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Google Chrome, Day 2

Posted by CmdrTaco on Wed Sep 03, 2008 09:25 AM
from the lookit-all-them-stories dept.
Businesses Google The Internet
Seems that almost every story submitted to Slashdot last night in some way involved Google's Chrome that we started talking about yesterday. Dotan Cohen noted that according to Clicky Chrome has hit 3% browser share. Since Google has decided to release Chrome only for Windows, I now share for you 3 reviews written by others: the first comes from alexy2k, the second from mildsiete, and the third from oli4uk. They all seem to feature various opinions, charts, and screenshots demonstrating various exciting points.
+ -
story

Related Stories

[+] Google Chrome, the Google Browser 807 comments
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google says Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."
[+] Mozilla's Thoughts On Google's Chrome 604 comments
tandiond writes to tell us that in a recent blog posting, Mozilla CEO John Lily shared his thoughts on Google's new browser project, Chrome, and what that means for Mozilla. "It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they've got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it'll be interesting to see how it evolves." Mozilla's Europe president, Tristan Nitot also chimed in during an interview with PCPro, stating that they don't view this as a direct attack on Firefox, even if it did catch them by surprise. "I'll take another example: just before Microsoft launched Vista, it invited us [to work with it] so that Firefox works better on Windows Vista. Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista. Therefore, it helped us improve Firefox for Vista. That's just the same for Google. It wants Firefox to perform well with its applications, that's for sure. Indeed, it even wants IE to perform well with Gmail and the rest. It's just that it has very limited control over this. That's why Google's been frustrated and it is launching this Chrome browser."
[+] Your Rights Online: Reading Google Chrome's Fine Print 607 comments
Much ink and many electrons are being spilled over Google's Chrome browser (discussed here twice in recent days): from deep backgrounders to performance benchmarks to its vulnerability to a carpet-bombing flaw. The latest angle to be explored is Chrome's end-user license agreement. It does not look consumer-friendly. "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."
[+] Google Claims User Content In Multiple Products 166 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Google last week removed some language in its Chrome browser's terms of service that gave the company a license to any material displayed in the browser, but that language remains in several other Google products, including its Picasa photo service and its Blogger service."
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Google Chrome, Day 2 50 Comments More /

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  • Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Informative)

    by xmas2003 (739875) * on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:26AM (#24858741) Homepage
    I looked at the web logs from a general purpose, non-techy website (Watching Grass Grow) [watching-grass-grow.com] and Chrome accounted for 0.73% of the browser traffic yesterday ... ... and traffic didn't start until after the release at Noon. The User Agent String is "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13" For comparison, IE was 53.8%, Firefox was 34.6%, Safari was 3.5% (non-Chrome) , Opera was 0.7%, and there was even 0.05% of traffic from an iPhone.

    That's an impressive bump for day one (actually, half a day) and if you (unrealistically) extrapolated that rate, Chrome would have 100% of the browser market by year end! ;-)

    I had to modify the Analog source code to account for the Chrome browser (gotta like open-source) but have have other popular programs (such as Google Analytics) been updated to identify this browser?

  • A couple of annoying things I've found so far (Score:5, Informative)

    by rallymatte (707679) * on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:27AM (#24858751)
    You can't seem to change the default new page. For example, open up a new tab and you'll see recently closed tabs and most visited pages. If a collegue wants to use a browser on your computer you might not want him to see a screenshot on your most viewed pages.
    The other thing that I personally find a bit annoying is that if you don't put http:/// [http] in front of or / after a url that is within one of your search domains, it automatically assumes that you want to search the web for that, lets say there's a server on your network that you haven't visited before called server1.domain.com and you have domain.com among your search domains, it will go off to google.com and search for server1 if you only type in server1 in the address bar. But then again, maybe that's just me.

    -
    Posted with Google Chrome

  • NetApplications shows 1% share (Score:5, Informative)

    by bunratty (545641) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:27AM (#24858753)
    According to NetApplications, Chrome has around 1% usage share [hitslink.com]. That's pretty good for a browser still only in beta.

  • Chrome Eval (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Ethanol-fueled (1125189) * on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:27AM (#24858759) Homepage
    I tried it out on my XP box yesterday and I was very impressed with it, especially its speed, but a quick look through the options revealed that DNS prefetching is enabled by default.

