I think Safari is the only browser that will support extra codecs' installation for video tags.
Content authors need to provide fallback content for these cases. When this is deployed on YouTube for real, either it will provide Theora as well, or you'll fall back to the Flash player like users of Firefox 3/IE/etc.
If the way it works out is that some sites work with Firefox, other sites work with every HTML5 browser other than Firefox, and none of them work with Internet Explorer...
Sites can provide video in one of two formats:
Theora is unpatented as far as anyone knows, and is supported by Firefox 3.5, Chrome 3, and experimental Opera versions. Apple has said they refuse to support it at present because of fears about unknown patents surfacing when someone with deep pockets starts shipping it (this was before Google shipped Theora support).
H.264 is patent-encumbered and supported by Safari 4 and Chrome 3. Mozilla and Opera both refuse to support a patented video format on principle.
Microsoft has not commented on any of this as far as I know.
Of course, sites can provide fallback so that the content works in the absence of video tag support. The way to do it for the time being is 1) provide both Theora and H.264 in a video tag, 2) put Flash or something in the fallback for older browsers and IE. This can be automated through various tools, and will "just work" for the user. Eventually everyone will support the video tag with a single common format, hopefully, but you have to give it some time, it's new stuff.
Chrome has a very small amount of closed-source code in it, but Chromium is certainly fully open-source, and it's identical to Chrome for performance purposes. So no, Chromium is the fastest fully open-source browser.
But Chrome?? They do not even have usable bookmark!?
I use bookmarks on Chromium just fine. How are they not "usable"?
Even Mosaic 10+ years ago was more useful than Chrome is now.
Really? What essential features does it lack? I assume you're talking about the Windows version, since the Mac/Linux builds are still clearly labeled as development versions (although I use Chromium on Linux as my primary browser now and only go to Firefox for Flash).
That is a different problem. The problem with this specification is that when enabled it doesn't allow you to use inline scripts anymore. i.e. you can no longer directly trust *your own domain* unless you use out of line scripts, which is enormously constraining for a large class of applications.
But also necessary to prevent HTML injection from escalating into XSS. Even if you can't do this, however, the spec is very modular. You can still use other features it allows while allowing inline script, like restricting domains of image/script/etc. loading.
If I say that my site trusts domain1.com, but domain1.com isn't using this and ends up having all sorts of dodgy scripts they're passing along, would this block them, or would they count as coming from domain1.com?
They would be executed. Even if you use this to its fullest, attackers can still do XSS if they can alter your actual script files. But if fully deployed, it kills the most common cause of XSS: HTML injection. The point is that injected HTML will not be able to include scripts except from approved domains.
Currently an HTML injection anywhere in the application means you can stick in a <script> tag or onload attribute and run any script you like. This is bad, because HTML pages are usually generated dynamically and embed many user-provided strings that have to all be escaped individually by the application. One unescaped string and you get XSS.
With this new tech, a properly-configured site is immune to that. HTML injections can inject HTML, but not anything else: no scripts, images, objects, etc. except from approved domains. Since script files are usually static files with no user-provided strings embedded in them, XSS becomes vastly more difficult. You can't even inject an image from your domain to track IP addresses.
So even if you include dodgy third-party scripts, that won't enable HTML injection to escalate to XSS like it currently can. The third party can, of course, still freely screw you over if their server gets hacked or they deliberately provide malicious content. If you're worried about that, don't trust them!
The summary is wrong, this is NOT a standard in any way, or even a proposed standard. This is a proprietary security feature being introduced by Firefox. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (it's not), or that this won't eventually become a de facto standard (it might). But it is not a standard.
It's not a standard, but it's not proprietary either. Proprietary means "owned by someone". Perhaps the term you're looking for is non-standard or vendor-specific.
The author gave the best reason for not implementing this.
The benefits of this, and other various security implementations, won't be seen until it's tested. The costs of testing? Way too high compared to the current cost of operation. This is a very hard proof-of-concept problem, and unless this is already built into development standards, I doubt any deployments would switch.
