Google Chrome Is Out of Beta

BitZtream writes "This morning Google announced that Chrome is out of Beta, and showing improvements for plugin support, most notably video speed improvements. It also contains an updated javascript engine, claiming that it operates 1.4 times faster than the beta version, and work has begun on an extensions platform to allow easier integration with the browser by third parties."

Credit where credit is due

[AKAImBatman]

I have to give the Chrome team credit. Chrome has been improving in stability and usability almost like magic. From day to day, it seems like problems I had previously just disappear. As it turns out, Chrome has an automatic updater that runs in the background. The browser is constantly and silently upgrading itself as the Chrome team push out new updates. The results are quite impressive.

If you'd reading this in chrome and want to force the most recent update, just go to the "About" screen. Chrome will tell you if an update is available and allow you to manually run the updater. There's a good chance that most users are already updated, but it doesn't hurt to check.

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open. Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As...". I realize that keeping a single Downloads directory is userfriendly, but using it as the default location when the user is overriding the download location is annoying. If I need to download 10 files, I need to navigate to the same directory 10 times. That's just ridiculous.

Otherwise my gripes are mostly minor and have no real bearing on its use in day to day activities. (e.g. I hate that I can't view the properties of an image. Sometimes I need to verify that its under a certain size. Or that there's no easy method of tracking page errors.) Thankfully, most of my gripes are developer-related and are better served by keeping a copy of FireFox around.

Kudos to Google for working on another alternative to Internet Explorer! If Chrome and Firefox can each grab a significant marketshare, Internet Explorer's hold over the Internet will disappear. Firefox's popularity has already caused it to wane. I look forward to the day when using IE will net you nothing but pages telling you to upgrade your web browser. :-)

Still no Mac / Linux support.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd love to try it, but I'm still waiting for the Mac and Linux ports. But I guess if they take it out of beta before those are out, it's not on the top of their list.

Re:Addons

[pushing-robot]

Get Privoxy [privoxy.org] and don't look back.

Re:Addons

[rite_m]

They are going to [chromium.org] support extensions. The list includes content-filtering extensions like ad-block.

Re:Neat - Mac OS X ? Linux?

[secmartin]

There are .dmg's of the current version at http://securityandthe.net/chrome/ [securityandthe.net] if you want to give it a try. These are based on the current SVN tree.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[AKAImBatman]

I agree. The WebKit team has been simply amazing. Though in Google's defense, parts of the browser are customizations over WebKit. e.g. The V8 Javascript engine is quite a bit different from JSKit or Squirrelfish.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Arionhawk]

The killer feature that I still think is missing is the ability to exit and save tabs. Chrome can Restore after a crash (most of the time), but you can't manually restart the browser without loosing the history you have open. Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As...". I realize that keeping a single Downloads directory is userfriendly, but using it as the default location when the user is overriding the download location is annoying. If I need to download 10 files, I need to navigate to the same directory 10 times. That's just ridiculous.

That "killer feature" is in there, you just have to turn it on in the options, in the "on start-up" section. You just select the option that says restore the pages that were open last. I agree with you on the saving files thing, that is rather annoying.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[AKAImBatman]

You just select the option that says restore the pages that were open last.

Dude, you just made my day. I wonder when that was added? Or did I simply not notice it back when they released the browser?

Re:Attn: Network admins Security issue

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

(Please note, I say this as the IT guy who locks stuff down)

Chrome's behavior is shared with many other newer programs(usually if you install them with the "just for me" rather than "for all users" option) and is a good thing. Programs that break unnecessarily because of lack of permissions they don't need are a bad thing. This is all part of the move away from legacy single-user design crap, where virtually everything requires arbitrary rights, programs die if they aren't in C:/Program Files, and there is poor or no separation between immutable system files and commonly modified user files.

If tightly controlling installed applications is necessary, you can use signature or hash based execution restrictions, and solve the problem the right way, rather than relying on the behavior of third parties.

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Enderandrew]

I only used Chrome for a day before going back to Adblock Plus and Firefox, but I swore there was an option to turn this off.

