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Google Chrome, Day 2
Posted by
CmdrTaco
on Wednesday September 03, @10:25AM
from the lookit-all-them-stories dept.
from the lookit-all-them-stories dept.
Seems that almost every story submitted to Slashdot last night in some way involved Google's Chrome that we started talking about yesterday. Dotan Cohen noted that according to Clicky Chrome has hit 3% browser share. Since Google has decided to release Chrome only for Windows, I now share for you 3 reviews written by others: the first comes from alexy2k, the second from mildsiete, and the third from oli4uk. They all seem to feature various opinions, charts, and screenshots demonstrating various exciting points.
Related Stories
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Google Chrome, the Google Browser 807 comments
Philipp Lenssen writes "Google announced their very own browser project called Google Chrome — an announcement in the form of a comic book drawn by Scott McCloud, no less. Google says Google Chrome will be open source, include a new JavaScript virtual machine, include the Google Gears add-on by default, and put the tabs above the address bar (not below), among other things. I've also uploaded Google's comic book with all the details (details given from Google's perspective, anyway... let's see how this holds up). While Google provided the URL www.google.com/chrome there's nothing up there yet."
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Mozilla's Thoughts On Google's Chrome 604 comments
tandiond writes to tell us that in a recent blog posting, Mozilla CEO John Lily shared his thoughts on Google's new browser project, Chrome, and what that means for Mozilla. "It should come as no real surprise that Google has done something here — their business is the web, and they've got clear opinions on how things should be, and smart people thinking about how to make things better. Chrome will be a browser optimized for the things that they see as important, and it'll be interesting to see how it evolves." Mozilla's Europe president, Tristan Nitot also chimed in during an interview with PCPro, stating that they don't view this as a direct attack on Firefox, even if it did catch them by surprise. "I'll take another example: just before Microsoft launched Vista, it invited us [to work with it] so that Firefox works better on Windows Vista. Because for it, Firefox being a top-tier application that was very successful - we now have 200 million users around the world - it could not afford to have Firefox run slowly on Vista. Therefore, it helped us improve Firefox for Vista. That's just the same for Google. It wants Firefox to perform well with its applications, that's for sure. Indeed, it even wants IE to perform well with Gmail and the rest. It's just that it has very limited control over this. That's why Google's been frustrated and it is launching this Chrome browser."
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Your Rights Online: Reading Google Chrome's Fine Print 607 comments
Much ink and many electrons are being spilled over Google's Chrome browser (discussed here twice in recent days): from deep backgrounders to performance benchmarks to its vulnerability to a carpet-bombing flaw. The latest angle to be explored is Chrome's end-user license agreement. It does not look consumer-friendly. "By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services."
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Google Claims User Content In Multiple Products 166 comments
An anonymous reader writes "Google last week removed some language in its Chrome browser's terms of service that gave the company a license to any material displayed in the browser, but that language remains in several other Google products, including its Picasa photo service and its Blogger service."
The Fine Print: The following comments are owned by whoever posted them. We are not responsible for them in any way.
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Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
That's an impressive bump for day one (actually, half a day) and if you (unrealistically) extrapolated that rate, Chrome would have 100% of the browser market by year end!
I had to modify the Analog source code to account for the Chrome browser (gotta like open-source) but have have other popular programs (such as Google Analytics) been updated to identify this browser?
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
But in my 10 mins of usage, I have just realized how Firefox has spoiled my browsing habits!
Few points so far (remember - just 10 mins of use):
1. Cursor is going missing in Slashdot reply box if it is at the beginning of the line.
2. There are ads on
3. Great debugging tools for developers built-in.
4. Unlike Firefox, no option for smooth-scrolling (I find it mandatory for large pages - especially on
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
Gmail running faster must be the JavaScript. From test results it seems that is the strongest point of the browser: JavaScript performance. Plus some other interesting features such as each tab it's own process. But JavaScript performance is of course what they are after: then Google Docs will run much much better, making it more attractive for people to start using.
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Non-Tech Percent of Web Traffic from Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
It all started when idiotic websites started testing for 'Mozilla' in the User-agent string to make their sites break when you weren't using Netscape. So to keep compatibility, Microsoft decided to put 'Mozilla (compatible; blah blah)' in their User-agent string. The mess used by Chrome is the apex of User-agent stupidity, so far. All those strings are in there so that badly configured webservers won't serve the wrong content. The next browser that replaces Chrome will no doubt include this string and add even more words.
I wonder if Microsoft, Mozilla, Google, Opera, Apple and others could get together to declare a User-agent flag day when, on the first of January 2009, all User-agent strings would remove the historic cruft and just tell you the browser and version. Sadly this has no chance of happening.
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A couple of annoying things I've found so far (Score:5, Informative)
The other thing that I personally find a bit annoying is that if you don't put http:/// [http] in front of or / after a url that is within one of your search domains, it automatically assumes that you want to search the web for that, lets say there's a server on your network that you haven't visited before called server1.domain.com and you have domain.com among your search domains, it will go off to google.com and search for server1 if you only type in server1 in the address bar. But then again, maybe that's just me.
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Posted with Google Chrome
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NetApplications shows 1% share (Score:5, Informative)
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Chrome Eval (Score:5, Insightful)
The show-stopper is(as of now) no NoScript/AdBlock! I've become spoiled with ad-free pages and seeing that first obnoxious flash ad was enough to convince me to keep FF as my browser of choice -- at least until a few plug-ins are made for Chrome.
