Google Betas Chrome 4, Touts 30% Speed Boost 383
CWmike writes "Google upgraded the beta version (4.0.223.16) of its Chrome browser yesterday, boasting a 30% speed improvement over the current production edition and adding integrated bookmark synchronization. Developers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin, who announced the release, tout Chrome 4.0's faster JavaScript rendering speeds. 'We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, and by 400% since our first stable release,' they said, referring to Chrome 3.0. The new beta includes the ability to sync bookmarked sites across multiple computers."
60% faster loss of privacy (Score:4, Insightful)
I bet google would love to see your bookmarks, I bet advertisers would pay dearly for that sort of info.
Love to use it, but... (Score:1, Insightful)
This is like the situation with Google Earth which only eventually showed up in a Mac version a few years after the Windows version.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:1, Insightful)
It's snappy but the lack of plugins like NoScript, Adblock Plus, Firebug, and numerous others is what kills it for me. So I stick with Firefox and the 3.6 beta isn't bad at all.
100% less advertisements would be nice... (Score:2, Insightful)
No AdBlock, No mouse gestures... No Chrome :)
Re:60% faster loss of privacy (Score:5, Insightful)
if only you could look at the source* to see that they are not doing that...wait what?
*and if you don't trust them compile your own
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, less features.
Firefox is bloated now. Too many features, those features cost RAM and CPU time. Start adding all the 'must have' extensions that geeks use and Firefox REALLY starts to suck ass performance wise.
Couple in that Mozilla has seriously lost its focus and is too busy inventing more crap rather than making Firefox run properly. Mozilla building something like Breakpad/Socorro makes sense, adding crap like new font formats when they already support ones that are more than capable and MORE open is.
Chrome doesn't have a bunch of crap to tweak, doesn't support everything and the kitchen sink. You get far less features from Chrome and more speed.
You decide which one is more important for you. Me, I take Chrome for web browsing, Firefox for a mutli-OS development platform where speed isn't as noticeable.
Re:60% faster loss of privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
That would be chromium-browser, chrome itself is a derivative of that, but not Free software.
Re:100% less advertisements would be nice... (Score:1, Insightful)
google is an advertising company, I think satan will be wearing snowshoes before google puts in Ad blocking.
Re:60% faster loss of privacy (Score:1, Insightful)
Troll?
For pointing out why google would want to do this?
You would think I had insulted the Cult of Jobs.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:1, Insightful)
> Too many features, those features cost RAM and CPU time
You think chrome is faster because it has less features? Your deep knowledge from studying the application architecture and using profilers tells you this? Or is it the typical desperate need of slashdotters to be relevant that they scoff at everything and tear anything and everything down without knowing why?
You people are like grumpy old men without even the benefit of the wisdom that you'd accidentally pick up with age.
Re:100% less advertisements would be nice... (Score:2, Insightful)
I know. Perhaps this is the real reason Chrome even exists. They can prevent people from blocking ads, and of course track peoples surfing habits.
Quite sad actually. The browser is pretty nice overall. Its too bad they will most likely treat their users like most corporations do... like shit.
Firefox is much better in this area. As if that needed to be said.
Is it 30% faster? Does it matter? (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Smoking (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm right there with you. Basically all of the free tools from Google have no serious competition in terms of quality. Other tools may have more users, but it's not because they're better.
I'm not saying we give them a free pass, but have there been any serious breaches of privacy by Google? We've seen dirty moves by Microsoft, we've seen slow moves by Firefox. We've seen silly moves from Yahoo. We've seen invasive moves by Facebook.
I see Google as pretty freaking amazing. I think even the people who take issue with one thing here or there would have to agree that they are definitely the least of all evils.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter? (Score:1, Insightful)
Have you used GMail? It's amazing what it can do in a web-browser.
When you then consider Google Wave, which has GMail (and a bunch of other Google services) as a subset of it's functionality plus its new collaboration items, it's fairly easy to see the need for it.
Re:Sucks To Be You (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter? (Score:2, Insightful)
If tomorrow Intel released a CPU that's 30% faster than today's fastest while still using the same amount of power and not costing any extra $, it'd be pretty big news, don't you agree? Well, this is basically the same thing, except it's free and you don't need to replace hardware to get the speedup. Like it or not, most people routinely use Javascript heavy pages on a daily basis (most any webmail interface, Facebook, even Slashdot), what's wrong with speeding that up? Or maybe you don't like Javascript because you're only vaguely familiar with it? (a surprisingly common affliction)
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
For reasons that, I assume, have to do with the fact that advertisers are subhuman vermin who would sell their own grandmothers for a nickle, ads are overwhelmingly among the slowest page elements to load. Even if you don't mind what eventually pops up(which can be a tall order, particularly with noisy flash crap) wasting 10 or 15 seconds on what would otherwise be a highly responsive page waiting for one or more overloaded 3rd party ad servers sucks. It sucks even more when you do it dozens of times a day.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:2, Insightful)
How is this a troll?
Moderators, you need help.