Well, I don't know. I'm a MediaWiki developer, and I can pretty much guarantee you that Wikipedia will use this, and that MediaWiki will support it. If you mean some random corporate website copy-pasted through sixteen iterations of hacked-up code dating back to 1994 won't use it, then sure, maybe not. But you can bet that some of the top websites will.
One of the coolest features is that you can specify a URL for the browser to report violations to. That way you can catch bugs in your policies without relying on user reports, and you immediately learn of any attacks on your Firefox users so you can fix them quickly for your non-Firefox users.
For two, flash has MUCH larger potential for security holes and exploits than Javascript, which does not even have write access to the filesystem in any way. One wrong buffer overflow in flash and the thing can actually WRITE to your hard drive.
Non sequitur. The Flash interpreter is implemented in C or suchlike, so it can have buffer overflows. JavaScript interpreters are also implemented in C or suchlike, so they can too. Firefox has had plenty of buffer overflows over the years. (Which isn't to say that Flash doesn't reduce security, just not for this reason.)
But the (protected) content people want happens to be in Flash, and because of that specific ability, I am willing to bet that publishers will be reluctant to use anything as open as HTML5.
You can bet YouTube will. Chrome supports <video>, YouTube has test pages that use it, and for that matter the editor of HTML 5 is employed by Google. If <video> really is better, which it theoretically should be, other sites will be pushed to support it for feature parity and consistency with the biggest player out there.
Some people will still try using encumbered formats. There's no way to stop that. Some people serve images instead of HTML for the same reason. But <video> is a step in the right direction for the web regardless.
I guess I'm doing something wrong: Firefox v3.5, noscript.
Video does not play unless Javascript is enabled.
And some sites don't work at all if JavaScript isn't enabled. Just because a lot of people use JavaScript when they don't have to doesn't mean it's actually required by the features they're using. <video> itself works fine without JavaScript.
I dunno what web designer in his/her right mind is going to make a web page that only 1 in 4 people can view.
Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility????
Why do you think IE8 fully supports CSS2.1? Because every other browser agreed on a standard, and IE got the reputation of "first make everything work in standards-compliant browsers, then hack on support for IE's brokenness" among web developers. Microsoft isn't so much of a monopoly that they can't be pressured by good features in other browsers.
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Why would they care what Apple/Webkit supports? Um, besides the fact that 65% of mobile browsing is currently with a Webkit based browser, golly, I can't think of any.
WebKit supports Theora just as well as H.264. Chrome is WebKit and supports Theora. Theora support is just disabled in Safari.
Mod parent up. I have no idea how the grandparent got to +5; his suggestions are all either implemented, unreasonable, or flat-out unimplementable. (No browser vendor can massively break reverse compatibility. Period.)
I suspect that the problem is that companies like Apple, Microsoft, and Adobe have enough influence on the W3C to kill something like this.
The W3C is irrelevant. The WHATWG didn't start out as part of the W3C, and if the W3C tried to push it around it could just break off again. The contents of the HTML 5 spec are determined solely by Ian Hickson, currently employed by Google. His only oversight is a steering committee. I can't find who's on the steering committee, but I'm very certain that it includes no one from Microsoft or Adobe, and Mozilla plus Opera almost certainly have more votes than Apple.
The fact is, the HTML 5 standard is not meant to dictate anything, because that doesn't work. It's a forum for browser vendors to coordinate new features, and it documents the features that are agreed upon. If implementers refuse to implement it, the spec doesn't include it. That's how it works for everything, not just video. Try subscribing to the whatwg mailing list to see how it works.
Apple doesn't want to be the deep pocketed commercial implementation of Ogg that ends up having to pay patent trolls. That's why it is going with the ISO/MPEG standard, which pools patents together from everyone. Mozilla doesn't want to use the standard because it is the opposite: penniless and non-commercial.
Then how does this explain the fact that Google supports both H.264 and Theora (despite the supposed patent risks)? Or the fact that Opera has stated that it refuses to support H.264 on principle (despite the fact that it's for-profit and certainly has enough money to pay licensing fees)?
The fact is that Mozilla and Opera refuse to support any new patented format if they can possibly avoid it, because they believe that patented formats are bad for the web. Google and Apple are evidently more compromising on that front.