    The show-stopper is(as of now) no NoScript/AdBlock! I've become spoiled with ad-free pages and seeing that first obnoxious flash ad was enough to convince me to keep FF as my browser of choice -- at least until a few plug-ins are made for Chrome.

          • Re:Chrome Eval (Score:5, Insightful)

            by arevos (659374) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:35AM (#24859981) Homepage

            That day would also spell the end of the web. Most sites exist because of ad revenue, you know.

            Adblock does not, by default block Google text ads that appear alongside search results. Nor do I have any desire to block them, because they are often useful and relevant.

            The problem isn't with ads. The problem is the low signal-to-noise ratio for most online ads.

  • I'll stick with Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Massacrifice (249974) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:31AM (#24858813)

    Really, I still don't see why I'd have to switch from FF3 to this new browser, free or not. I mean, once you get rid of IE's security hole and MS lock-in web technology, a browser's a browser, right?

    I understand that Google want to have their own, but the established base of Firefox, with its plugins and extensions beats all for now, from a desktop user perspective.

    I'll let the hype pass before I have a look.

    • Re:I'll stick with Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Tribbin (565963) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:43AM (#24859023) Homepage

      1. The memory tool that displays per-tab mem usage.
      2. Sensible memory management.
      3. Fast?
      4. Sandboxed tabs.

      • Re:I'll stick with Firefox (Score:5, Informative)

        by Tumbleweed (3706) * on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:47AM (#24860149) Homepage

        1. The memory tool that displays per-tab mem usage.
        2. Sensible memory management.
        3. Fast?
        4. Sandboxed tabs.

        As far as I'm concerned, point 4 is the killer feature for me of Chrome. I won't use it as my default browser until several of my must-have extensions are availble for it (via Google Gears, I assume), but that's the kind of infrastructure planning that's hurting Firefox in a big way. Adobe's buggy Flash player shouldn't be ABLE to crash the browser, or even temporarily lock it up! The Flash specs are all open now, so hopefully one of the open source projects will soon be able to update everything they couldn't reverse engineer and get something decent out the door, but if not, Chrome will surely mature within a few months to have most of the functionality I need on a MUCH better thought-out platform than FF.

  • Chrome is spyware! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:32AM (#24858835)

    Install it and 'Google Update' is silently installed along with it with no apparent way of turning it off besides regedit/msconfig. So much for "Don't be Evil".

  • Google spying on you (Score:5, Interesting)

    by edelholz (1098395) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:33AM (#24858839)

    Apparently, every installation of Chrome gets an unique id [lawblog.de] (sorry, German only) and, once you've signed into your Google account ONCE, the unique id gets connected with your account and you'll always be traceable back to your Google account, even if you're not logged in.

    That's a showstopper. But I'm hoping for a spy-free version to be out soon, the beauty of open source!

    • Re:Google spying on you (Score:5, Funny)

      by flynns (639641) <sean@@@topdoggps...com> on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:41AM (#24858987) Homepage Journal

      So, uh, what happens if someone else logs into their google account, then?

    • Re:Google spying on you (Score:5, Informative)

      by spyrochaete (707033) <spyrochaete@hypp y . z a p t o . o rg> on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:01AM (#24859333) Homepage Journal
      Matt Cutts denies that Google spies on your browsing and form submissions in this post on his blog [mattcutts.com].

    • Re:Google spying on you (Score:5, Informative)

      by edelholz (1098395) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:28AM (#24859847)

      Read further on Google's privacy policy [google.com] for Chrome.

      # When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
      # If you navigate to a URL that does not exist, Google Chrome may send the URL to Google so we can help you find the URL you were looking for. You can disable this feature as explained here.
      # Google Chrome's SafeBrowsing feature periodically contacts Google's servers to download the most recent list of known phishing and malware sites. In addition, when you visit a site that we think could be a phishing or malware site, your browser will send Google a hashed, partial copy of the site's URL so that we can send more information about the risky URL. Google cannot determine the real URL you are visiting from this information. More information about how this works is here.
      # Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers. These numbers and information about your installation of the browser (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when you first install and use it and when Google Chrome automatically checks for updates. If you choose to send usage statistics and crash reports to Google, the browser will send us this information along with a unique application number as well. Crash reports can contain information from files, applications and services that were running at the time of a malfunction. We use crash reports to diagnose and try to fix any problems with the browser.

      So they send them the URLs I visit and there's an unique id. And I'm still to lazy to check out the source about how it's used...

