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."
OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flash!! (Score:5, Funny)
When will it be available for my iPhone & iPad?
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It ships with Flash, but Flash will never become available for you iPod/iPhone/iPad... ever. Forget it...
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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.
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Re:OMG! Including direct integration of Adobe Flas (Score:4, Interesting)
And... (and this is the biggie)... since Apple have already allowed Opera with it's own JavaScript engine**, and Apple already include their own JS engine, what excuse could they give not to allow Chrome+Flash on iPhone|iPad|iPod?
It's clear [to me anyway] that Google are including Flash not to piss Apple off, but to (1). ensure stability of Chrome Browser and by extension, Android and ChromeOS, and (2). to make it easier for OEMs to include Android/ChromeOS as well as Flash and have everything manage updates automatically.
Since Google is doing all the leg-work to make Flash fast and stable, this would seem to address all of Steve Jobs'es issues with Flash.
I predict fun interesting times ahead!
**except... as I'm writing this, I've just remembered that Opera on iPhone is Opera Mini, and I'm not 100% sure that does include any JS engine?
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.
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Interesting point. Of course, just as soon as someone got that working, the app would be banned from the iStore.
I could really use proper CSS3 multicolumn support (Score:2)
So much flakiness in the WebKit support of CSS multi-column layout... don't even know where to begin. Firefox is much farther ahead in this case.
Eventually DIVs are going to have to go away completely, so that all HTML is semantic.
Re:I could really use proper CSS3 multicolumn supp (Score:5, Funny)
So much flakiness in the WebKit support of CSS multi-column layout... don't even know where to begin. Firefox is much farther ahead in this case.
Eventually DIVs are going to have to go away completely, so that all HTML is semantic.
Silence! Real web users spend all day continually refreshing the ACID3 test. Nothing else matters.
But Father Steve says no Flash (Score:5, Funny)
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NONE SHALL FLASH!
You mean Gandalf is really Steve Jobs?
Damn. You made Baby Frodo cry.
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Yeah - if you picture that movie exactly the same but with Ian McKellan sporting jeans + black turtleneck instead of the robes, that movie would take on a whole new meaning.
"Mobile is mine!" - Saruman via Theodin
"You did not kill me, you will not kill RIM!" - Stevedalf
Can it display PDFs? (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
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I use PDF Download to solve that problem under Firefox. But with Chrome, each browser tab is an independent process. Load up something in a tab (such as a PDF) and it's borked? Close the tab, problem solved. Doesn't seem like it would be a big issue for Chrome.
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PDFs displayed inside the browser window is a bug more than a feature. Almost 100% of the time, this causes problems, of all kinds.
I don't have any problems with it.
And a couple of the banks I do business with make it very hard to get a downloadable PDF. It's nearly impossible to look at my statements with Chrome.
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Yes, but while I like the PDFs to open in a separate window, I don't like being left with a pointless tab showing a blank page, which seems to happen quite often (but not all the time) on Chrome.
Blame Acrobat. (Score:4, Informative)
PDF itself is an open format, perfectly capable of being displayed efficiently and safely. What's the problem with putting it in a browser Window?
Remember, GP was talking about Linux. While we could use acroread, there's also things like Okular, which opens nearly instantaneously to display PDFs. On OS X, there's Preview -- same situation. Both display PDFs at least as accurately as Acrobat.
Re:Can it display PDFs? (Score:4, Informative)
Is this because of specific gripes you have with existing PDF plugins, or on a more general level?
Although I despise Adobe Reader, I find Safari's PDF implementation to be quite good on Macs (although this could be because OSX's treatment of PDF in general is top-notch, lightning-fast, and very deeply integrated into the windowing system)
You can also get similar functionality [google.com] for Firefox on mac.
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It is a bug because it means that every new drive-by PDF exploit has a chance to hit me if my browser automatically loads the PDFs.
Your system is nice, but you have control over the content. That “feature” shouldn’t be enabled for PDFs from the web in general.
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I have the same problem with chromium, I don't know what the deal is. Even mozplugger doesn't fix it (and chrome/chromium will use mozilla plugins automagically these days. and they often work — flash does.)
mostly I try to quick view PDFs these days, but that's even worse than downloading the PDF if you have poor bandwidth.
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I suggest using a Google Chrome extension to let Google Docs parse the PDF and display it inline.
Yes, you'll lose some PDF features, but often it's good enough, and it's a much more stable method than using PDF Reader online.
The extension:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn [google.com]
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https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/nnbmlagghjjcbdhgmkedmbmedengocbn [google.com]
I hope this is only an early example (Score:2)
Chrome has long been one of the browsers with worse Flash integration. Right-click flash menu refusing to disappear, very slow Flash plugin startup, high resource usage, Chrome starting and running Flash at full priority in background pages.
