Looking At Google's Flashified Chrome 385
An anonymous reader writes "Google quietly released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which not only blows its rivals out of the water as far as performance is concerned, but comes with half a dozen new features, including direct integration of Adobe Flash. First benchmarks show that the new beta is about 10% faster than the previous beta in the SunSpider and V8 benchmark, and about 30% faster than Chrome 4, which remains the fastest JavaScript browser available today."
Its just not the fastest browser... (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Thanks Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
Hmmm...I think saying that Flash is "about to die" and that "nobody uses Flash for anything serious" is...well...wrong.
As it stands now, Flash is, by far, the most popular and ubiquitous plug-in in use on the internet. It is used in many different places and can be relied on more than trying to rely on the fact that users will have new, up-to-date browsers. Yes, Apple won't be supporting Flash, and, yes, I hope HTML5 replaces a great deal of Flash (as I can't stand plug-ins). But, in no way is Flash going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Heck, even to get everybody to switch to HTML5 is going to take at least a few years, and probably more.
Re:Yay for Google (Score:3, Insightful)
Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.
Re:Thanks Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
If YouTube would switch perma to HTML5 vid, the very second about 60% of the world is going to want to have it running.
It is not new: YouTube already stopped supporting IE6 and it is... not working anymore =D
Re:Can it display PDFs? (Score:5, Insightful)
PDFs displayed inside the browser window is a bug more than a feature. Almost 100% of the time, this causes problems, of all kinds. Whenever I install a browser, or get a new company computer/laptop, I disable PDF display in the browser window.
Re:What about for us normal folks? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:But... Trust Issues (Score:1, Insightful)
What information is Mozilla collecting as you browse?
What information is AOL collection as you browse?
Wireshark and run them or stfu.
Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas (Score:3, Insightful)
Sense of humour failure, mods?
More seriously, I'm sure that this is one of many ways that Google will use to drive adoption of Android & Chrome/web-interface.
You wanna Flash? We havva Flash! And all the funny Flash videos you can eat!!
Until they're big enough to 'fuck off' Adobe, that is, just like MSFT & Apple are trying to do.
Of course, the hope is that the 'not evil' boys will achieve this with open, standards-based stuff instead of, for example, Silverlight.
Re:Thanks Google! (Score:2, Insightful)
So when developers start making the same "extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney" stuff using HTML5/Javascript, what then?
Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript? (Score:5, Insightful)
Chrome's adblock is nowhere near as good as firefox's, because chrome's is really an ad hider, and not an ad blocker. Chrome still downloads all of the ads, with all of the assorted performance and privacy issues.
Yes, yes, I know that people have been saying that this will be fixed someday, but I'll believe that when I see it. Google has a lot of incentive to disallow this and other features.
And, as others have said, lack of noscript is a deal breaker.
Re:Yay for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Firefox uses Google by default for search and suggestion.
IE uses Bing.
I trust Google infinitely more than I trust Microsoft. And if you're really paranoid, then run Iron, which is a privacy-freak version of Chromium. But if that isn't enough, Google added tons of privacy features into Chrome/Chromium starting with version 5.
But keep wearing that tin-foil hat.
Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Still do not want (Score:4, Insightful)
Blame the NPAPI and implementations of it on other platforms.
For example all Mac plugins are windowless which is why performance goes down the toilet. On Windows, plugins are usually windowed (although they can also be windowless) which means the browser creates the plugin, puts it somewhere and can more or less forget about it since the plugin will paint itself when it needs to. On the Mac, every plugin is windowless so it must shout "paint me" at the browser and then wait for browser to call back to repaint it. Picture a couple of plugins screaming "paint me" 30 times a second and it's not hard to see why there may be a performance impact.
Linux plugins support windowed & windowless plugins, but performance probably suffers there from the lack of decent accelerated hardware support and the complexities of X, what extensions are there etc.
Let it go. If you want to help out, partner with Adobe on writing HTML5 authoring tools that make replacing Flash easy and painless for web developer. Open standard web is good web.
