The Future of Google Chrome 294
TRNick writes "Lars Bak, who heads up development of Google Chrome's cornerstone javascript engine, talks about why Google is so focused on in-browser javascript performance, the role Chrome has played in driving up javascript performance in other browsers, and why it's taking so long to introduce support for third-party extensions. 'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more,' he says."
I know the future... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:I know the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Being uninstalled?
Until they get support for Firefox addons or get a base of addons equal to Firefox's, it won't be going on my computer anymore. ;*( I used it for about two weeks after its release, and then switched back to Firefox and never looked back.
Re:I know the future... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I know the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I know the future... (Score:4, Funny)
Because not everyone in Slashdot is a programmer?
Now fixed that for ya.
Re:I know the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
I'm a programmer. But that doesn't mean I don't have better things to do than play with web browsers.
If I wanted to work on yet another solution to an already solved problem, I would write accounting software for fun.
Re:I know the future... (Score:4, Insightful)
Now everyone stop complaining about Chrome having no extension! If Chrome is really that good for everything else except has no add-ons, and if you really so sick of getting that noscript/adblock add-on, why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?
Am I missing something?
Yes. Not all potential users are developers. In fact, I suggest that the majority of potential users are not developers. Telling a random user of web browsers that they need to learn to program to make it do what other free browsers already do is unlikely to convert them. And of those of us who are developers? Well, lets see: shall I spend my free time developing tools for Chrome that are already working perfectly satisfactorily for me in Firefox, or shall I spend my free time doing someting that I think actually needs doing?
Re:I know the future... (Score:5, Insightful)
if you really so sick of getting that noscript/adblock add-on, why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?
Time to develop extensions support and equivalent noscript add-on: six months, full time
Time to complain about lack of extensions in Google Chrome: <10 seconds
Your question is why people don't give up 6 months of their time instead of complaining why Google released a browser without modern features? That's madness. Developers work on open source for free when they feel like it, so unless some developer is really excited about reinventing NoScript they are going to complain instead.
And I'll go even further and turn the tables on you. If you are so sick of people complaining about lack of extensions why haven't you fixed it yet? And even if you are contributing to the project, why are you taking your free time to complain about everybody else instead of working on plugins? The chromium code is right there, so get back to work.
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Re:I know the future... (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it is important to add that Google Chrome already supports add-ons (well, user scripts)... the types that block ads... customize sites... etc... I use these user scripts all the time, and these weren't ones I wrote myself... these are ones written by others.
What Chrome does not yet have is the ability for non-techies to easily find and install these user scripts. That is definitely coming, but everyone just needs to be patient. Also what is coming is the ability for such add-ons to modify and tweak the UI.
Re:I know the future... (Score:4, Insightful)
why not develop one yourself and contribute back to the project?
Because we already have it with firefox.
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Then how did you install it in the first place?
Very carefully. . .
As we've seen. (Score:4, Insightful)
As we've seen with Windows and IE.... the distinction between browser and and OS matters quite a bit. That is if you don't want to get accused of being and evil monopoly.
Re:As we've seen. (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:As we've seen. (Score:5, Insightful)
The lawsuit concerns the question of whether or not a web browser is structurally distinct from the OS or not: is it an integral component, or an instance of bundling of two essentially unrelated things.
This interview concerns the developer's observation that people's use of the browser doesn't draw much of a distinction between the browser and the OS(in that they consider the computer broken if web access isn't working, and in that they consider webapps to be on par with native apps).
It is also quite possible that, shockingly, an individual developer, speaking semiformally about his project, has a slightly different view than does Google's legal department, speaking on behalf of Google's official position.
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This "the browser is the OS" rubbish is really starting to annoy me. It's just not the case.
This really doesn't signal a change in paradigm in computing. Rather, it signals that many users who don't understand the distinction between local and remote applications have become the majority, and those who understand the distinction are now the minority. Buzzwords like "cloud com
Re:As we've seen. (Score:5, Insightful)
Buzzwords like "cloud computing" and "online OS" don't change the fact that this is not a paradigm shift
And "netbook."
