Google Updates Maps, Makes First Stable Chrome Release Using WebKit Fork 62
Two bits of Google news from today/yesterday. This morning, Google started rolling out a major update to mobile Maps. They've created a new tablet interface, improved integration with local places, integrated the Zagat guide, and enhanced navigation to automatically route you around traffic incidents. As usual lately, Google also removed a few features: Latitude and Check-ins. If you used those you'll have to use the Google+ application now. They also made a strange change to offline maps: instead of a menu option, you now access the area you want to make available offline and search for "OK Maps." On the Chrome front, Google released Chrome 28 yesterday, the first release featuring the WebKit fork Blink. The under-the-hood changes look promising, quoting the H: "The developers say that the increased speed is also thanks to the new threaded HTML parser, which frees up the JavaScript thread, allowing DOM content to be displayed faster. The HTML parser also takes fewer breaks, which is said to result in time savings of up to 40 per cent."
Re:And yet... (Score:4, Interesting)
Your mention of caching reminded me of this:
http://www.pclinuxos.com/forum/index.php?topic=113754.0 [pclinuxos.com]
"In a majority of web browsers, the size of the browser history and document cache is capped in one way or another: for example, if you have not visited facebook.com for a couple of weeks, any record of this will eventually disappear down the memory hole.
This is not the case for Chrome: the browser keeps all the cached information indefinitely; perhaps this is driven by some hypothetical assumptions about browsing performance, and perhaps it simply is driven by the desire to collect more information to provide you with more relevant ads. Whatever the reason, the outcome is simple: over time, cache lookups get progressively more expensive; some of this is unavoidable, and some may be made worse by a faulty hash map implementation in infinite_cache.cc."
That sounds Chrome specific to me.
Certainly I haven't noticed any cache oddities in Firefox, which I tend to leave running for weeks at a time.