It would be useful for such a tool to produce HTML/JS but it would still be machine generated spew. Also HTML5 is not some magic wand to better performance. JS / DOM performance is all over the shop from one browser to the next and virtually all JS / DOM / repainting in the page is running synchronously through a single thread.
So yes a tool would be nice, but you're deluded if you think HTML5 is an adequate replacement for all but the most sedentary content. Perhaps someone needs to define proper extensions to HTML, SVG, DOM etc. that allows content to be tweened with timing critical hinting, audio etc. that Flash supplies which make it so useful for animation & video content.
Re:Yay for Google (Score:2, Insightful)
In matters of security yes. In matters of privacy no. Microsoft isn't running a global network of connected search, advertising and analytics where your every move can be tracked. Ethics aside, Google has far more power to play games with your privacy than Microsoft has.
But then comes the issue of ethics. It is Google who said [youtube.com]: "If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." -- not Microsoft.
Apparently Google does have the appropriate ethics, or lack thereof, to invade your privacy. You'll be more private with Microsoft I think.
Re:Still has the same old problems (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Thanks Google! (Score:5, Insightful)
If you think that Flash is dead or about to die then maybe you need to have a look around... ...for example the websites that won each category in the webby awards (announced yesterday http://www.webbyawards.com/webbys/current.php [webbyawards.com]) are almost all made entirely in flash. The same goes for the peoples award for each category.
For anyone in the real world it looks very much like Flash is going from strength to strength, both in terms of what it is capable of and usage.
Re:Thanks Google! (Score:1, Insightful)
Youtube is serious by generating many millions of dollars in advertising revenue.
Besides that, some content that's on youtube is in fact serious.
Just search for ie "science" instead of "boobies" or "lolcat".
Re:Yay for Google (Score:4, Insightful)
Your analogy fails. Both a tiger and a shark want to steal your steak.
Microsoft has a patent to sell your information to the highest bidder, and has already shown a willingness to just fork your private data over.
Google has a history of fighting to protect your private data. An automated process serves up ads to you that have a contextual relationship to your private data, but that data is not being handed out. Nor is anyone just sitting around reading it.
There is a world of difference between the two approaches.
Your second statement is even more flawed. You suggest you can trust Microsoft more, because Google is inherently more likely to screw you over to preserve their business model.
Again, history demonstrates that Microsoft doesn't mind screwing users, where as Google is all about providing free services to users and then protecting them.
It is because Google's revenue comes from advertising that they can't afford to screw their users over. If they lose their users, they lose their business model. It is in Google's best intereest to keep their users happy.
Microsoft can piss off most individual end users (like they have with Hotmail fiascos, Vista, etc) and it doesn't matter. Microsoft lives and dies with big contracts in the enterprise world. They can care less what the individual consumer thinks.
Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas (Score:4, Insightful)
would it be possible for Flash to instead use Chromes V8 engine [google.com]?
Most likely not. It would be possible for Chrome to instead use Tamarin, if it really wanted, but v8 itself is very Javascript-specific at the moment. ActionScript is a superset of that, so it might be possible, but it'd take a lot of work.
what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?
Whatever excuse they want.
This is what people don't understand about iPhone/iPad/iPod -- it's not up to you. It's entirely up to Apple whether or not they're consistent or fair, and so far, they've been neither.
And yet, people keep simultaneously buying these things and whining that they can't do stuff. It's like buying fertilizer and complaining that it's shit.
Since Google is doing all the leg-work to make Flash fast and stable,
What? No, Google is doing the leg-work to make Flash contained. It's still going to be dog-slow, unstable, and evil, but at least it'll be more secure and won't lock up or crash your browser, just itself.
If you want a fast, stable Flash, petition Adobe to open it up. That, or accept that the fastest, stablest Flash ever is not Flash, but HTML5.