As for patent risk, I don't know, but obviously Google thinks it's tolerable, and its pockets are almost as deep as Apple's. AFAIK, the nasty thing about patent trolling is usually that they can seek injunctions to basically kill your product. In the case of supporting Theora, the browser vendor could just immediately release a top-priority unavoidable update that drops support as soon as a suit is filed. In that case, given that they acted in good faith, would it be possible to get any significant amount of money out of them? My impression is no.
To be fair, Google is also refusing to switch YouTube to Ogg because of its lower quality per bitrate than h.264.
No, it is not. There has been no official statement from the YouTube team saying that. There's been one off-the-cuff statement to that effect by Chris DiBona, who is the open-source program manager at Google and does not work with YouTube (AFAICT). Subsequent requests for clarification failed to elicit any official statement. Peter Kasting of the Chrome team stated:
This is a quote from an actual Google employee, who incidentally happens to work on their browser and quite possibly knows their exact reasons for supporting both Theora and H.264.
Could people please stop spreading the misinformation that Google/YouTube believes that they can't use Theora because of its bitrate? It's completely unsubstantiated. Period.
Fuck Adobe for Flash. Seriously, I don't need vector graphics in my web browser.
Does this mean you're against support for SVG and <canvas>?
Yes, yes, just like those transparent PNG files I've heard so much about. Or that new CSS 2 thing. Any browser that doesn't support them will just fall by the wayside the moment a superior browser comes out.
Um . . . you know that the current versions of all browsers do support those, right? So those are actually decent reasons to believe that the GP is right. (Reasons to believe otherwise include, for instance, SVG.)
So it is alpha after all? Or is it still "Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome"??
Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome, as I've repeatedly said. I do happen to be using a developer version of Chromium, from nightly builds, but the features are the same as I'd get in the official dev channel of Chrome. "Chromium" is just the name for unofficial builds of Chrome, sort of like Iceweasel for Firefox. (Not quite, but close enough for the present discussion.)
You can have bleeding-edge Chromium builds, or you could have Chromium builds that track the Chrome stable versions, or whatever you like. Conversely, you can get stable, beta, and developer versions that are officially called Chrome — the dev versions are weekly builds.
And regarding RSS ... YOU MUST BE [CENSORED] BLIND! to not to notice RSS in Opera which is like forever part of its mail client.
You must have been using Opera even less than I did Chrome.
Right, I don't use Opera, I just loaded it up for a quick check and didn't see it at a glance, then Googled and saw some discussion about how it wasn't there. (I guess they meant it wasn't in bookmarks, it was a separate feature.) I use Google Reader, so I don't care much.
AdBlock and FlashBlock are not part of FireFox precisely because they are extensions. They might have been a part or it - like Opera - but then it might have severed Mozilla's (which is non-profit) relationships with advertisers.
It still has nothing to do with your comparisons to vanilla Firefox plus Google Toolbar, let alone Mosaic. Chrome definitely does not have the features of Firefox plus whatever extensions you like: nothing does. But it's quite comparable to vanilla Firefox, even if it's somewhat slimmer.
2. "Four out of ten" apparently work in some developer build acquired somewhere else, but not from official source: http://www.google.com/chrome. Huh?
Everything I said will definitely work in the official developer builds of Chrome officially acquired from Google and officially called "Chrome", by switching from the stable channel to the developer channel. Dev builds are perfectly usable in my experience. (I also usually used pre-release versions of Firefox: I was using 3.5 for months before switching to Chromium.) I don't have a stable build handy to test with — I'd have to go find a Windows box — so it's possible that stable doesn't support some of these things yet. But in that case it will pretty soon, or you could try the dev channel.
I also have no idea why you bothered to write how everything is rosy in Chrome^WChromium land and at the same time mention number of times that some some stuff still doesn't work.
Browsers do not have to support every feature that Firefox does to be good browsers. I don't know if Chrome supports every feature you mentioned, but I never really used any of them in Firefox, so I frankly don't care. If you really really can't live without RSS feeds in bookmarks or whatever, then by all means say you dislike Chrome. But don't claim that means that Chrome is unusable. At most it's unusable to you.
