The only difference between the Netscape 4 debacle and Internet Explorer is that Netscape didn't have the resources to develop a better browser.
A little revisionism there. Netscape did have the resources to develop a better browser. That browser could've been NS5 and it could've changed the course of browsers to this very day.
So much hay about MS killing NS. They certainly hurt them, but NS killed NS.
Instead of incrementally improving NS with a release-early, release-often strategy, they decided to completely rewrite the browser. 150 internet-years later they released NS6 and by that time they hadn't a chance.
The whole point is that we are not just one nation. We are a collection of *united* *states*.
That our state governments do represent more than just the population of those states.
The electoral college gives disproportionate representation to smaller states. Argue whether or not this is a good thing, but at least acknowledge that it was something that was deliberate and intentional.
We remove the Electoral College and Presidential candidates would have little incentive to do anything but travel up and down both coast lines with some additional time spent in the industrialized midwest.
You're right. That's the real problem. ISPs are hacking vertically-- all BT traffic -- when they should be hacking horizontally:
I support a greedy node algorithm. Everyone starts with their burstable line, and the more you utilize, your cap slowly lowers until you reach a guaranteed minimum bandwidth threshold.
At the end of the day, greedy users will be greedy users. And if BT goes offline, they'll migrate to something else. And if I suck 100gb of crap off usenet in a month it's no different than 100gb of BT crap in terms of network stress.
Burstable lines make sense. It's a concept as old as timeshare. But if somebody is constantly "bursting" they need a governor on their line.
I hate to be the one invoking a Hitler reference--albeit tenuous--but the old parable about "They took the unionists, I was not a unionist, so I didn't protest. They took the _____, I was not a ____, so I didn't protest,......" seems to fit.
Personally, I think this is a tough nut to crack. But if transferring files via a well established and well known protocol is going "meltdown" the internet, maybe the internet isn't as resilient as it should be?
I personally can't remember the last time I downloaded via torrent. I sucked tons of shit off P2P networks, napster, gnutella, fasttrack, even some BT, but I just graduated to an income bracket where I'm more time poor than cash poor.
But if we don't demand fair practices from ISPs it won't be long until they cross off BT and then move to the next biggest 80/20 rule traffic hog. And THAT might be something i DO care about.
Your post was a very succinct argument against *commercial* space travel.
But that's the whole point of the government program. Government's should do things that:
1. Are beneficial to mankind as a whole, AND.. 2. Is too expensive or complicated for the private sector, OR.. 3. Is too important to hand over to a corporation with a profit motive.
Re:A simple request
on
jQuery in Action
·
· Score: 3, Insightful
Girlintraining also seems to be developerintraining...
Some of your points make sense, I think most would agree about the futility in trying to lock down right clicks and such.
But there's a lot here that's simply wrong.
Not sanitizing content on the client side? You're right, it should be done on the server side. That's non negotiable. But it should also be done on the client side. It gives users immediate feedback and it prevents a wasted round-trip to the server. There are wrong ways to do this (alert() for example) but it's a must-have.
And your comments about hiding content, loading content, cookies and JS-dependance miss the point entirely: The goal here is graceful degradation.
Why am I going to cripple usability on a site by not supporting JS just because some luddites have it disabled? There's no reason you can't build a UI that relies on JS but degrades gracefully when it's not available, even if that means certain features being disabled.
Not to mention, some of your comments make me wonder if you've ever actually done any of this. How, exactly, is CSS and XML going to provide loading and reloading content on-demand the way JS can?
Furthermore, using JS does not, at all, mean mingling content and interface. Just because it's all composed in the browser as a single page doesn't mean it's developed that way.
Development is about nuance. Your "JS is bad" theory displays no nuance whatsoever.
We do have "term limits." They're called "elections."
Term limits are silly. For every incompetent that's term-limited we have a situation where we cannot elect the best man for the job because of a technicality.
If it weren't for term limits, sure, Reagan could've gotten a 3rd term. But that would hardly have been worse than Bush I. And on the flipside, Clinton would've surely run again in 2000 and most likely he would've stomped Bush II, saving America from 7 years of national tragedy.
In many state legislatures that have term limits (Ohio comes to mind), you constantly see legislators serving 2 terms in the State House, then 2 in the State Senate, then back to the House, ad infinitum.
No doubt you'd see that at the federal level as well.