I don't see any of these resolved. So far all that has materialized from the "advanced integration" is the bundling.
does this fix flash sandboxing? (Score:2)
But... Trust Issues (Score:2, Troll)
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http://code.google.com/p/chromium/ [google.com]
Still has the same old problems (Score:5, Interesting)
In particular, it's still lacking a lot of options that i think ought to be available, like making new tabs open at the end of the list, having a minimum size that tabs can shrink to and a scrollable tab bar, having a drop-down list of all open tabs, and the ability to move the tab bar below the rest of the toolbars. Which is mostly just a list of all the fixes that the Firefox browser has already introduced. There's no shame in benefiting from the experience of those who have come before if you're unable to think of a way to improve the interface yourself.
Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options. Unfortunately Google's view towards user customability remains... unencouraging at best. [chromium.org] (Or, IMHO, "stupidly wrong.") Luckily _some_ of those changes can be implemented by extensions, but not all of them.
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SSL renegotiation is still broken as well (under mac at least, haven't tried the others).
This is a deal breaker, if I can't use my certificates, I can't use the browser for work.
Is a shame, because I really like everything else about the browser.
SSL renegotiation is a security hole unless... (Score:2)
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The scrollable tab bar is, arguably, not only not the best idea necessarily...but, most importantly, redundant if you have drop-down list of open tabs - potentially much more clear with much less action required if you really have lots of tabs open. But that's the thing, "potentially"...because the way FF implements it totally blows - it shouldn't be a scrolling menu if the list doesn't fit, it should be a nested menu; much faster again, much more clear.
FF also has problems with those elements of the interf
Preference overload (Score:2)
Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options.
This is the path to preference overload [pair.com].
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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.
Chrome ad blockers use up your transfer cap (Score:4, Insightful)
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This is important to people on satellite, 3G, or the Southern Hemisphere, all of which have transfer caps on the order of 5 GB per month per subscriber.
That tells me a lot about the way you process and distribute information. I can personally vouch that there is definitely no transfer cap for the absolute majority of people in the country where I live, which is in the southern hemisphere. I am pretty certain the 5 GB number was also pulled from the same area of your ass where the rest of your "information" exists.
I will not comment on satellite connections or 3G(although unlimited bandwidth plans are fairly common) since unlike you I try to make sure that
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Does it still require switching to a "developer channel", a procedure that was fundamentally broken when I tried it the last time? It simply never worked - I repeatedly ran the "channel switcher" app, and nonetheless my browser never switched into the developer channel, and thus no extensions would work.
Does your browser still download ads, slowing page loads down, and just hide them? Or is actual blocking of ad loads now possible?
I know these things exist, but there is still a lot of work to be done on t
Re:Still has the same old problems (Score:4, Insightful)
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Chrome allows you to hide ads through extensions but if you really don't want any bandwidth used on them at all why not use Privoxy, eliminate AdBlock extensions in all the web browsers you use, and enjoy an ad-free web experience? That way whatever browser you decide you want to use at any given time has ad-blocking because Privoxy filters it all out. I realize there are some certain scenarios where an extension would be preferable (or the only option) but for most cases Privoxy is by far the better soluti
Well (Score:5, Funny)
DO NOT WANT. I don't need any more proprietary crap rolled into a browser. Lean, mean, and a solid plug in architecture. Great now how the fuck am I supposed to block all those fucking retarded flash ads with the damn flash engine embedded... grr.... on the other hand:
I for one welcome out cowboyNeal worshipping Dancing Baby overlords but question their ability to run Earth better then a borg augmented Bill Gates. WhatCouldPossiblyGoWrong besides Steve Ballmer throwing a chair and breaking the series of tubes we call the Internet. The only thing worse then a suddenOutbreakOfCommonSense coupled with the release of Duke Nukem Forver is the return of Charlie the Unicorn during a Chocolate Rain. In Soviet Russia Snakes on a plane get You but under the new rulership we are as screwed as the Star Wars Kid getting the hookup with a Wii Fit Girl. If you don't think things can get worse, I am fine with that, OK Go, but all your bases are belong to us then. See if I care. But when Dear Leader forces you to do the Hampster Dance in front of the Saugeen Stripper after the JK Wedding Entrance Dance you will beg to be thrown in with those Snakes on a Plane flying to the Ultimate Showdown of Ultimate Destiny! I know that CorrelationNoCausation may apply here but I am certain that the new overlords computer will be superior to our current technology, but does it run Linux and can you imagine a Beowulf cluster of their computers! My Epeen is huge thinking about it to the point of a joygasm! Perhaps with their technology we could getyourasstomars in the time it takes to watch the Last Lecture! Imagine the number of Libraries of Congress we could store using their technology! Mod me Troll? How dare you you insensitive clod! Now to distract you while I steal the Netcraft report confirming Gentoo
Linux is dying. LOOK OVER THERE! OMG!!! PONIES!!