Re:Smoking (Score:4, Insightful)
Well said. Google bashers always baffle me with their lack of factual support. A healthy caution of companies that have so much information is justified. If someone wants to avoid Google for that reason, then fine. But they should not pretend it is because Google has shown any pattern of abuse. If anything, they have been much better than most companies.
I saw someone in another forum using Google's slogan "don't be evil" as some kind of argument that they are evil... asking why they would need such a motto. From my perspective, "don't be evil" is one of the few corporate slogans worth anything. Unfortunately, it is something that cannot be taken for granted. It's sad, but that's the world we live in. And "don't be evil" is certainly more meaningful than most of the warm/fuzzy tripe that other companies spew in their mission statements.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Because web advertising has gone way beyond "little images trying to sell things." Instead, we get Flash monstrosities that slow my computer to a crawl, pop-ups that jump in front of the content you're trying to read and steal mouse clicks, and pages full of blinking, animated pictures that make it difficult to find the actual content.
Just because you don't mind having your time wasted in that way doesn't mean that everyone else will put up with it.
Re:Sucks To Be You (Score:3, Insightful)
So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware?
The simple answer is that it doesn't. WiFi is still hit and miss on some popular chipsets. Don't even get me started on audio - headphone/speaker auto-switching is still broken in my Karmic, and clicks and pops are all over any played sound (particularly so when it starts). Video is normally fine... except when either NVidia or X decide to break something and forget to tell the other side.
Re:Is it 30% faster? Does it matter? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Agree totally. What's the point of /. if you can't discuss relevant poi's? /. should instigate a moderator license scheme as lately they've been hopeless.
Maybe
Re:Password Sync also please (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:60% faster loss of privacy (Score:2, Insightful)
Slashdot fucking loves Google. They want to use Google's OS, browser, bookmarks, RSS reader, email, and phone. Then they bash Microsoft's platform expansion attempts and Apple's branding.
Re:Smoking (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah, Google has consistently required court orders before they hand out info. They've even turned down the US government's warrantless demands numerous times, while Microsoft and Yahoo just handed everything over.
I haven't heard of them sharing private info with other companies - they keep whatever they mine closely guarded. I think they realize their reputation is worth more than whatever they could gain by collaborating.
Re:60% faster loss of privacy (Score:3, Insightful)
While I believe you are correct, there is absolutely no way to know that. Google could be taking any number of things onto the Chromium codebase before shipping Chrome, and you would have no way of knowing.
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
Except for the fact that, generally, resumes are solicited for job openings and you are therefore not "advertising". You are responding, which is something entirely different.
Re:Smoking (Score:2, Insightful)
One is from a perspective of generalized mistrust: stated in the strongest terms, no one besides you should have access to any of your data.
The other is from a perspective over the long-term: there is a real chances that, in one's lifetime, either due to individual breaches or a shift to corporate evil, Google will cease to be entirely trustworthy.
To me personally, they both seem tiresome, and not worth the effort, but I understand why people with stronger commitments to privacy or safety would make those arguments.
uh... (Score:3, Insightful)
you seem to be left on an island in history. i remember that island, it was somewhere around 2003 i think:
the thinking was that javascript was unnecessary bloat and a properly written website didn't need any javascript, and a good netizen concerned about safety and privacy turned his/her javascript off. people were (and are) doing harebrained unnecessary things with javascript (whoa dude! look at the animated cursor!) and incompatibility between browsers in an era when firefox was still a cult and ie5 was king meant nobody thought to program for anything but ie. and ie's javascript quirks meant anyone using any other browser was getting nothing but error messages anyways. so just turn javascript off
sorry dude, but the functionality AJAX delivers and how it fundamentally changes the browsing experience in powerful and positive ways utterly washed away any validity to that kind of thinking
but, enjoy your craiglist. i think that's the only site of any heft that came out of that era of web philosophy that survives today with the "pure HTML 3.2 ought to be good enough for anybody" attitude still intact
i think that anti-<TABLE/> jihad from that era is still going strong though. all hail the holy <DIV/>!
Re:Sucks To Be You (Score:1, Insightful)
note how you specified "properly-installed Linux".
Because only 1/1000 is, and Macs aim for 1/1.
Re:Smoking (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox (Score:3, Insightful)
With regard to the AJAXy Slashdot, the speed issue was never important to me. I'd command-click the reply button and have it load the reply box in a new tab while I read.
Yes, I did exactly the same.
These days, though, it's just faster -- especially if I have a quick point to make (right now). It's also nice in that I get that much more context while replying -- I can see your post, and posts below the one I'm making. When I submit, if Slashdot is feeling fast, I can preview/submit without leaving the page, without having to manage multiple tabs, and without really waiting at all.
It's kind of like the advantages I get from Git being faster. It's actually faster enough that it changes the way I work, because I can now commit at pretty much any stage, knowing I can redo the commit, or rearrange a bunch of commits before I push. I can also branch as often as I want, knowing that the merge will be instantaneous and much more often conflict-free than with Subversion.
In short, we're not complaining about AJAX in general, just the incredibly poor implementation on Slashdot.
Perhaps, or a bit of both. The point is that AJAX in general is faster on Chrome, and that it can make an incredibly poor implementation usable, a barely-usable implementation awesome...