Besides, many here forget that Stevens was marginalized in 2006 when Democrats took control of the Senate. He lost his chairmanship and was nothing more than a ranking minority Committeeman and Senator.
That PHP5 made great leaps forward by implementing a true object model?
Or the fact that PHP5, while good, was not the end-all-be-all that could fix every issue anyone has ever had?
Because if you actually read the link, that's the conclusion the author presents.
If you used PHP in 2000 then you probably used 3.x, or, maybe, an early 4.x version.
Not sure if you realize, but the language was rewritten from scratch for the 4.x release. So much so that it's really a different language entirely. So you either used the last release of the predecessor of modern PHP, or you used the very first version of a language.
Now tell me: Do you really think that makes you qualified to pass judgment on, arguably, the most widely-used language on the internet?
You are trolling. If you weren't you'd have no need to try to disclaim it.
There's no such thing as too many languages.
From a programmers perspective the more the market fragments the more opportunity for specialized knowledge that increases your market value.
And it seems you don't really understand the idea of M. This is not a general purpose language.
So your post is like saying "iPod? Great. Another computer to buy that is useless and no one will use. This glut of computers is fucking ridiculous. Why not make x86 boot quickly instead?"
The iPod is a specialized computer for a specialized task. Just like M.
If you're on Net10, then you should check that price list again...
You only pay 5 cents per message, not 10, and certainly not 20.
You would, however, pay 10 cents to send a text and then receive a response.
And when sending the 5 cents is flat -- so you can send a long text (displayed to your recipient in 3 parts) for the same 5 cents you'd pay to send a single character.
I used Verizon prepay, then Cingular, and for the last year or so Net10. It's the cheapest prepay plan I've found yet.
On most you pay a daily charge of some sort. On Net10 it's just the 10 cents a minute and 5 cents a text.
It uses the Cingular network, so it does use SIM cards but they're (unfortunately) crippled.
There are 2 exceptions:
1. Alltel has a pretty awesome prepay plan where you can add a-la-carte options like free texting. Alltel could turn out to be the best option for certain callers.
2. If you don't use your phone for at least 10 minutes a day on average you will end up paying the equivilent to the Verizon daily fees I mentioned:
When you buy airtime it has an expiration: if you buy $30 in airtime (300 minutes) you have 30 days to use it. ($90--900 mins--has 90 days, etc).
After that time any remaining mins you have expire.
This is ONLY a problem if you rarely use your phone because this actually accrues.
That is, if you were to add $30 airtime to a new phone today you'd have 300 mins to use by 11/10.
On 11/1, if you have (say) 200 mins left, you can buy another 300 minutes for $30 and your expiry date is pushed back to 12/10.
I've had Net10 for about a year and my expiry date is now sometime in 2012.
Finally, you can get an ok Nokia phone for free. It's $30 but includes 300 minutes in airtime.
I can add airtime using prepaid cards, the internet, or right from my phone as long as I've setup my CC details.
(Of course, most of this has been for the benefit of wh
That's certainly true. The only caveat I'd add would be that much of the problem isn't just "life" (in the proverbial sense).
In many cases today the problem is black and white fraud.
Yes, the borrower is at fault for taking more than they can afford.
But our system has functioned properly since the New Deal by bringing accountability to those in the financial sector.
Deregulation of the industry and a bevy of new financial instruments that are very difficult for individual regulators to fully understand and audit has eliminated this accountability.
Honestly, we need to see mortgage brokers going to JAIL. We need to see appraisers going to JAIL. We need to see MILLIONS in personal property of CEOs and CFOs and such confiscated as restitution.
The trouble is that this has NOT been happening as long as mortgages have been around.
Anyone that knows anything about econ knows at the core Economics is about incentives.
In the last 10-15 years inventives in real estate have been flipped backwards.
Let's just take a few examples:
#1 The rise of a secondary market for mortgages.
There was a time when most mortgages were self-funded. The bank would fund the mortgage out of its own pocket. If they were sold, it was to FNMA.
Banks had a real incentive to do solid deals on homes with proven valuations.
In the late 90s the secondary market exploded. Somebody figured how to sell just portions of a mortgage by combining it with portions of other mortgages into a MBS (Mortgage Backed Security) and these securities were sold as ROCK SOLID CREDIT opportunites. The reason?
