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."
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Re:Crap, not webkit ... (Score:5, Informative)
Apple doesn't seem to really care very much about Safari on Windows
The fact that they discontinued it should be a clue.
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Every 6 months they say XXX JavaScript engine is 50% faster, the HTML parser is 40% faster! Browsing doesn't feel 45% faster every year to me, instead it just feels like all these freed up cycles are just going to tracking JS.
and I hardly think that pages are getting that much more complex every year... what's more likely is that some intermediate versions add some bloat or they just decide which bench the made better that time.
however.. has anyone seen any problems arising from updating the view while the javascript is running? blinking elements or such? or does it buffer those?
Re:They keep saying it's faster but... (Score:5, Insightful)
and I hardly think that pages are getting that much more complex every year
Wirth's law, amendment of 2013: web page code get slower faster than browsers get faster.
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Pages do in fact get much more complex over time. For example, cnn.com nowadays loads well north of a megabyte of JavaScript on every load...
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Is the tracking JS really slower, or is it more that the bottleneck is that the page is designed to wait for the tracking stuff to run, and the ad servers are under-provisioned, too far away (and/or not using a cdn), and all the tracking stuff isn't bundled, so many requests need to come back (and some of the tracking stuff has its own 3rd (4th?) party dependencies...) before you actually get to run it....
Hello from my iPhone... (Score:4, Funny)
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So here are the results. As I write this, it's currently +5 Funny. Honestly, this is the intent, regardless of whether you believe me or not. So, we can say from this single sample point (obviously insufficient for true science) that the /. moderation system works! Here, however, are the moderations on this post:
Oddly, no troll moderations, but I assume that's becaus
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LOL, on the bright side, some of us with older i-devices only have access to Google Maps because they stopped giving us updates before they changed to Apple Maps.
I'll trade you my now unsupported first-gen iPad for your phone. ;-)
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Yes I'm kicking myself now that Google Maps [apple.com] is no longer available on i-devices.
Oh, wait, that's a lie.
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Well, either you are silly or your dictionary is, because mine says pretty clearly, "percent also per cent".
You wouldn't have lied just now, and not actually looked it up in the dictionary, would you?
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God forbid anyone look at the words to understand them based on their content and construction. 40 percent = 40 per cent = 40 per 100.
cent being a latin root word meaning 100.
centennial- the 100th anniversary; centimeter - 1/100 of a meter; century - 100 years; centenarian - a 100 year old person; centigrade - a scale divided into 100 degrees
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God forbid anyone look at the words to understand them based on their content and construction.
The Real Meaning of MPH [youtube.com]
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Yeah, that one is great...
Common sense - not as common as one might hope.
Call the union! (Score:4, Funny)
> The HTML parser also takes fewer breaks
I'm sure there's a better technical explanation for this, but I laughed at the thought of the HTML parser on a coffee break.
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You know, that's not a bad write up. Well done Mr. AC.
(I'm a professional software dev. with over a decade of experience writing large scale desktop, web and distributed systems in both C++ and Java, for the past six months I've been helping Fortune 500 companies tune their Java based servlet containers. My observation is that is about the level of technical complexity I can get into while trying to explain related problems to customers... i.e. just barely skimming the surface, but clear and accurate.)
Proof that old-time SlashDot editors have survived (Score:3)
>> Google released Chrome 28 yesterday
Dup dup dup, dup-dup dup dup: http://tech.slashdot.org/story/13/07/09/2238233/google-chrome-28-is-out-rich-notifications-for-apps-extensions [slashdot.org]
Re:Please stop calling it "WebKit Fork" (Score:4, Funny)
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Well, Blink is a WebKit fork, so calling it as such is technically correct -- the best kind of correct.
Stop being a pansy. Btw, your chemistry teacher was an idiot.
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I'm an optometrist. Instead of asking my patients to blink, I'm going to ask them to web kit fork their eyes.
And yet... (Score:2)
And yet, the slowest part of Chrome is STILL the web cache, which was borrowed from Firefox years ago... "Waiting for cache..." is the most common thing I see my browser doing.
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Eh. Anon, your sarcasm seems misfounded.
You'll notice maybe that article has chart of chrome vs firefox for cache latency, w/ Firefox cache behaviour levelling off at 30ms navigation latency while Chrome's keeps climbing - 90+ms latency after 30 days and no apparent limit.
Soo, sounds like maybe he has a legit complaint, not that I use Chrome enough to know if this behaviour still exists.
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.
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Version numbering (Score:2)
Re:Version numbering (Score:4, Funny)
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I don't understand why I'm not seeing the same slew of posts deriding Chrome's version numbering scheme that I see whenever there is a Firefox article.
Because Chrome started with the inflated numbering scheme and stuck with it. Firefox had a sane and useful numbering scheme and abandoned it.
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Google started out with crazy inflated version numbering, whereas Firefox used to have a sane system but then decided to abandon it.
Speaking of which...isn't Firefox almost caught up now? 22 vs. 28 I believe?
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Google started out with crazy inflated version numbering, whereas Firefox used to have a sane system but then decided to abandon it.
Speaking of which...isn't Firefox almost caught up now? 22 vs. 28 I believe?
It won't ever catch up. They're both on a 6-week release schedule.
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Because Chrome is not trying to copy everything Firefox does at every opportunity.
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Chrome has always maintained a stable extension API, and have largely stuck with it (I'm not aware of any deviations, but I don't discount the possibility that they've existed.) Also, because they never exposed a version number in a prominent way, we haven't had web developers targeting versions of Chrome.
Firefox maintained a stable extension API, but then they also hosted third-party extensions which used unstable interfaces. By hosting them, they gave legitimacy to the unstable interfaces. With every F
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Have you ever noticed WHEN chrome[ium] updates? Nope.
Firefox show you this "checking addon compatibility" for a minute after every update. Some addons used to break (not anymore though). Those negative points are what made the rapid-release so awful.
Wow, a tablet-specific version of their maps app (Score:2)
What will they think of next?
Fuck. (Score:3)
If it routes around traffic incidents, then it'll be useless in Washington DC.
I don't want my phone to die with an error to the effect of "Unable to find path from Washington to Baltimore avoiding traffic incident WASHINGTON_BELTWAY_CLUSTERFUCK".
Now if it would automatically warn of known speed traps...
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Bahhh! (Score:2)
Oh what a beautiful morning...
My Maps Gone! (Score:5, Insightful)
They also removed the "My Maps" feature where you can pull up maps you've saved under your account within the desktop interface. Sad day for me, I use this for trip-planning all the time.
Yesterday? (Score:2)
Google released Chrome 28 yesterday
I updated to Chormium 28 on 19 June 2013. Why is Google Chrome getting released one month after Chromium?