Thank you for writing this post, it really nails my opinion of the matter on the head as well. This whole new webapp craze has created such a stink in the IT world because so many people assume that it's going to phase out good-old-fashioned binaries. This is simply not the case. Like any tool, webapps are extremely useful for the right job. Regular binary programs are extremely useful for the right job. Writing a document with a webapp that is OS-independent and stored remotely is a nifty idea (especially if your laptop dies or is stolen, your data is safe), but the thought of something like MatLab, number-crunching or large spreadsheets using Javascript makes me cringe. Of course, people out there are still going to try doing this, and that's the crappy part about webapp popularity.
The two approaches just need to find a balance and coexist. There will continue to be a distinction between webapps and the local OS because there will continue to be different people who have different uses for their computers. Average Joe will not know or care what OS is on his Eee as long as he can use his Google Mail and Google Calendar and Google Documents... and as long he knows that when the Eee is pickpocketed or dropped and broken, he can still get his data back from Google using another computer. IT Dude Tarlus (me) will continue to be anal-retentive about my OS, my software and the more advanced applications I have for them. I admit that I have written and use webapps, but only because they're the best tool for the job at hand. But I'll stick with a native word processor. (And no vasectomy, please.) =)
Re:As we've seen. (Score:5, Informative)
Too late. Google Docs is already here, a JavaScript word processor with real-time collaboration features.
Muddy-soft waters... (Score:2)
...The lawsuit concerns the question of whether or not a web browser is structurally distinct from the OS or not: is it an integral component, or an instance of bundling of two essentially unrelated things.
Ah, to clarify, it was Microsoft who managed to muddy the waters first between browser and OS with their implementation, with every damn window on the screen essentially being a IE browser. I certainly don't get the same when I install Firefox on top of any other OS.
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ahh yes, those were glorious times. I enjoyed that integration actually. Maybe the overhead wasn't worth it, but I thought it was convenient and pretty cool. Flame me if you must.
Yeah, the virus writers thought it was pretty cool and convenient too. Why target a browser when you can attack the whole interface. It's a buy one, get one at 50% off deal!
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can't we have some type of integration once in a while?
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can't we have some type of integration once in a while?
No. You should read your internets by sending email to a daemon on a different box that downloads the pages and sends them to you as text files, the way Stallman intended things to be.
Re:As we've seen. (Score:5, Insightful)
in that they consider the computer broken if web access isn't working
I suspect that will be MS's essential defense of bundling a default brower (IE) with Windows. People EXPECT any modern OS to come with a default browser. Most of them don't even realize the browser is a distinct program from the OS itself. The argument against MS not bundling a browser with their OS is a relic from the 90's. These days it would be suicide for anyone to release an OS without built-in web capability right out of the box.
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These days it would be suicide for anyone to release an OS without built-in web capability right out of the box.
...I'm looking at you, Gentoo!
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The parent speaks the truth. You wouldn't believe how many times a customer has complained to me that their freshly re-installed computer doesn't have Word any more, and I have to tell them that Word isn't part of Windows and I can't put a pirate version on for them like the guy who sold them the PC did.
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The whole point of Chrome (Score:5, Insightful)
is that its future per se doesn't matter.
What Google cares about is that there is a least one standards-compliant browser out there with fast javascript. Sure Google might have a slight preference for people using Chrome over another browser with fast javascript (like, say, Safari), but what really matters to them is that they are able to deliver web apps that are fast enough to be reasonable competitors to traditional desktop apps.
Chrome is a combination insurance policy/open-source soapbox whose purpose is to make sure that Google apps (and other web apps) will always have a browser to run on.
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
I think it's more important that it's a challenge to the rest of the 'market' to catch up on Javascript performance. I don't think they -really- expect their browser to be the best or even have a decent market share... They just need something to point to and say 'See, it's possible. Why haven't you done it yet?'