#2 The derivatives market and other developments
The derivatives market is valued at an est. 6tn. Bigger than stocks. Bigger than bonds. This and other developments, like the consolidation of the IBank industry led to real issues with the 3 credit rating agencies. There began to be financial incentives to give good, AA and AAA ratings to securities.
So these MBS's were given, yes, A, AA and even AAA ratings. You have to understand that AAA means "rock solid investment." That is, a AAA credit rating is considered to be as good as a t-bill.
#3 Brokers Since banks sold mortgages to the secondary market, all of a sudden you didn't NEED $200k for 15 years to lend somebody $200k. All you needed is $200k for 180 days. This led to the rise of mortgage brokers. With far less scrutiny than banks, it was easier to fudge numbers to get deals made.
This led to an array of CRAZY financial instruments designed basically just to make a profit for the lender.
Take the infamous NINJA loan: No Income, No Job, No Assets. That is, you're given a mortgage based on nothing but good looks and your credit score. Nothing else is verified.
Or the interest-only loan with a balloon payment.
Or ARMs.
Technology played a part, too. A small role, but still, being able to access a HELC via a debit card makes that TV purchase or riding lawnmower or whatever a lot more tempting.
All of these things casue real issues with inventives.
Who is the appraiser working for? Well, he's hired by the loan officer. Who is the loan officer working for? Well, he's not lending his bosses money anymore, since the mortgage will be sold in 90 days after close anyway. Who is the agent working for?
This has NOT been business as usual. Make no mistake about that.
1. FF3 Has never crashed on you and Chrome has. You said you've used FF3 for "over a month." That means you weren't using it in Beta. Chrome is still Beta. Apples meet Oranges.
2. "Don't open a tab that's going to lock up your browser." Wow. You know, you're right. No reason for modern OS's to use protected memory. Lets all go back in time 20 years and use shared memory. After all, don't run an app that's going to lock your OS.
3. "Guess we should go ahead and make FF IE5 complient then" You can just read about this one on wikipedia.
4. "pretty hard to do in Chrome with all the tabs having the same process name mind you"... huh? The chrome task manager uses the page title as the process name. Click on the page title you want to kill, press "end process" and you're done.
5. "There aren't many out there" You're on one right now. The new discussion system here has locked up FF2 on my system dozens of times. It doesn't happen as much anymore, but it still does when there's >500 comments and I'm reading at +1.
6. The truth is, having one process per web application makes sense. 20 years ago OS's transitioned from cooperative multi-tasking and shared memory space to preemptive multi-tasking and protected memory space. That change allows us to do everything we take for granted now, although it probably wasn't NECESSARY to meet the needs of the time.
Google is correct: Most of the "websites" we love and use every day are actually web applications. And when you're running 5 applications in one process, you're right back into the 1980s world of cooperative multi-tasking. And in FF3 if one tab decides to throw a JS alert() box, that thread is no longer "cooperative" and all JS execution on the other 4 tabs has stopped.
And no, today's applications aren't yet at the point where they NEED their own process. But who knows how web app development could be retarded by not giving developers the kind of environment that has proven successful for Win32 development.
The truth is that you'll probably see this in FF4. It IS the next major leap in browser tech. Tabs took us from dos-era one-page-at-a-time browsing into a Win3.1 era of "almost multitasking."
Now we're about to enter the "NT era." No use fighting it.
Spawning a process on Windows does involve more overhead than it does on Linux.
But after its created, a quiet process doesn't use very many resources at all.
Chances are your Windows PC has about 200-400 process as soon as you start your PC. Still, it runs snappy. And I'm at work, I've got a 4 year old Latitude D800. Not bad, but hardly a speed machine.
Re:Firefox Damage Control Is More Than Enough
on
Chrome Vs. IE 8
·
· Score: 1
ok, are you seriously going to defend FF against Chrome by citing memory footprint?
Seriously? FF is hardly lean on memory.
And honestly, what Mozilla et al should find humiliating is that Google built a 1.0 browser with a JS virtual machine that just leaps over them in nearly all performance metrics.
First thing I did after installing Chrome yesterday is run the SunSpider benchmarks in FF3 and Chrome.
FF came in at about 8.5 seconds.
Chrome blazed through it in 5.1.
A 40% performance increase is simply breathtaking.
Don't get me wrong, FF is my daily browser. I have it customized to my tastes. But I'm using Chrome from now on for Gmail and other google apps, and really any JS-heavy site.