    • Re:Google spying on you (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Simon (S2) (600188) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:42AM (#24860095) Homepage

      I posted [slashdot.org] this earlier today, but I feel I have to post this again, as it is really important people know what they get in to using this browser:

      In metrics_service.cc [chromium.org] [chromium.org]
      it sends everything you do in the toolbar to
      static const char kMetricsURL[] =

              "https://toolbarqueries.google.com/firefox/metrics/collect";
      It collects everything and sends it to google servers, on startup and on shutdown.

      // Ongoing log typically
      // contain very detailed records of user activities (ex: opened tab, closed
      // tab, fetched URL, maximized window, etc.) In addition, just before an
      // ongoing log is closed out, a call is made to gather memory statistics. Those
      // memory statistics are deposited into a histogram, and the log finalization
      // code is then called. In the finalization, a call to a Histogram server
      // acquires a list of all local histograms that have been flagged for upload
      // to the UMA server.
      //
      // When the browser shuts down, there will typically be a fragment of an ongoing
      // log that has not yet been transmitted. At shutdown time, that fragment
      // is closed (including snapshotting histograms), and converted to text. Note
      // that memory stats are not gathered during shutdown, as gathering *might* be
      // too time consuming. The textual representation of the fragment of the
      // ongoing log is then stored persistently as a string in the PrefServices, for
      // potential transmission during a future run of the product.

      WHAT THE FUCK. Keep ff ftw.
      If your privacy means nothing to you just use Chrome.

  • local anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)

    by pohl (872) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:34AM (#24858867) Homepage

    In my office, there are several windows developers who were excited to try Chrome yesterday - one enthusiastically declaring that he was going to uninstall his other browser as soon as he got home. What struck me about this is that these are people who would never, in a million years, lift a finger to try Safari/Windows - yet here they are drooling over how snappy a WebKit-based browser is. The prospect of increased WebKit adoption makes me happy.

    • Re:local anecdote (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Lendrick (314723) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:45AM (#24859057) Homepage Journal

      For me, it's not about WebKit at all. Chrome has two features I've wanted for ages: One, separate tabs are separate processes, which means that alert windows and that kind of crap are all tab-modal instead of application-modal. That way one little alert window can't tie up five tabs. The other thing is the JavaScript execution speed, which is nice.

      That said, I'm not 100% sold on it. I like Firefox, and there are big JavaScript improvements coming down the pipe in the near future. Hopefully the tab feature will be picked up by Firefox in the near future as well, but we'll see... it may require a major rewrite.

    • Re:local anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Zoidbergo (751725) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:49AM (#24859141) Homepage

      I would characterize Chrome as "Safari for Windows done right."

      There were massive mistakes Apple made (out of arrogance or incompetence, I'm not sure), when releasing Safari for Windows:

      - Apple style Font rendering. Having to switch your eyes between Safari's anti-aliasing and ClearType on a regular basis starts to hurt your eyes, one seems blurry in comparison to the other.
      - Safari didn't follow many of the standard windows app behaviors, another snafu. You can't stuff OS X app behaviors down the throats of Windows users, and vice versa.
      - It also had an incredibly slow startup time. (Although it would render extremely fast)

      Contrast this to Chrome, which renders text using ClearType and windows font rendering, behaves like a windows app, starts up really fast.

      It's not even like I'm bashing Apple for a bad port. iTunes for windows was ported really well, it follows (for the most part, except menus) the windows UI conventions and font rendering, so it feels more like a Windows app.

      (By the way, I'm primarily a Mac user and use Safari regularly on the Mac)

  • Yuck (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Bazman (4849) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:34AM (#24858871) Journal

    I'll start using Chrome the instant they have a plugin that blocks annoying flashing multi-colour favicons.

    [for those who haven't read the links, just go to the second so-called 'review' link, which is really a review of reviews...]

  • Things I like, Things I don't (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Zerth (26112) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:38AM (#24858933) Homepage

    The inspect element tool is awesome, lets you see the tree and go to any element you can right click on.

    Killable tabs, I open tons of new tabs/windows in any browser I use and I hate it when one crashes and takes out a dozen pages I had open earlier to read later and then have to grep and guess through my history. This makes my day

    When you search, it puts little marks on the scroll bar where results are. That's neat.

    The tweaked tab system is great. Create new windows from tabs, drag tabs between windows, consolidate windows into tabs.

    On the other hand

    I really miss scroll-click and smooth scrolling. But it isn't the end of the world.