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe 1) re-writing the firefox JS engine is too much work or 2) would be too disruptive to a well-established open-source project, or 3) wouldn't be as supa-cool awesome as starting from scratch (I'm assuming that Chrome began as a %20 time project), or 4) they felt the Firefox dev team would have simply ignored the work done by the Chrome people, or 5) they would have to've reworked the whole browser, and not just the JS engine.
I'm sure I could think of more reasons why the Chrome developers would want to do their own thing rather than submit changes to the Firefox engine, but I hope you get the point. Nothing about the bazaar forces you to join a current project and push updates, or even makes that practise logically necessary. Sometimes it's a good idea, sometimes not.
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:5, Interesting)
It is interesting the while javascript is being more and more heavily used, it is in a way like development tools have been reset 10 years.
Maybe I have been blind, but I have yet to come across a decent IDE for javascript development. All the nice features like code completion and even syntax checking are now no longer a given.
Even some decent syntax checking would be nice. I would like to know how much time is lost now on developers looking for typos in their js code. The only way you discover them is to run the code. And even then, the errors generated are not always helpful.
And debugging is getting more complicated. Stuff like venkman and firebug work for basic standard linked javascript, but the newer libraries use so many shortcuts in declaring objects that no debuggers just can't seem to keep up.
A lot of this is with any script that is weakly typed. So many libraries and scripts take advantage and abuse this.
Now these same libraries are abstracting so much of what is hard browser differences and the like out. So that is good. But with this only really being at the start of being heavily used. I can see some real ugly legacy applications around in five years time.
And this type of scripting is popping up everywhere, I see servers now that have javascript running on the server, and other devices using them for UI.
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There used to be no debugger at all... alert(), anyone?
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good luck using Alert when you get an infinite loop...
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
I'd suggest you check out IntelliJ's IDEA 8.0. I've been developing interfaces for the web for ten years now, and I've come across nothing with such comprehensive and accurate support for js coding. Both your complaints about code completion and syntax checking are handled by IDEA accurately.
Some other developers in my group swear by MyEclipse's js handling, but I haven't had any personal experience with it in the past couple of years. My last impression of it was that its color-coding wasn't as detailed as IDEA's. Still, MyEclipse is open-source, so check it out first and see if it takes care of your needs.
For debugging, Firebug is still your best bet, though I believe IE's debugger has been making huge strides lately, and is better than Firebug for automatically handling breakpoints--in Firebug, you have to search through your .js files in order to manually place a breakpoint, and then that can get weird if you have iframes to deal with.
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I took a look at the web page for this one and yes it seems to definitely steps in the right direction.
But the fundamental aspect of javascript being a weakly typed language means that further development is quite a difficult problem.
Take a simple line of code. somevar.jump(); If this is java, it doesn't take much for the compiler to figure out whether this is valid.
In javascript it might be possible to declare if it is a valid call but it is impossible to determine if it is an invalid call.
The IDE that you
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Try NetBeans, it has javascript autocompletion, support for popular libraries, like jQuery and various other goodies.
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I suspect it's because the skillset to make a program in C/C++ or some other locally-run language are very close to the same skillet to write a debugger for those languages. But I suspect the skills to write a JavaScript debugger are much more disparate from those for writing JavaScript itself.
So you have all these web developers and no debugger developers in the field. The people who can write debuggers are all busy writing in languages that aren't JavaScript. At least that's my crackpot theory.
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Visual Studio has a great javascript IDE. It provides statement completion, syntax checking, and intellisense. It's debugging experience is great too (step over, step into, hover over variables to evaluate them at tooltip, type evaluation expressions interactively while the code is paused, ...)
function f()
{
var x = new MyObject1();
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for MyObject1
x = "hello";
x.| -- here it shows intellisense for strings
}
The intellise
Re:The whole point of Chrome (Score:4, Informative)
Maybe I have been blind, but I have yet to come across a decent IDE for javascript development. All the nice features like code completion and even syntax checking are now no longer a given.