It screams. There is no comparison. The user experience on tons and tons of popular web-apps increases dramatically with Chrome.
Actually, IE8 will include many of these same features, specifically the use of protected memory for each "application" running in the browser.
Which makes me wonder... Did Microsoft ramp-up IE production due to competition from FireFox (as we have all assumed) or is it really because 2 years ago they confirmed the "gbrowser" rumors that swept the net..
First, what is "terrible" about this. Do you have any clue what a thread actually is? If so, do you have any notion of how much processing power a single, quiet thread uses?
The answer is "not much at all."
In fact, there's no doubt in my mind that if you're running a Windows OS, you're PC is currently managing hundreds and hundreds of threads.
The real irony here is that, by moving to a parallel multi-thread technology, IE8 will probably FEEL a lot faster to the user. Mozilla gets this. FF3 spawns new threads for plugins like Acrobat, which lets you load a PDF in one tab without freezing the others.
Furthermore, IE8 has a technology base very much like the Google Chrome browser announced a few days ago.
A unique thread AND protected memory space for each tab. This lets you run multiple web apps in multiple tabs without one interfering with the other. One can crash--you could lose a single tab--without the rest of the browser going with it.
The move from shared memory to protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking was a massive leap forward in OS design. That leap has now come to web browsers. This is a good thing.
Slashdot Mirror
A little revisionism there. Netscape did have the resources to develop a better browser. That browser could've been NS5 and it could've changed the course of browsers to this very day.
So much hay about MS killing NS. They certainly hurt them, but NS killed NS.
Instead of incrementally improving NS with a release-early, release-often strategy, they decided to completely rewrite the browser. 150 internet-years later they released NS6 and by that time they hadn't a chance.
It's slightly more than "aristocratic doubt."
The whole point is that we are not just one nation. We are a collection of *united* *states*.
That our state governments do represent more than just the population of those states.
The electoral college gives disproportionate representation to smaller states. Argue whether or not this is a good thing, but at least acknowledge that it was something that was deliberate and intentional.
We remove the Electoral College and Presidential candidates would have little incentive to do anything but travel up and down both coast lines with some additional time spent in the industrialized midwest.
What would that be good for our nation?
You're right. That's the real problem. ISPs are hacking vertically-- all BT traffic -- when they should be hacking horizontally:
I support a greedy node algorithm. Everyone starts with their burstable line, and the more you utilize, your cap slowly lowers until you reach a guaranteed minimum bandwidth threshold.
At the end of the day, greedy users will be greedy users. And if BT goes offline, they'll migrate to something else. And if I suck 100gb of crap off usenet in a month it's no different than 100gb of BT crap in terms of network stress.
Burstable lines make sense. It's a concept as old as timeshare. But if somebody is constantly "bursting" they need a governor on their line.
I hate to be the one invoking a Hitler reference--albeit tenuous--but the old parable about "They took the unionists, I was not a unionist, so I didn't protest. They took the _____, I was not a ____, so I didn't protest, ......" seems to fit.
Personally, I think this is a tough nut to crack. But if transferring files via a well established and well known protocol is going "meltdown" the internet, maybe the internet isn't as resilient as it should be?
I personally can't remember the last time I downloaded via torrent. I sucked tons of shit off P2P networks, napster, gnutella, fasttrack, even some BT, but I just graduated to an income bracket where I'm more time poor than cash poor.
But if we don't demand fair practices from ISPs it won't be long until they cross off BT and then move to the next biggest 80/20 rule traffic hog. And THAT might be something i DO care about.
Your post was a very succinct argument against *commercial* space travel.
But that's the whole point of the government program. Government's should do things that:
1. Are beneficial to mankind as a whole, AND..
2. Is too expensive or complicated for the private sector, OR..
3. Is too important to hand over to a corporation with a profit motive.
Girlintraining also seems to be developerintraining...
Some of your points make sense, I think most would agree about the futility in trying to lock down right clicks and such.
But there's a lot here that's simply wrong.
Not sanitizing content on the client side? You're right, it should be done on the server side. That's non negotiable. But it should also be done on the client side. It gives users immediate feedback and it prevents a wasted round-trip to the server. There are wrong ways to do this (alert() for example) but it's a must-have.
And your comments about hiding content, loading content, cookies and JS-dependance miss the point entirely: The goal here is graceful degradation.