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I'll stick with Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
Really, I still don't see why I'd have to switch from FF3 to this new browser, free or not. I mean, once you get rid of IE's security hole and MS lock-in web technology, a browser's a browser, right?
I understand that Google want to have their own, but the established base of Firefox, with its plugins and extensions beats all for now, from a desktop user perspective.
I'll let the hype pass before I have a look.
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Re:I'll stick with Firefox (Score:5, Insightful)
1. The memory tool that displays per-tab mem usage.
2. Sensible memory management.
3. Fast?
4. Sandboxed tabs.
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Chrome is spyware! (Score:5, Interesting)
Install it and 'Google Update' is silently installed along with it with no apparent way of turning it off besides regedit/msconfig. So much for "Don't be Evil".
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Google spying on you (Score:5, Interesting)
Apparently, every installation of Chrome gets an unique id [lawblog.de] (sorry, German only) and, once you've signed into your Google account ONCE, the unique id gets connected with your account and you'll always be traceable back to your Google account, even if you're not logged in.
That's a showstopper. But I'm hoping for a spy-free version to be out soon, the beauty of open source!
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Re:Google spying on you (Score:5, Funny)
So, uh, what happens if someone else logs into their google account, then?
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Re:Google spying on you (Score:5, Funny)
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local anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
In my office, there are several windows developers who were excited to try Chrome yesterday - one enthusiastically declaring that he was going to uninstall his other browser as soon as he got home. What struck me about this is that these are people who would never, in a million years, lift a finger to try Safari/Windows - yet here they are drooling over how snappy a WebKit-based browser is. The prospect of increased WebKit adoption makes me happy.
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Re:local anecdote (Score:5, Insightful)
For me, it's not about WebKit at all. Chrome has two features I've wanted for ages: One, separate tabs are separate processes, which means that alert windows and that kind of crap are all tab-modal instead of application-modal. That way one little alert window can't tie up five tabs. The other thing is the JavaScript execution speed, which is nice.
That said, I'm not 100% sold on it. I like Firefox, and there are big JavaScript improvements coming down the pipe in the near future. Hopefully the tab feature will be picked up by Firefox in the near future as well, but we'll see... it may require a major rewrite.
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Re:local anecdote (Score:5, Interesting)
I would characterize Chrome as "Safari for Windows done right."
There were massive mistakes Apple made (out of arrogance or incompetence, I'm not sure), when releasing Safari for Windows:
- Apple style Font rendering. Having to switch your eyes between Safari's anti-aliasing and ClearType on a regular basis starts to hurt your eyes, one seems blurry in comparison to the other.
- Safari didn't follow many of the standard windows app behaviors, another snafu. You can't stuff OS X app behaviors down the throats of Windows users, and vice versa.
- It also had an incredibly slow startup time. (Although it would render extremely fast)
Contrast this to Chrome, which renders text using ClearType and windows font rendering, behaves like a windows app, starts up really fast.
It's not even like I'm bashing Apple for a bad port. iTunes for windows was ported really well, it follows (for the most part, except menus) the windows UI conventions and font rendering, so it feels more like a Windows app.
(By the way, I'm primarily a Mac user and use Safari regularly on the Mac)
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Yuck (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll start using Chrome the instant they have a plugin that blocks annoying flashing multi-colour favicons.
[for those who haven't read the links, just go to the second so-called 'review' link, which is really a review of reviews...]
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Things I like, Things I don't (Score:5, Interesting)
The inspect element tool is awesome, lets you see the tree and go to any element you can right click on.
Killable tabs, I open tons of new tabs/windows in any browser I use and I hate it when one crashes and takes out a dozen pages I had open earlier to read later and then have to grep and guess through my history. This makes my day
When you search, it puts little marks on the scroll bar where results are. That's neat.
The tweaked tab system is great. Create new windows from tabs, drag tabs between windows, consolidate windows into tabs.
On the other hand
I really miss scroll-click and smooth scrolling. But it isn't the end of the world.
While I like having tabs on top, having the File/options/etc WIMP standards under that little button to the right of the address bar is kinda weird.
It's beta. It's very beta. Somewhere above "everybody else's beta" and but slightly below the usual "Google beta" quality.
I turned the awesome bar off.
But I still want it to do math for me.
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Reviews suck (Score:5, Informative)
I installed Google's browser. It sucked. Didn't ask where I wanted to install it. No adblocker (and probably never will be). Very limited configuration options. Couldn't handle my font colors. Set GoogleUpdate.exe to run every time my computer starts. Took me to a "why are you uninstalling it" web form when I went to uninstall it, and the web form didn't work. Ass sucking from start to finish. Classic Google.
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do not pass go. do not collect $200 (Score:5, Insightful)
Does it matter how good or bad it is, when you type in:
about:plugins
and the first thing you see is:
ActiveX Plug-in
File name: activex-shim
ActiveX Plug-in provides a shim to support ActiveX controls
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DO NOT READ 3rd link (Score:5, Informative)
It's not malicious or anything, it's just very, very poor writing and will make you angry.
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Re:How do they do it? (Score:5, Informative)
Did they use large chunks of other open-source browsers? If so, which ones?
Yes, they chose the WebKit [webkit.org] rendering engine, which is the same one you find in browsers like Konqueror, Safari, and Google's own Android platform.
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