Then again Google already has tons of my private data via email and I'm not overtly paranoid. If you want a version of Chrome that doesn't phone home at all, check out Iron.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[daver00]

(e.g. I hate that I can't view the properties of an image. Sometimes I need to verify that its under a certain size. Or that there's no easy method of tracking page errors.)

This I don't understand it, but this is the biggest misconception about chrome there is! Chrome has the best and most comprehensive page debugger I have seen, for Javascript, html and css. Right click on your image, and select "inspect element" from the menu. You will get all of your image properties plus all of its surrounding code. Page errors, same deal just right click and select "inspect element" and you can get an extremely good, verbose output of any javascript errors, or track your way through the dom as it highlights elements firebug style.

Chrome rules, it is the best browser bar none, especially when it comes to development!

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Paul Slocum]

Another issue I wish they'd fix is remembering the last save directory when doing a "Save As..."...

If you're in Windows, Direct Folders [codesector.com] fixes that problem in almost every program. I'm not one to install a lot of add-ons, but since I discovered Direct Folders, I can't live without it.

Re:Moderators, please note: Microsoft troll

[Anonymous Coward]

This person does nothing but anonymously troll Slashdot for a living. He is a shill and should be modded "-1, Troll".

Re:Addons

[Anonymous Coward]

Privoxy it the bomb. It even works for IE.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[amRadioHed]

Doesn't really work. I disabled the GoogleUpdater service long ago, and yet the process is still running.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Anonymous Coward]

This is one area where Linux is unquestionably better-designed and easier to use than Windows.

In Windows, you have Windows Update and Java Updater and Apple's updater and GoogleUpdater and umpteen other updaters, all sucking up resources, all with completely different user interfaces -- oh, and also some other programs that don't update automatically at all so you have to check for updates manually or get stuck with an old version.

In Linux, you just have one updater, and it handles everything. Automatically. And normally you don't even have to reboot.

It's a shame Microsoft is refusing to learn. If Windows would only copy the good bits of Linux, while retaining the excellent software support which is the main reason people use it, it could be the best OS around, instead of merely the most widespread.

Re:Good!

[headbulb]

I would suggest to the original poster to use chromium instead of chrome. Chromium doesn't send what's typed in the address bar till enter is hit.

I would suggest that anyone that's wanting to protect things being sent to Google should totally disable any search from the search bar. In any browser.

Re:Credit where credit is due

[Lyrael]

Been there since the start, as has the option to change your default download location....it's in the second tab of the options. :)

Re:But does it run Linux?

[creativeHavoc]

Chrome has a status bar. It doesnt show unless there is status though. It shows as a blue background box in the lower left of the browser. There is a stop button. It shows up when a page is loading. It is located on the far right of the address bar. It replaces the "play" or "go" button that is there when you already have a page loaded. This makes a little more sense than Operas way of doing it, which is to show the stop button in place of the refresh button... however both make sense in their own way.

Re:just what we need

[lysergic.acid]

Google also offers a variety of other web services besides search. and most Google Apps services have complex enough interfaces to make cross-browser compatibility a major hassle, i imagine.

as for StarOffice/OpenOffice, i think it's important to first understand why Sun purchased StarOffice:

The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft. (Simon Phipps, Sun, LUGradio podcast.)

offering StarOffice as a free download (for personal use) was a great way to promote their office suite and did not conflict with their original goal. then perhaps following in the footsteps of Netscape with Mozilla, Sun opened the source code for StarOffice, creating OpenOffice. this further boosted the popularity of StarOffice/OpenOffice (which /. no doubt had a hand in) and also accelerated the development of the StarOffice code base by enlisting the help of the open source community.