Why am I going to cripple usability on a site by not supporting JS just because some luddites have it disabled? There's no reason you can't build a UI that relies on JS but degrades gracefully when it's not available, even if that means certain features being disabled.
Not to mention, some of your comments make me wonder if you've ever actually done any of this. How, exactly, is CSS and XML going to provide loading and reloading content on-demand the way JS can?
Furthermore, using JS does not, at all, mean mingling content and interface. Just because it's all composed in the browser as a single page doesn't mean it's developed that way.
Development is about nuance. Your "JS is bad" theory displays no nuance whatsoever.
Forget both and use ext.js
We do have "term limits." They're called "elections."
Term limits are silly. For every incompetent that's term-limited we have a situation where we cannot elect the best man for the job because of a technicality.
If it weren't for term limits, sure, Reagan could've gotten a 3rd term. But that would hardly have been worse than Bush I. And on the flipside, Clinton would've surely run again in 2000 and most likely he would've stomped Bush II, saving America from 7 years of national tragedy.
In many state legislatures that have term limits (Ohio comes to mind), you constantly see legislators serving 2 terms in the State House, then 2 in the State Senate, then back to the House, ad infinitum.
No doubt you'd see that at the federal level as well.
Besides, many here forget that Stevens was marginalized in 2006 when Democrats took control of the Senate. He lost his chairmanship and was nothing more than a ranking minority Committeeman and Senator.
They introduce web-based voice search years ago. I remember trying it on their Labs site as far back as 2002.
You'd call an 800#, speak your query, and a results page on your browser woudl refresh automatically w/ the results.
Google's MO is all due dilligence. Seems like they waited for this tech to mature before they rolled it out.
And in this spirit..
US Zip Code, either 5-digits or 9 (eg 12345-6789)
^\d{5}$|^\d{5}-\d{4}$
And the Canadian postal code:
^[a-zA-Z][0-9][a-zA-Z]\s?[0-9][a-zA-Z][0-9]$
Actually, I said "arguably, the most widely-used language on the internet"
And according to, you know, actual facts...
http://www.tiobe.com/index.php/content/paperinfo/tpci/index.html
What, exactly, was enlightening?
That PHP5 made great leaps forward by implementing a true object model?
Or the fact that PHP5, while good, was not the end-all-be-all that could fix every issue anyone has ever had?
Because if you actually read the link, that's the conclusion the author presents.
If you used PHP in 2000 then you probably used 3.x, or, maybe, an early 4.x version.
Not sure if you realize, but the language was rewritten from scratch for the 4.x release. So much so that it's really a different language entirely. So you either used the last release of the predecessor of modern PHP, or you used the very first version of a language.
Now tell me: Do you really think that makes you qualified to pass judgment on, arguably, the most widely-used language on the internet?
Oh please.
When I write this:
function foo() {}
it highlights the word "function" in blue.
Somehow, miraculously, when I type:
$x = "function foo() {}";
The IDE knows that this isn't a function declaration. And, lo and behold, so does the PHP interpreter.
Now tell me why you think an IDE will have trouble differentiating:
$x = 'this isn\'t hard';
and
$x = myNamepace\myClass::myFunction();
This makes no sense.
You're out of your depth.
Wait for the next FP post on WoW or something similarly inane.
You are trolling. If you weren't you'd have no need to try to disclaim it.
There's no such thing as too many languages.
From a programmers perspective the more the market fragments the more opportunity for specialized knowledge that increases your market value.
And it seems you don't really understand the idea of M. This is not a general purpose language.
So your post is like saying "iPod? Great. Another computer to buy that is useless and no one will use. This glut of computers is fucking ridiculous. Why not make x86 boot quickly instead?"
The iPod is a specialized computer for a specialized task. Just like M.
If you're on Net10, then you should check that price list again...
You only pay 5 cents per message, not 10, and certainly not 20.
You would, however, pay 10 cents to send a text and then receive a response.
And when sending the 5 cents is flat -- so you can send a long text (displayed to your recipient in 3 parts) for the same 5 cents you'd pay to send a single character.
I used Verizon prepay, then Cingular, and for the last year or so Net10. It's the cheapest prepay plan I've found yet.
On most you pay a daily charge of some sort. On Net10 it's just the 10 cents a minute and 5 cents a text.