    While I like having tabs on top, having the File/options/etc WIMP standards under that little button to the right of the address bar is kinda weird.

    It's beta. It's very beta. Somewhere above "everybody else's beta" and but slightly below the usual "Google beta" quality.

    I turned the awesome bar off.

    But I still want it to do math for me.

  • Reviews suck (Score:5, Informative)

    by Phylarr (981216) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:40AM (#24858963)
    One reviewer hadn't even installed the browser yet. Seriously.

    I installed Google's browser. It sucked. Didn't ask where I wanted to install it. No adblocker (and probably never will be). Very limited configuration options. Couldn't handle my font colors. Set GoogleUpdate.exe to run every time my computer starts. Took me to a "why are you uninstalling it" web form when I went to uninstall it, and the web form didn't work. Ass sucking from start to finish. Classic Google.

  • do not pass go. do not collect $200 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by the_B0fh (208483) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:42AM (#24858995) Homepage

    Does it matter how good or bad it is, when you type in:

    about:plugins

    and the first thing you see is:

    ActiveX Plug-in
    File name: activex-shim
    ActiveX Plug-in provides a shim to support ActiveX controls

  • DO NOT READ 3rd link (Score:5, Informative)

    by FiloEleven (602040) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:56AM (#24859261)

    It's not malicious or anything, it's just very, very poor writing and will make you angry.

  • Google update service installed without choice (Score:5, Informative)

    by kriston (7886) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:10AM (#24859497) Homepage Journal

    The Goodle update service program is installed without the choice to avoid running it.
    It is a regular background process started from HKCU\\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run.
    The files are installed to %HOMEPATH%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Update.

    By any sensible definition, applications that "phone home" are spyware when they cannot be opted out upon installation.
    Google Earth's downloader asks you if you want to install it, but Chrome's downloader just goes ahead and sideloads it without asking. Worse, it's not easy to remove, since you have to edit your registry or use a registry "autorun" hacking tool to remove this "phone home" application.

    I don't understand Google's motivation for installing this without prompting the user or providing a removal option.

  • One click install???? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by argent (18001) <peterNO@SPAMslashdot.2006.taronga.com> on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:10AM (#24859505) Homepage Journal

    OK, I went to install Google Chrome, and the "download and install" button started running an external application without any prompts. Needless to say I immediately cancelled it and started digging through the source to see what the fox is going on.

    function installApp() {
        if (isOneClickEnabled() && _GU_isOneClickAvailable()) {
          installViaOneClick();
        } else if (isClickOnceEnabled() && _GU_isClickOnceAvailable()) {
          installViaClickOnce();
        } else {
          installViaDownload();
        }
    }

    I am sure that some Google software that I installed in the past has given google this capability, rather than this being some kind of trust relationship between Mozilla and Google. I'm even sure that at some point I clicked "OK" to some question that said it was OK for them to do X, Y, and Z, and that included this capability.

    Regardless...

    I don't think this kind of backdoor is even vaguely sane, no matter how "non evil" Google may be. If this capability exists, then the possibility exists for other folks who aren't so "non evil".

    This is something I'd expect from Microsoft.

    And if they could slip something like that past a fellow as paranoid as me, they sure didn't provide nearly enough disclosure.

    So...

    What's going on. Is this something in Google Gears? In some other Google tool? I guess I'll have to start dissecting my browser and figure out exactly what the hell they're doing.

  • The jewel in this software is V8 (Score:5, Insightful)

    by kriston (7886) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @10:15AM (#24859589) Homepage Journal

    The user interface is limitted and the options available for customization are practically nonexistent based on a somewhat single-sided view from Goodger that browsers should not be customizable.
    The real value of Chrome is V8, the JavaScript engine, and the smart, asynchronous management of native-code JavaScript objects on the client (without re-parsing them over and over).

    V8 will be released to the open source community and hopefully will be the standard JavaScript engine for Firefox which actually has a useful user interface.

    I can't really speak of Gears, though, but I think the real value of this release is V8.

    • Re:How do they do it? (Score:5, Informative)

      by pohl (872) on Wednesday September 03 2008, @09:48AM (#24859117) Homepage

      Did they use large chunks of other open-source browsers? If so, which ones?

      Yes, they chose the WebKit [webkit.org] rendering engine, which is the same one you find in browsers like Konqueror, Safari, and Google's own Android platform.

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