For some examples of features Chrome has but default Firefox doesn't: a "new tab" page that's useful, like Opera's but better than the versions of Opera I've tried; a unified search+URL bar so you don't have to tab over to the search box or manually enable shortcuts like "g" for Google; multi-process model means better stability and security; nothing slows or freezes the interface, ever, due to essentially no blocking on the interface thread; downloading doesn't pop up a separate window, it displays unobtrusively at the bottom of the screen; vastly less clutter in everything (right-click menus, prefs, etc.); much more responsive in my subjective experience, at least on Linux
RTFA. We are talking here about official piece of alpha software released by Google called Chrome.
I did RTFA. Chromium is effectively identical to Chrome in terms of functionality; I have no idea what your point is.
1. AdBlock
2. FlashBlock
Not part of "vanilla Firefox + Google Toolbar". Of course Chrome doesn't have as many extensions as Firefox yet, that's not what you originally said. What you said is: "They do not even have usable bookmark", "Even Mosaic 10+ years ago was more useful than Chrome is now", "I have to install something extra to get [bookmarks]". These all go far beyond the fact that Chrome doesn't have many good extensions yet, and all those statements are patently absurd.
3. Bookmarks toolbar
Chrome has this. Hit Ctrl-B, or select "Always show bookmarks bar" from the wrench menu. It's disabled by default in Chrome to save space.
4. Bookmarks menu
If you have the bookmark bar visible (Ctrl-B), you can click "Other bookmarks" to get the same functionality as Firefox's bookmarks menu.
5. Keyword searches
For what, where? Chrome's Omnibox allows you to search the web and your browser history.
6. Preserving text zoom level per domain
I don't know if Chrome does this, but frankly I had no idea Firefox did either. I also note that Opera doesn't seem to do it, and you apparently think Opera is a usable browser.
7. RSS feeds as bookmark folders
Yes, this is a feature Chrome doesn't provide. As far as I can tell, again, Opera doesn't either.
8. Searchable browsing history
Chrome has searchable history. Go to the history menu (Ctrl-H or via wrench) and you'll see a big prominent "Search history" box at the top. It also searches your history when you type in the Omnibox, although this doesn't seem to work as well as in Firefox 3 yet.
9. Proxy configuration
On Windows, Chrome uses the Windows default proxy configuration, according to Chrome help. You can change that just fine.
10. Page Info screen which allows to save e.g. images used on the page.
Chrome has a "view page info" option in context menus, right-click on any page. I don't know what it actually does, though, since it seems not to work yet on Linux. In any event, I once more don't see this option in Opera either.
So of your criticisms of Chrome:
In short, you apparently did not bother seriously trying to use any recent version of Chrome, and consider anything you use regularly in Firefox to be essential without bothering to give alternative ways of doing things a chance. Not a very good basis for criticism at all, let alone absurdly over-the-top claims like that Chrome has fewer features than Mosaic. I have no idea why I bothered writing out such a detailed response to such patent nonsense, but here you go anyway.
Oh, ick, that's horrible. I've never seen hardware-accelerated Theora playback, but hardware-accelerated H.264 is all over the place.
Only because it's so popular, though. If Theora becomes the de facto video format for the web, which is what Mozilla and Opera are aiming for, then devices could have hardware-accelerated Theora too.
From my perspective, this seems like Firefox making a boneheaded anti-consumer move that's going to have the practical real-world effect of handing video on the web over to Adobe and Microsoft, regardless of what they might intend. Thanks, Mozilla!
I don't know about that. We'll have to see. Mozilla might not be able to get a patent license anyway if they want to continue distributing under the GPL. I'm hoping that Theora will take off, personally. It might stand a real chance if Apple would back it, especially if it commissioned hardware Theora acceleration for the iPhone. Requiring the use of patented formats to get video to work is just a terrible idea.
Yes, because bookmarks are such an exotic feature that I have to install something extra to get them.