It uses the Cingular network, so it does use SIM cards but they're (unfortunately) crippled.
There are 2 exceptions:
1. Alltel has a pretty awesome prepay plan where you can add a-la-carte options like free texting. Alltel could turn out to be the best option for certain callers.
2. If you don't use your phone for at least 10 minutes a day on average you will end up paying the equivilent to the Verizon daily fees I mentioned:
When you buy airtime it has an expiration: if you buy $30 in airtime (300 minutes) you have 30 days to use it. ($90--900 mins--has 90 days, etc).
After that time any remaining mins you have expire.
This is ONLY a problem if you rarely use your phone because this actually accrues.
That is, if you were to add $30 airtime to a new phone today you'd have 300 mins to use by 11/10.
On 11/1, if you have (say) 200 mins left, you can buy another 300 minutes for $30 and your expiry date is pushed back to 12/10.
I've had Net10 for about a year and my expiry date is now sometime in 2012.
Finally, you can get an ok Nokia phone for free. It's $30 but includes 300 minutes in airtime.
I can add airtime using prepaid cards, the internet, or right from my phone as long as I've setup my CC details.
(Of course, most of this has been for the benefit of wh
That's certainly true. The only caveat I'd add would be that much of the problem isn't just "life" (in the proverbial sense).
In many cases today the problem is black and white fraud.
Yes, the borrower is at fault for taking more than they can afford.
But our system has functioned properly since the New Deal by bringing accountability to those in the financial sector.
Deregulation of the industry and a bevy of new financial instruments that are very difficult for individual regulators to fully understand and audit has eliminated this accountability.
Honestly, we need to see mortgage brokers going to JAIL. We need to see appraisers going to JAIL. We need to see MILLIONS in personal property of CEOs and CFOs and such confiscated as restitution.
The trouble is that this has NOT been happening as long as mortgages have been around.
Anyone that knows anything about econ knows at the core Economics is about incentives.
In the last 10-15 years inventives in real estate have been flipped backwards.
Let's just take a few examples:
#1 The rise of a secondary market for mortgages.
There was a time when most mortgages were self-funded. The bank would fund the mortgage out of its own pocket. If they were sold, it was to FNMA.
Banks had a real incentive to do solid deals on homes with proven valuations.
In the late 90s the secondary market exploded. Somebody figured how to sell just portions of a mortgage by combining it with portions of other mortgages into a MBS (Mortgage Backed Security) and these securities were sold as ROCK SOLID CREDIT opportunites. The reason?
#2 The derivatives market and other developments
The derivatives market is valued at an est. 6tn. Bigger than stocks. Bigger than bonds. This and other developments, like the consolidation of the IBank industry led to real issues with the 3 credit rating agencies. There began to be financial incentives to give good, AA and AAA ratings to securities.
So these MBS's were given, yes, A, AA and even AAA ratings. You have to understand that AAA means "rock solid investment." That is, a AAA credit rating is considered to be as good as a t-bill.
#3 Brokers
Since banks sold mortgages to the secondary market, all of a sudden you didn't NEED $200k for 15 years to lend somebody $200k. All you needed is $200k for 180 days. This led to the rise of mortgage brokers. With far less scrutiny than banks, it was easier to fudge numbers to get deals made.
This led to an array of CRAZY financial instruments designed basically just to make a profit for the lender.
Take the infamous NINJA loan: No Income, No Job, No Assets. That is, you're given a mortgage based on nothing but good looks and your credit score. Nothing else is verified.
Or the interest-only loan with a balloon payment.
Or ARMs.
Technology played a part, too. A small role, but still, being able to access a HELC via a debit card makes that TV purchase or riding lawnmower or whatever a lot more tempting.
All of these things casue real issues with inventives.
Who is the appraiser working for? Well, he's hired by the loan officer. Who is the loan officer working for? Well, he's not lending his bosses money anymore, since the mortgage will be sold in 90 days after close anyway. Who is the agent working for?
This has NOT been business as usual. Make no mistake about that.
Allow me to return the favor..
1. FF3 Has never crashed on you and Chrome has. You said you've used FF3 for "over a month." That means you weren't using it in Beta. Chrome is still Beta. Apples meet Oranges.
2. "Don't open a tab that's going to lock up your browser." Wow. You know, you're right. No reason for modern OS's to use protected memory. Lets all go back in time 20 years and use shared memory. After all, don't run an app that's going to lock your OS.