I felt like this for a long time. Finally I discovered , which is Google's own solution to this problem. [google.com]
I now code my dynamic web components in java in my regular (eclipse) IDE, debug it in Eclipse, then deploy (compile) to Javascript. It's robust, full featured, maintainable, and easily debugged.
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Well I thin Chrome is part of Android.
I often wonder if Google is getting too myopic. I am not sure that Browser Apps will ever replace all native apps. Maybe Google doesn't as well but their supporters really do.
Google sees what future web is heading to (Score:2)
And its built on JavaScript.
If they they create a framework or engine which internet would be dependent on, they would control the web. The plugins which try to compete against JavaScript will lose their place when its achieve this speed and Google Gears integration.
I think what would happen is Chrome framework being (a restricted) interface to the OS and media control libraries which would try to be what ActiveX,Flash and Java do today(within their plugin interface). Except it would be built-in into Chrome
basic distinction between the OS and the browser (Score:2)
More "the basic distinction between the shell and the browser". OTOH, when you can run MacOS, Linux, and WinXP simultaneously on not too high end equipment (a 2 year old 24 inch iMac w/3gb ram in my case) then you have to ask just which layer is the "operating system", and which is the shell.
<script type="text/python"> (Score:5, Interesting)
I would rather have the browser guys work on getting something OTHER than javascript into the browsers. Javascript is getting better, but you only polish a turd so much.
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If all JRE's (browsers) are alike in syntax, semantics, security and libraries then the faster one will become the shell of choice to run these cloudy, ajaxy apps. And we'll partying like it's 1980 with browser-and-cloud architectures replacing greenscreen-and-mainframe.
It's a shame that, like you said, j
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The problem with javascript is still browser incompabilities, and that would not lessen with other scriping languages.
I disagree (Score:5, Informative)
The problem is people still fail to grasp the difference between Javascript and DOM and CSS manipulation....
All Javascript engines have been ECMA compliant for 5 years now. Javascript incomparability is not the problem, it is the DOM and CSS incompatabilities.
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I strongly disagree. JavaScript is a great language - in fact I think it is one of the best dynamic languages out there. The biggest problem is that 95% of the people who program JavaScript never bother to figure out the right way to use the language. I have heard people who had worked for years programming in JavaScript (actually JScript) claim that the language does not support inheritance, which could not be more untrue. As Douglas Crockford stated in a talk titled "JavaScript: The Good Parts [yahoo.com]":
If people would actually bother to learn the language (and could be convinced to give up the notion that you can't do OO properly without classes) you'd probably hear a lot less hatred for it.
Also, adding other support for other languages wouldn't do anything to address the biggest difficulty in writing code that runs in a browser, which is the incompatibilities between the different browsers' DOM and CSS implementations.
JavaScript assembly language (Score:5, Interesting)
With compilers like GWT [google.com], Pyjamas [pyjs.org], and HotRuby [accelart.jp], I sometimes wonder if JavaScript is starting to emerge as a "portable assembly language" for dynamic languages, the way C is often used by higher-level language compilers. I mean, when it comes down to it JS is basically just hash tables and closures, some of the basic elements required for dynamic language execution.
Given a fast-as-C javascript engine, you could have a pretty decent VM to share between several dynamic languages, and due to JS's dynamic nature compiling these languages to JS is fairly trivial.
I mentioned this once on reddit and someone called it a 'braindead' approach. That may be true. I'm not sure. He also pointed out that many things you'd have to do to get languages like Ruby running in JS would require passing the context as a function argument, which he claimed would probably bypass any potential optimization by the JS compiler. Not sure about that either.
But I find it really interesting (and cool!) that JS's heavy web presence is giving it such attention in both the "compiler backend" and optimization departments simultaneously. Whether it's a braindead approach or not, it sure seems to be drawing a lot of interest lately.