(Did I miss anything there?)
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Just nuke it from orbit.
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(Did I miss anything there?)
4. Profit?
Re:Well (Score:5, Funny)
Meme overload Captain!! She'll fly apart!
Re:Well (Score:4, Funny)
Awesome (Score:2)
Given that Chrome is the only browser I've found on Linux that actually feels fast (well, Midori is speedy too but it crashed constantly), I'm happy to see innovation on that front.
I've never figured out why Chrome is as fast as it is on Linux while Firefox feels like driving an 18-wheeler dragging a stadium behind it (while on Windows and Mac it feels just fine), but alas, I found something that works and that's all that matters.
PDFs in linux? (Score:2)
Chrome Flash: Crashy McCrashington (Score:2)
I actually thought this was a good idea, at least for heavy users of Facebook, as we all know is awash in Flash games of all description.
Unfortunately it's easily the crashiest Chrome beta I've tested. In fact, it's very easy to replicate!
I'll call this a reversion, because a similar bug was supposedly fixed [google.com] back in December.
I've really wanted to like Chrome. It reall
Chromium (Score:2)
Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, if you leave out Opera. However, if you do include Opera in the test it beats even Chrome 5 [computerworld.com].
No, again, that is Opera.
Where the hell is print preview??!! (Score:3, Interesting)
http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=29ea05faa34bade4&hl=en [google.com]
Webkit is also getting faster (Score:4, Insightful)
Googleupdate (Score:3, Insightful)
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Of course it can. It would take you about 5 seconds to google that.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=chrome+adblock [lmgtfy.com]
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Which part of the word 'and' is confusing you?
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Which part of the word 'and' is confusing you?
FYI: The word 'and' is monosyllabic and therefore consists of only one 'part'. If you presume that this word is confusing the GP then maybe you could have taken the next intuitive step and insinuated that it is the whole word that is causing issues and not any 'part' of it. Unfortunately by not making this leap you are proving yourself to be a bit of a forum noob.
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.
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Absolutely. NoScript is all the magic.
But think about it: you want NoScript from Google, considering that Chrome's only real claim-to-fame is to run JavaScript faster than everyone else.
For me, the only actual temptation to use Chrome is to get the independent processes in each tab, and the next version of Firefox will have that.
I would argue that Firefox with NoScript is faster than Chrome with scripts. Not rendering the crap at all makes for a much better web experience for both me and my browser.
Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript? (Score:5, Informative)
The next version of Firefox with have plugins in a seperate process. The rest of the project is still going to take some more time.
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Electrolysis [mozilla.org]
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But think about it: you want NoScript from Google, considering that Chrome's only real claim-to-fame is to run JavaScript faster than everyone else.
Why would that prevent me from deciding whose scripts I want to run? I run Chromium, and I would very much like to have NoScript. With that said, it seems like all that is needed on top of functionality recently added to chrome [techie-buzz.com] is a bit of GUI.
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It already has that. Small icons appear to the right of the entry bar when cookies or scripts are blocked. You can click the icon to turn on scripts or cookies for the domain.
More info and screenshots at my web site [ath0.com].
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NoScript is the deal breaker. Chrome has a clunky way to turn JavaScript on and off, It even looks like it has the ability to manage blacklist/whitelist. If it could add the ability to manage the exception list while you are looking at the page (without diving into menus) the way NoScript does, then I would switch to chrome in a heartbeat.
I wonder if Chrome extensions can now manipulate said white/blacklist, like Chrome 5 indeed now has for both pictures, javascript (for Noscript-like functionality), and plugins (for Flashblock-like functionality)? It even does simple pattern-matching to block entire sub/domains... Seems like a wasted effort if there's no better UI than this however.
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Quick question aimed at no one in particular:
Chrome is based on Chromium, Chromium is open source, meaning the code is available to anyone who wants it. So why hasn't anyone massed around with Chromium to kludge together a true ad blocker, which may (or may not) be portable to Google's flavor, Chrome?
There really should be a thrid-party ad-blocker for Chromium by now, or at least some decent documentation on the web on why there isn't, or why it isn't possible. Google doesn't seem to give any evidence, ou
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Adblock is freely available from the Google Chrome website fro christs sake. Even easylist and a more or less hidden option to turn ON Google text adds.
Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript? (Score:4, Informative)
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Chrome runs the plugin in its own process, so the probability of Flash locking up the browser is zero to begin with.
That's like saying the Titanic can't sink because the sealing bulkheads are part of the ship itself. All that happens is that the water overflows the compartments and the whole ship sinks. Such is the case with this, you said yourself that you have a taskbar icon to kill an unresponsive flash plugin process. Surely if the plugin is coded into the browser when that part of the program fails the entire browser will lock up and you'll have to kill chrome rather than just libflashplugin. I can't see this be
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Bad analogies are why I keep coming back to slashdot. Thanks for carrying the torch!