Sun then adds proprietary components to snapshots of the OpenOffice code base to develop StarOffice. these proprietary components include:

• Several font metric compatible Unicode TrueType fonts containing bitmap representations for better appearance at smaller font sizes
• Twelve Western fonts (including Andale Sans, Arial Narrow, Arial Black, Broadway, Garamond, Imprint MT Shadow, Kidprint, Palace Script, Sheffield) and seven Asian language fonts (including support for the Hong Kong Supplementary character set)
• Adabas D database
• StarOffice-only templates and sample documents
• A large clip art gallery
• Sorting functionality for Asian versions
• File import filters for additional older word-processing formats (including EBCDIC, DisplayWrite, MultiMate, PFS Write, WordStar, WordStar 2000, and XyWrite (conversion filters licensed from MasterSoft))
• A different spell checker (note that OpenOffice.org includes a spell checker as well) and thesaurus
• StarOffice Configuration Manager
• Macro Converter for converting Microsoft Office VBA macros to StarOffice Basic

so by contributing to OpenOffice, Sun is still just contributing to StarOffice. funding both projects allows them to have the best of both worlds, and doesn't really cost them anything extra. they gain the benefits of an active open source development community, and they also get to keep a proprietary office suite to sell, in which they can include components they're unable to include in OO.org.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[revealingheart]

Rlz.dll, the closed-source file that pings Google on certain actions, is still there.

It appears in the latest zipped Chromium builds too (v.6830), which wasn't there in the October builds (v.3979). Chromium only uses it if it's there, and likely the same for Chrome, so you can delete it and be happy.

Re:just what we need

[Pierre Phaneuf]

I still don't understand why Google and Sun are offering the same software under different names. Google is backing the Mozilla Foundation while supporting their own Chrome (read: they didn't write Firefox, just back it), and Sun is distributing both OpenOffice and StarOffice.

What are you saying here? That Chrome and Firefox are the same software?!? What you're saying about Sun seems right, but Chrome and Firefox aren't close at all...

Re:I know its unpopular to bag on the Mighty Googl

[Bert690]

That ID is only ever sent if you opt in to sending usage stats and crash reports. And if you were dumb enough to opt in when you're paranoid about these sorts of things, you can opt out with the "Under the Hood" menu.

Re:But does it run Linux?

[BZ]

There are several fun things going into the performance difference there. The three main ones I know of are:

1) MSVC++ happens to generate faster (and smaller) code than g++ does. This is especially noticeable when turning on profile-guided optimization. That gave a 10% speedup across the board on Windows, and basically nothing on Linux. It seems that the g++ profile-guided optimizer could use a lot of work.
2) Certain parts of the OS that are of critical importance to web browser performance are faster on Windows at this point (Uniscribe vs Pango and whatever GDI vs X are the two main comparisons here). It doesn't help that moving to cairo means that a lot of operations are delegated to the X server, via RENDER. In theory this means that they can be executed efficiently on the graphics hardware, but in practice it means they use the same software codepaths that the browser could have used itself. In fact RENDER uses the same pixman library that cairo uses for its own software fallback, except recent cairo versions use a much newer and faster pixman. And while it's possible to ship a cutting-edge cairo with the browser and get the faster pixman for client-side use even if your system cairo is older and slower, I don't think you want your browser making changes to your Xorg install. ;)
3) Some of the system APIs on Windows are a little easier to use efficiently than equivalent ones on Linux. Font selection on Linux, apparently, did get a good bit faster an memory efficient between Firefox 3 and the current Firefox 3.1 beta. But this took a good bit of analysis of exactly how fontconfig works and how to work around some of what it does.

Re:Don't forget the WebKit team

[kestasjk]

How about giving the KHTML team some credit for writing WebKit? It seems like only yesterday that Apple forked KHTML from Konqueror.

It's definitely the most impressive thing about KDE that they wrote such a good rendering engine that both Apple and Google ended up using it, but you always hear Apple getting praise for WebKit but never the KHTML team. (A bit like OS X and BSD I suppose, but more so)

Re:just what we need

[Simon Brooke]

It makes far less sense if the two products aren't build using the same parts, of course, which is why the car analogy falls flat when talking about Google.

If you believe that the car industry analogy falls flat, you know nothing about the car market. I can go out today and buy a Ford Mondeo, or a Volvo V70, or a Saab 93, or a Jaguar XF - all competing directly against one another, all with significantly different engineering and tooling, all made by Ford. Google only supports two browsers (and only makes one). Ford has about six entirely different executive saloon cars.