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I don't know, Lua [lua.org] would fit that role a whole lot better. It's semantically similar to Javascript but is much cleaner. Javascript is a disgusting hack of a language with bizarre bit and pieces shoehorned into it over the years.
The fastest Javascript engines will never be as fast as the fastest Lua engines. Javascript is too tied down by cruft. LuaJIT already beats every other Javascript engine out there in all tests except a few and it's not even using tracing yet (the fastest JS engines are using traci
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You're missing the point.
Lua isn't built into the browser of almost every computer on the planet.
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Lua isn't built into the browser of almost every computer on the planet.
neither is Flash... but it's everywhere.
all we need is NativeClient to suceed just as widely
Re:JavaScript assembly language (Score:4, Funny)
Yeah we could have a platform independent language that compiles efficiently into a type of code easily run by virtual machines.
Not sure about the name Javascript though, think it sounds a bit complex and we need to distinguish it from the browser only one. Lets just call it Java
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I mentioned this once on reddit and someone called it a 'braindead' approach.
Ah well, if the Reddit guys don't like it, the idea must be fundamentally broken - there's no point us wasting time here on /. discussing it further.
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With compilers like GWT [google.com], Pyjamas [pyjs.org], and HotRuby [accelart.jp], I sometimes wonder if JavaScript is starting to emerge as a "portable assembly language" for dynamic languages, the way C is often used by higher-level language compilers. I mean, when it comes down to it JS is basically just hash tables and closures, some of the basic elements required for dynamic language execution.
However, a language is more than hash tables and closures, and even the great similarity between most dynamic languages isn't enough.
For example, in JavaScript all you have are doubles - no integers. That means that if you are using Pyjamas, and you write some math stuff in what appears to be Python, it won't behave like Python. Because of a lot of stuff like this, a straightforward translation of syntax-to-syntax will never work.
Instead, you can do more complicated stuff - like compile code using int
If the browser is the OS... (Score:4, Insightful)
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the internet flourished during the dark age of browsers and we've gone another half decade since then. what's another year between friends? at least we have a promise that it's on its way soon.
besides, with safari, firefox and opera (and even ie??? [ducks]) getting more and more standards compliant and faster J
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because they are taking the time to do it right
...and then to release it as Beta.
Oh the irony..
Single platform, then multi, equals fail (Score:3, Interesting)
it's faster to develop for a single platform than to use a shotgun approach.
Yeah, but telling your developers that they can develop for windows only and then porting the application is likely to be a lot slower than writing things portably from day 1.
An argument to back this assertion up: the sooner you fix a bug, the cheaper it is to fix [this is widely believed]. Every dependence on a particular platform that's not put into a platform abstraction layer is a bug. If you develop for every platform all the time, you'll find and fix those bugs immediately, paying the lowest possibl
um.. (Score:2)
Wanting it to be so and it being so are two entirely different things.
Forget Javascript for a moment (Score:2)
I'd be much happier with Chrome if they fixed the little things, like rendering checkboxes properly [google.com] (especially when it breaks Gmail, of all things) or getting Flash [tweak3d.net] to stop freezing after a few seconds of video after fast-forwarding (which breaks sites like Youtube)
paraphrasing mr. bak: (Score:2, Insightful)
"resistance is futile, you will be assimilated"
i think slashdot needs to update its icons
the borg bill gates icon is threatening only circa 1996. microsoft of 2009 is on a real decline
meanwhile, the company of all-domination in 2009 is obviously google. we need a remake of the google icon for slashdot to include the borg cube
and the microsoft icon should be remade with just a non-borg bill gates holding a jar of mosquitoes [msn.com]
How about something OTHER than javascript... (Score:4, Interesting)
It seems to me that the browser will not be able to replace the desktop ... or even claim to be an "OS" in anything but the most attenuated sense... until we have the ability to use something other than javascript in a reasonably cross-platform way. Imagine for a second that Windows could only be programmed in Visual Basic, or Linux could only be programmed in C. We'd absolutely hate it, and we'd be right to hate it.