I honestly am not sure what you're talking about. Bookmarks work perfectly fine for me in Chromium, with nothing else installed. Chromium is identical to Chrome in effectively every respect except branding, so I find it extremely implausible that this doesn't hold just as well for Chrome. What about bookmarks doesn't work for you?
Until I have in Chrome the same functionality I have in vanilla FireFox + Google Toolbar, for me it is in deep "alpha", least 2.0 release.
But you aren't able to name specific, exact things that you can do in Firefox but can't in Chrome?
You might wanna recheck your preconceptions - a lot has changed in the past few releases for Firefox: http://dotnetperls.com/chrome-memory
That benchmark is worthless. Especially for Chrome. Quote: "When a process with the same name such as 'chrome.exe' is encountered more than once, its total size is accumulated, yielding a total of all the 'chrome.exe' figures together." Apparently the author has never heard of shared memory! See Google Chrome Memory Usage - Good and Bad on the Chromium blog for some discussion on this.
The other browsers might not be using multiple processes, but the same flaws apply to a lesser degree. Every library they load will count against them, even if another app is using the library and so it would be in memory anyway. The only reliable way to tell how much memory a process is really using is to check memory usage, use program, check memory usage, kill program, check memory usage. If the first and third figures are equal, then you can get a correct figure by subtracting the second figure from their common value. (If they aren't equal, either the app hasn't actually exited fully, or some other program has eaten up more memory in the meantime and the results are no good.)
Granted, I doubt Firefox is such a comparative memory hog as people paint it to be, but the benchmark proves nothing either way.
So far I haven't been able to get this to just work. If I point Safari at the YouTube HTML5 video demo, it all just works. But Firefox 3.5 doesn't have the x264 code, and fails silently, and I can find no mechanism to install that codec.
So, any pointers?
As far as I know (could be wrong), Firefox deliberately refuses to allow H.264 to be used on the basis that it's a patented format and therefore poisonous to the web. I think Safari is the only browser that will support extra codecs' installation for video tags.
Content authors need to provide fallback content for these cases. When this is deployed on YouTube for real, either it will provide Theora as well, or you'll fall back to the Flash player like users of Firefox 3/IE/etc.
I can't get that to work in anything but Firefox!
If the way it works out is that some sites work with Firefox, other sites work with every HTML5 browser other than Firefox, and none of them work with Internet Explorer...
Sites can provide video in one of two formats:
Microsoft has not commented on any of this as far as I know.
Of course, sites can provide fallback so that the content works in the absence of video tag support. The way to do it for the time being is 1) provide both Theora and H.264 in a video tag, 2) put Flash or something in the fallback for older browsers and IE. This can be automated through various tools, and will "just work" for the user. Eventually everyone will support the video tag with a single common format, hopefully, but you have to give it some time, it's new stuff.
and 'strong' usually results in bold text (but I guess it might not if the CSS for a page goes all over the place).
The same is true for any HTML markup. b { font-weight: normal; color: green; } would chuck your expectations out the window just as well.
Firefox is the fastest fully open-source browser.
Chrome has a very small amount of closed-source code in it, but Chromium is certainly fully open-source, and it's identical to Chrome for performance purposes. So no, Chromium is the fastest fully open-source browser.
But Chrome?? They do not even have usable bookmark!?
I use bookmarks on Chromium just fine. How are they not "usable"?
Even Mosaic 10+ years ago was more useful than Chrome is now.
Really? What essential features does it lack? I assume you're talking about the Windows version, since the Mac/Linux builds are still clearly labeled as development versions (although I use Chromium on Linux as my primary browser now and only go to Firefox for Flash).
That is a different problem. The problem with this specification is that when enabled it doesn't allow you to use inline scripts anymore. i.e. you can no longer directly trust *your own domain* unless you use out of line scripts, which is enormously constraining for a large class of applications.
But also necessary to prevent HTML injection from escalating into XSS. Even if you can't do this, however, the spec is very modular. You can still use other features it allows while allowing inline script, like restricting domains of image/script/etc. loading.
If I say that my site trusts domain1.com, but domain1.com isn't using this and ends up having all sorts of dodgy scripts they're passing along, would this block them, or would they count as coming from domain1.com?