Re:What about for us normal folks? (Score:1, Insightful)
You're obviously so out of touch of what the actual web uses to do much of anything that's of use to "normal" users that you really ought to spend some time refreshing your knowledge of modern web technology. Besides, Javascript is an amazingly cool language to learn in it's own right.
Tab bar at top is wise gui design (Score:2, Insightful)
One aspect of gui design is considering the landing area of buttons - this means how much work it is to get the mouse to land over an element. Objects that are along the edge of the screen are considered to have finite width but infinite depth (think about it, you need only aim at the side of the element, and can move your mouse as deep into it as you want). Additionally, having the tab bar be at the top - where we mentally delineate a discrete window, helps in thinking of the tabs as not really bonded to a particular window (as in Firefox), but capable of being pulled away and reconnected to a grouping of windows quickly and easily. Lastly, when not full screened, the tab bar buttons take roughly the same amount of effort to use as if placed elsewhere on the window, if only a bit unintuitive to users who are used to it being done differently.
When Chrome is full screen, you need only toss the mouse pointer in the general direction of the tab, and you are there.
Webkit is also getting faster (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Still has the same old problems (Score:3, Insightful)
Meh, I'll just wait for the SRWare Iron version.
Most of the complaints people have about Chrome are gone in Iron (or, as your esthetic complaints) don't matter enough to me to want to go back to Firefox (which was almost as bloated and slow as IE by the time I departed using it after many years of happy use) or *shudder* IE.
Re:Thanks Google! (Score:3, Insightful)
I just had a look at one of them, http://www.stemcellfoundation.ca/ [stemcellfoundation.ca] to be precise, I was definitely underwhelmed. For a start it took over 30 seconds to load, I am connected to a University network which gets over 80 mbits so either their servers can't cope with the large page or the page is very large. Either way it is unacceptably slow. Transitions are animated making them slow compared to a normal html page.
There is a scrollable box of text which can be scrolled in precisely one way which is to drag the little round thing on the scrollbar. This compares to a fully functional scrollbar with three navigation options, using my mouses scroll wheel, using cursor keys or Page Up/Down and autoscroll (middle mouse click and scroll). If I am on their web page my mouses back button breaks as does equivalent keyboard shortcuts. I can't open a new tab using ctrl-T. Middle clicking links does nothing when it should open in a new tab. They even made a small text heading the same color as a link (links aren't underlined of course) so it is indistinguishable without rolling over with a mouse (which causes a non standard fade effect on actual links). Hopefully you never want to copy any text because you won't be able to select it. Also the scrolling problems are exacerbated by the fact that on my 1680x1050 monitor I have a nice 530*330 box to read the text in.
So in conclusion usability is a joke since it breaks the vast majority of UI conventions.
There is a useless gimmick of having looping videos of the peoples faces rather than a still photo, adds nothing other than a slightly cool factor when you first visit which I would say is outweighed by the annoyances of the people in the videos shifting uncomfortably plus increased download time.
Trying to sign the charter brings up a nice form which conveniently has none of my saved data like an html form so I have to type everything in myself. You can copy/paste to these boxes though, although with the caveat of my Linux middle click paste not working (I would have been shocked if it had. The auto country filler is quite nice I will admit except for the minor thing where it wipes the box if you click it once it has been filled. Also the font rendering is horrible on the form page for some reason, there seem to be small patches on letter which are faded.
After thoroughly browsing this usability disaster I somehow don't feel much respect for the webbyawards. This is precisely why Flash websites are such a bad move. Flash itself is great for those things which need a richer environment than html can provide, such as games and video and some web applications.
Re:Its just not the fastest browser... (Score:2, Insightful)
300.0ms +/- 2.9% here on Opera 10.53 (3374) (with only 37 other tabs open :)
against chrome 4.1.249.1064 (45376)'s 423.0ms +/- 2.8% (with only two other tabs open)
Curious that Opera isn't compared within the speed tests but is within the market-share graph. Wonder why that would be...
Googleupdate (Score:3, Insightful)