New Chrome Beta Adds Themes, Speed, & HTML 5 Video 207
adeelarshad82 writes "Google developers are always working on and updating Chrome in three channels — Stable, Beta, and Developer — in increasing positions on the bleeding-edge scale. Today the company thought changes to the Beta channel warranted a post on the main Google Blog. The advances range from the superficial addition of themes for customizing the browser's window borders to even faster speed under the hood to internal support for HTML 5 tags such as <video> and 'web workers,' which allows the browser to divvy processing work among sub-threads."
Still not a Chrome user (Score:4, Interesting)
The first thing that really got me about Chrome was how well it seemed to learn my browsing habits. At least, that was my first impression when I booted it up. The first view you get in Chrome is the "most visited websites" page or something like that. As a incognito porn site surfer, I was really taken aback and worried about privacy issues.
It took a long time in Firefox to fix the URL history functionality. It used to keep the URLs in some cache so that it could be called up right away when you started entering a URL into the address bar. Now, the URLs at least seem like they are gone forever when you delete them from your History.
IE still has this problem (in addition to completely retarded address bar behavior). In fact, if you delete the entire browsing history at once, the URLs themselves can never be deleted except by completely clearing the cache, but then that also deletes the "cover" sites that I visit to make it seem like my surfing is just innocuous browsing and not the hardcore porn viewing which it ostensibly is.
So if Chrome wants my patronage, I think the first thing it needs to do is convince me that my personal privacy is safe. That my URLs aren't going to be cached and exposed at some inopportune time, and that it isn't tracking them for me to helpfully find other related websites.
In this way, I've found Firefox to be the most accommodating browser on the market today. It does what I want and doesn't try to be smart about it. Funny how so many things in life work better that way.
Re:Yes... (Score:2, Interesting)
I refuse to use a browser that phones home.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Firefox (Score:1, Interesting)
I use Firefox and will never in my lifetime use a browser made by a data collector like Google.
Re:NoScript and Adblock (Score:2, Interesting)
In all 4 years I have been using Firefox, I have never seen it went pass 800MBs RAM, even with the heaviest browsing (about 70+ tabs), so I can't understand why people complains so much about it consuming too much ram :-/ Sure it consume quite a bit of ram with normal browsing (171MB with 10 tabs open on Linux right now) but I haven't seen any memory leak yet. I also tend to keep Firefox open for several days too.
Re:NoScript and Adblock (Score:1, Interesting)
However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.
Then I don't think you will be using Chrome anytime soon. Javascript and ads are everything when talking about Google.
What's the video codec ? (Score:3, Interesting)
are they supporting theora (like firefox) or just h.264 ? both would be great, of course.
Re:Still no Adblock though (Score:2, Interesting)
(Then again, I've recently fallen in love with google after discovered Docs/Calender/Etc...
I am willing to accept unobstrusice ads (Score:5, Interesting)
In the non-cyber world, we all accept ads in the magazines and newspapers, realizing the subsidy they provide to the mags and papers. Same way here.
I wish there is a way to set my browser agent to tell the websites something like:
Will accept text ads.
Will reject all animations gif, flash or javascript.
Will allow 20% of screen real estate to ads.
Content load time not less than 0.33 times ad load time.
Currently looking for ads with keywords : digital camera, DVD cases/sleeves, air tickets to India
Re:NoScript and Adblock (Score:4, Interesting)
Oh I see. I'm running Firefox 3.5 like this (I'm on Linux too):
1213m 272m 43m R
and this is not a problem. The first figure 1213 MB includes also libraries shared with other programs. 272 MB is how much memory Firefox is using on its own. 639 MB for you, which is quite a lot but if you have a lot of tabs and windows it should be expected.
Chrome reaches 100 on Acid, Great Sunspider score (Score:3, Interesting)
Having passed all of the different Acid Tests [acidtests.org] with a perfect score on the latest JavaScript oriented Acid [acidtests.org] test.
My thumbnail look at Sunspider scores shows about a 20% overall speedup over the latest Firefox beta, but Firefox wins in enough of the individual tests that I expect BOTH to improve quite a bit, that is if the fastest times on each are used, even Chrome's time would be 20% better.
Re:Does it install in the right place? (Score:3, Interesting)
A recent World of Warcraft patch moved the entire game into "AppData" as well, they claimed it was a "necessity" for Windows Vista 64-bit compatibility.
WOW *does* incorrectly keep Add-Ons in Program Files, so what was happening is that some Vista users (depending on their permissions) were getting their Add-Ons installed into the fake Program Files folder that Vista keeps around for retarded software written by retarded developers who don't understand permissions. The solution to their problem was to move *just* the Add-Ons folder to where it should have been all along, not the whole multi-GB game! Idiots.