Now, granted, any given development platform generally displays a preference for a given programming language. If you're going to develop Gnome applications, you're probably going to use C, if Cocoa, then Objective C, etc. But right now the situation in the web space is one of total locking to Javascript, which isn't even all that good of a language.
What I really want to see is a reasonable degree of cross-platform support for the use of a reasonable variety of object-oriented scripting languages embedded in the browser, as plugins. So I can develop web pages in HTML + Ruby, or HTML + Python, or HTML + Javascript, as is best suited for my application. The hooks are there in the HTML specs to do this, but browser implementations don't seem to have caught up.
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Plasmoids can be programmed in a whole slew of languages, such as Ruby, JS, Python, C++, etc. Someone made a proof-of-concept Firefox extension that ran plasmoids in your browser.
Chrome comes with Gears, and can't Gears widgets be programmed in a variety of languages?
And Java is still around, etc.
security, anyone? (Score:3, Insightful)
'The web is becoming an integral part of the computer and the basic distinction between the OS and the browser doesn't matter very much any more', he says."
Outch. After this quote, I know I'm never going to test Chrome.
There is an absolutely vital distinction. The damn browser will happily run any code embedded in any website I visit. My OS (don't know about yours, but mine) only runs stuff that I explicitly tell it to, usually after explicitly installing it. In fact, I'd prefer even tighter limits on that.
If you don't get that distinction, your security mindset is fucked up.
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Re:annoyed (Score:5, Insightful)
That is UK-English, it seems TechRadar is a British site. I agree, it sounds really strange and illogical if you are used to US-English.
Re:annoyed (Score:5, Funny)
it sounds really strange and illogical if you are used to US-English
Yeah, the normal and logical may seem that way if you're used to something so strange and illogical as US English - putting 'z' in almost every word, and I mean, MM/DD/YYYY? come on!
Just kidding... we love how you've butchere^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hembraced our language :)
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Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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Yes, then we mixed them together, ingested, digested, and what came out the other end after all was said and done was a flaming piece of turd.
Re:annoyed (Score:5, Funny)
Don't worry, nothing bad could possibly happen next.
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We're gonna tax your coffee, you freeloaders!
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I like how the Japanese do it: year/month/day.
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YES!
YYYY/MM/DD makes so much more sense, as it means that you get sane sorting when ordering using a computer.
DD/MM/YYYY results in a mess of dates, whereas YYYY/MM/DD always orders dates in chronological order.
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Since I correspond with people in Asia, the US, and Europe for work, I've found that the only unambiguous way to express dates is YYYY-MMM-DD or the reverse (e.g. 2009-Feb-02, 02-Feb-2009). Short of going to the long form, of course. I personally like having the day first, since that is often the most relevant piece of data... how did we Americans end up putting the month first, anyway? I bet it's just the short form of our longhand: "February 2, 2009". Do the Brits write "2 February, 2009"? If so, do they
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Well, mystery solved! I love it when it is that easy :) I guess the American way is slightly lazier... "February second, two-thousand and nine" is 2 fewer words. Is that lazier or more optimized?
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Wouldn't a committed American slacker say, "February two, two thousand nine"? Cutting thirteen syllables down to nine.
It makes me cringe every time I hear a date expressed this way...
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It totally makes up for all that tentacle porn...
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ISO standard is YYYY-MM-DD which I use for documents when I need it. Good for sorting.
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and I mean, MM/DD/YYYY? come on!
Well, you can hardly blame them for that one. When your average English speaker writes out a date, they'd write it as, for example, "February 26th, 2009"... which just so happens to be MM/DD/YYYY.
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When your average English speaker writes out a date, they'd write it as, for example, "February 26th, 2009"
but that is still the wrong way round, nearly all UK residents will write 26th February 2009 (you insensitive clod!)