3. "Guess we should go ahead and make FF IE5 complient then" You can just read about this one on wikipedia.
4. "pretty hard to do in Chrome with all the tabs having the same process name mind you" ... huh? The chrome task manager uses the page title as the process name. Click on the page title you want to kill, press "end process" and you're done.
5. "There aren't many out there" You're on one right now. The new discussion system here has locked up FF2 on my system dozens of times. It doesn't happen as much anymore, but it still does when there's >500 comments and I'm reading at +1.
6. The truth is, having one process per web application makes sense. 20 years ago OS's transitioned from cooperative multi-tasking and shared memory space to preemptive multi-tasking and protected memory space. That change allows us to do everything we take for granted now, although it probably wasn't NECESSARY to meet the needs of the time.
Google is correct: Most of the "websites" we love and use every day are actually web applications. And when you're running 5 applications in one process, you're right back into the 1980s world of cooperative multi-tasking. And in FF3 if one tab decides to throw a JS alert() box, that thread is no longer "cooperative" and all JS execution on the other 4 tabs has stopped.
And no, today's applications aren't yet at the point where they NEED their own process. But who knows how web app development could be retarded by not giving developers the kind of environment that has proven successful for Win32 development.
The truth is that you'll probably see this in FF4. It IS the next major leap in browser tech. Tabs took us from dos-era one-page-at-a-time browsing into a Win3.1 era of "almost multitasking."
Now we're about to enter the "NT era." No use fighting it.
Spawning a process on Windows does involve more overhead than it does on Linux.
But after its created, a quiet process doesn't use very many resources at all.
Chances are your Windows PC has about 200-400 process as soon as you start your PC. Still, it runs snappy. And I'm at work, I've got a 4 year old Latitude D800. Not bad, but hardly a speed machine.
ok, are you seriously going to defend FF against Chrome by citing memory footprint?
Seriously? FF is hardly lean on memory.
And honestly, what Mozilla et al should find humiliating is that Google built a 1.0 browser with a JS virtual machine that just leaps over them in nearly all performance metrics.
First thing I did after installing Chrome yesterday is run the SunSpider benchmarks in FF3 and Chrome.
FF came in at about 8.5 seconds.
Chrome blazed through it in 5.1.
A 40% performance increase is simply breathtaking.
Don't get me wrong, FF is my daily browser. I have it customized to my tastes. But I'm using Chrome from now on for Gmail and other google apps, and really any JS-heavy site.
It screams. There is no comparison. The user experience on tons and tons of popular web-apps increases dramatically with Chrome.
I agree. But I'm not too impressed by all the logging that's being transmitted back to Google.
But it's SO F'n FAST.
Do this: Load up all the comments and collapse/hide/expand them.
In FF I sometimes get the "slow script" warning. In Chrome, it doesn't even flinch.
I ran the SunSpider JS Benchmarks:
FF3 completed in 8.5 seconds
Chrome completed in 5.1.
Check out Gmail and Maps. Google maps scroll SO smooth. Gmail is just as responsive as a rich-client app.
Actually, IE8 will include many of these same features, specifically the use of protected memory for each "application" running in the browser.
Which makes me wonder... Did Microsoft ramp-up IE production due to competition from FireFox (as we have all assumed) or is it really because 2 years ago they confirmed the "gbrowser" rumors that swept the net..
First, what is "terrible" about this. Do you have any clue what a thread actually is? If so, do you have any notion of how much processing power a single, quiet thread uses?
The answer is "not much at all."
In fact, there's no doubt in my mind that if you're running a Windows OS, you're PC is currently managing hundreds and hundreds of threads.
The real irony here is that, by moving to a parallel multi-thread technology, IE8 will probably FEEL a lot faster to the user. Mozilla gets this. FF3 spawns new threads for plugins like Acrobat, which lets you load a PDF in one tab without freezing the others.
Furthermore, IE8 has a technology base very much like the Google Chrome browser announced a few days ago.
A unique thread AND protected memory space for each tab. This lets you run multiple web apps in multiple tabs without one interfering with the other. One can crash--you could lose a single tab--without the rest of the browser going with it.
The move from shared memory to protected memory and pre-emptive multi-tasking was a massive leap forward in OS design. That leap has now come to web browsers. This is a good thing.