They would be executed. Even if you use this to its fullest, attackers can still do XSS if they can alter your actual script files. But if fully deployed, it kills the most common cause of XSS: HTML injection. The point is that injected HTML will not be able to include scripts except from approved domains.
Currently an HTML injection anywhere in the application means you can stick in a <script> tag or onload attribute and run any script you like. This is bad, because HTML pages are usually generated dynamically and embed many user-provided strings that have to all be escaped individually by the application. One unescaped string and you get XSS.
With this new tech, a properly-configured site is immune to that. HTML injections can inject HTML, but not anything else: no scripts, images, objects, etc. except from approved domains. Since script files are usually static files with no user-provided strings embedded in them, XSS becomes vastly more difficult. You can't even inject an image from your domain to track IP addresses.
So even if you include dodgy third-party scripts, that won't enable HTML injection to escalate to XSS like it currently can. The third party can, of course, still freely screw you over if their server gets hacked or they deliberately provide malicious content. If you're worried about that, don't trust them!
The summary is wrong, this is NOT a standard in any way, or even a proposed standard. This is a proprietary security feature being introduced by Firefox. I'm not saying this is a bad thing (it's not), or that this won't eventually become a de facto standard (it might). But it is not a standard.
It's not a standard, but it's not proprietary either. Proprietary means "owned by someone". Perhaps the term you're looking for is non-standard or vendor-specific.
The author gave the best reason for not implementing this.
The benefits of this, and other various security implementations, won't be seen until it's tested. The costs of testing? Way too high compared to the current cost of operation. This is a very hard proof-of-concept problem, and unless this is already built into development standards, I doubt any deployments would switch.
Well, I don't know. I'm a MediaWiki developer, and I can pretty much guarantee you that Wikipedia will use this, and that MediaWiki will support it. If you mean some random corporate website copy-pasted through sixteen iterations of hacked-up code dating back to 1994 won't use it, then sure, maybe not. But you can bet that some of the top websites will.
One of the coolest features is that you can specify a URL for the browser to report violations to. That way you can catch bugs in your policies without relying on user reports, and you immediately learn of any attacks on your Firefox users so you can fix them quickly for your non-Firefox users.
For two, flash has MUCH larger potential for security holes and exploits than Javascript, which does not even have write access to the filesystem in any way. One wrong buffer overflow in flash and the thing can actually WRITE to your hard drive.
Non sequitur. The Flash interpreter is implemented in C or suchlike, so it can have buffer overflows. JavaScript interpreters are also implemented in C or suchlike, so they can too. Firefox has had plenty of buffer overflows over the years. (Which isn't to say that Flash doesn't reduce security, just not for this reason.)
But the (protected) content people want happens to be in Flash, and because of that specific ability, I am willing to bet that publishers will be reluctant to use anything as open as HTML5.
You can bet YouTube will. Chrome supports <video>, YouTube has test pages that use it, and for that matter the editor of HTML 5 is employed by Google. If <video> really is better, which it theoretically should be, other sites will be pushed to support it for feature parity and consistency with the biggest player out there.
Some people will still try using encumbered formats. There's no way to stop that. Some people serve images instead of HTML for the same reason. But <video> is a step in the right direction for the web regardless.
I guess I'm doing something wrong: Firefox v3.5, noscript.
Video does not play unless Javascript is enabled.
And some sites don't work at all if JavaScript isn't enabled. Just because a lot of people use JavaScript when they don't have to doesn't mean it's actually required by the features they're using. <video> itself works fine without JavaScript.
I dunno what web designer in his/her right mind is going to make a web page that only 1 in 4 people can view.
Surely Mozilla developers should be trying to better emulate what the MOST popular browser does so that people won't be discouraged from using theirs; rather than creating yet more incompatibility????
Why do you think IE8 fully supports CSS2.1? Because every other browser agreed on a standard, and IE got the reputation of "first make everything work in standards-compliant browsers, then hack on support for IE's brokenness" among web developers. Microsoft isn't so much of a monopoly that they can't be pressured by good features in other browsers.