The date should be fully written as "the 26th day of February in the year of our lord, 2009" (as our Gregorian calendar is christian-centric).
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Still, if you write "february 26th"? I have to ask - 26th of what?
Uhh... February. You know, like "day 42 - George and I are still stranded on this desert island, and each day, he looks tastier and tastier..." That isn't too terribly confusing for you, is it? :)
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Yeah, the normal and logical may seem that way if you're used to something so strange and illogical as US English - putting 'z' in almost every word, and I mean, MM/DD/YYYY? come on!
Yes they store dates in mixed endian format.
Not to mention football which Americans think is a sport where you don't have a proper ball and you very seldom play it using a foot. :)
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No, but you do say "the integers are infinite", similarly, you don't say "the company google are ..." but you do say "google are ..."
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You would say, "This company of people is ", but you wouldn't say, "This Google of people is ". 'Google' is a proper noun (and a verb), not a collective noun.
Re:annoyed (Score:5, Funny)
incidentally, you may be unaware of the distinction made in the UK between pants and trousers, i.e. that pants are what one wears under trousers.
Re:annoyed (Score:5, Funny)
This is why Superman dresses as he does. He landed in America, and was told to wear his pants on the outside.
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"incidentally, you may be unaware of the distinction made in the UK between pants and trousers, i.e. that pants are what one wears under trousers."
So what the hell are under-pants in the UK then? Do they go under your pants?
You guys wear 3 layers of pant?
Do you wear a pair of pants or more? So confusing.
All I know is if you wear pants under your trousers and that's all... well then you aren't wearing underwear and that's nasty.
Comment removed (Score:5, Funny)
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I is.
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I occasionally fire it up... in particular I find it very responsive when I know I'm going to be doing a lot of "Web 2.0" type sites... Gmail, Facebook, Google Apps, etc because it is very responsive. Overall, though, I still prefer Firefox because I can then use the same browser on all my computers. Add to that Adblock Plus, NoScript, and the Web Developer plugin and Firefox still has a major advantage.
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No argument there... my windows box has 4 browsers currently, and while I mostly use Firefox I do fire up all of them at various times. Since I'm one of those perverse Mac users, I even occasionally use Safari :)
I do (Score:3, Insightful)
I use it as my main browser. I've got a portable Firefox and (of course) IE, but I only fire them up when something isn't working right in Chrome. This is happening less and less.
Re:How Many People Even Use Chrome? (Score:5, Informative)
Chrome introduced features which IE and FF either have since included as well or are planned for future releases. I am certainly aware that Chrome is quite limited in some areas, but in the end its speed, flexibility, small memory footprint, and physical layout (minimal intrusion into the web page display area) make it my first choice despite its drawbacks. Feel free to correct me where I may be ignorant (seriously, no sarcasm intended).
*Every now and then I find a web app that's just not well coded (mostly due to funky CSS that's poorly formed) that works or at least displays properly in IE but not Chrome. C'est la vie.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I use it as my primary browser in Windows. The only time I use anything else is when I need to go to the Windows Update site.
You mention the minimal intrusion of menus and taskbars and such. I wish all software was that good at getting the administrative debris out of my way.
When I go back to Safari in OSX I immediately notice the difference between it and Chrome's UI, Chrome is light years better. They've uncomplicated and uncluttered the modern address bar design while keeping it (making it?) actually use
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Either I don't get it, or they don;t get it (Score:4, Insightful)
The combination of your statement and your sig makes it clear that you are one of those people who has to be dragged kicking and screaming into the future. You weren't like that when you were young, were you?
I think it's pretty clear when he means: the OS is becoming little more than the driver for the dumb-terminal you use to access your web-based applications. Stuff like file system management is pointless if all your data lives server-side in web apps.
You can go after his terminology in a display of petty pedantry, but it doesn't change the fact that what he is saying is becoming increasingly the way things are. We may not be there yet. We may not ever get there. But that is certainly where the momentum is.