Re:Can it run adblock, flashblock and noscript? (Score:4, Informative)
ps axu | grep libflashplayer | grep $LOGNAME | grep -v grep | awk '{print $2}' | xargs kill
Err, you might want to consider replacing all that nonsense with something like
ps -U username | awk '/[l]ibflashplayer/ {print $2}"
Better yet, use pgrep/pkill
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The main reason for needing flashblock in FF is that the flash plugin tends to lock up the whole browser
That's a good reason, but for me the *main* reason is flash advertisements are so annoying. They often make "punch the monkey" look tame.
That, and IMO anything that pushes web designers to stop treating flash as a web standard is a good thing.
Does it still spy on you (Score:2)
Since google merged the google-bar and URL bar into one, it sends all your browsing to google does it not? If so, I really wonder why people use this.
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if no protocol is defines (say "http://") then their browser uses the default search engine. Of course this is Google by default, but it is realy easily changeable. Chrome (not Chromium!) asks you what search engine you want to use on the firts run.
After a while this one bar gets adiciting!
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Free....so long as your privacy is worth nothing.
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.
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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, o
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.
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You don't have to vote for them, they already have the power.
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: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
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That's exactly my point. YouTube *won't* switch to HTML5 completely - at least not yet. Too much of the world is still using browsers that don't support HTML5. While I'm sure Google engineers would love to have to not support Flash, it doesn't make sense for them to just dump it. They want as many eyes as possible on their websites - particularly YouTube. This is, in my opinion, exactly why Flash was integrated in with the Chrome browser. It ensures that every person who uses Chrome will be able to se
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BTW, funny thing with dropping ie6 on yt - I have one old machine around here, on which I keep also an older Opera version, 9.27 (typically works even better than recent releases on ram restricted machine). Recently, around the time of changes which supposedly broke ie6, I noticed that this old version suddenly started working better on yt... (and I doubt it was tested / optimized for; it will be quite cute if, with sites going more and more towards proper web standards, this old Opera will continue to "imp
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Interesting thing about Youtube - the whole site runs on Flash Media Server - even the non Flash clients.
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Which is also why I must have a flashblocker plugin - flash is responsible for most of the extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney [netlingo.com] out there.
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So when developers start making the same "extremely annoying, distracting dancing baloney" stuff using HTML5/Javascript, what then?
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[...] nobody uses Flash for anything serious but YouTube use...
You mean you consider YouTube use as something serious?
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.
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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 t
Re:Its just not the fastest browser... (Score:4, Informative)
The most casual of testing of Opera 10.53 on my own C2D e8400 just yielded a Sunspider result of...
"Total: 312.0ms +/- 13.9%"
If speed is such an important marketing factor then why aren't we hearing more about opera?
I don't really like Opera and don't use it because of my UI preferences, but about six months ago when I last compared html (not javascript) rendering speeds, Opera was the only browser that could smoothly scroll through the large text and image laden pages I used as benchmarks. Safari was the slowest, skipping entire screens of content as it experienced rendering hiccups, and Chrome (I tested Chrome 3) was pretty bad too. I tried Chrome 4 later and saw a lot of improvement, but it still didn't have the performance of Opera. This was all on an i7 system.
I'm hoping a newer version of Chrome will make up the difference, but then I still need it to run a real adblock, not the current "load the image and then hide it" version.
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then install a adblocking hosts file.
http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm [mvps.org]
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You're misinformed. That's just a (off by default) recently introduced function; Opera always was damn snappy overall.
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Are you talking about the mobile version?
Re:Its just not the fastest browser... (Score:5, Informative)
No, that is completely wrong. Opera was the fastest browser by far until some time after 9.5 was released. After that, Apple introduced their new JS engine. For a year or so Opera was no longer the fastest. Now Opera is the fastest at JS again.
So Opera has traditionally been the fastest, and now is the fastest again.
Re:What about for us normal folks? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Mathematically, if every release the javascript is 10% faster, that is 10% faster than the last fastest release, so maybe we're talking about smaller and smaller values of fasterness.
IOW, if it takes 10 seconds to complete a javascript script, then it takes 9 seconds because 1 second is 10% of 10 seconds; then it takes 8.1 seconds because .9 seconds is 10% of 9 seconds; then 7.29 seconds; then 6.561; and so on.
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``I've been following these browser press releases for years now and every time the Javascript is X% faster. Does that mean that it was horrendously crap to start with''
Yes. As long as people were using JavaScript to add little bits of interactivity and dynamism to web pages, speed was not an issue and browser makers didn't make their JavaScript implementations fast. Now that people are writing entire applications in JavaScript, speed is an issue and browser makers use JavaScript speed as a major selling po
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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.