Google chrome

Posted by William M. Connolley on September 2, 2008
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Just one of an avalanche of tedious blogosphere reactions to google chrome. This afternoon I was reading the comic book (at work, I confess, but I wasn’t alone) and now I’ve downloaded it and this is written in it.

So far I haven’t seen any obvious advantages over firefox (other than the porno-viewing mode, of course :-) but I’ve read what they say and maybe it will become obvious (OK, I have just found one. It allows me to drag this dialogue box I’m typing the text in to become bigger. I like that. I don’t think they even bothered to announce it). Its quite blue. I have just set it to be my default browser.

This looks a fairly obvious play in the anti-micr$oft get-apps-off-your-computer direction, by making a better browser. Its also bad news for firefox, which is regrettable.

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  1. #1 Paul Schofield
    2008/09/02

    Been playing for a while. A lot to like, but not default yet.

    Speed is fantastic. Looks are good. Plugins and most other features work wonderfully out of the box. Adobe and video support fantastic.

    The back end is excellent, with each tab and plugin being a separate process that can be managed, killed through the built in task manager. Crashes only take down what crashed, nothing more. Not that I’ve managed to crash it yet…

    However, it lacks some basic functions and still lacks the ability to tweak it. Doesn’t seem as intuitive yet, and I’d want to see how customisable it gets before I start adapting to it.

    Plus it flat out refuses to save changes to TiddlyWiki’s – a major reason I’d use it (it loads them quickly and looks fantastic).

    As for the resizeable text areas, already a Firefox plugin.

  2. #2 pough
    2008/09/02

    Resizeable text boxes must be a wekbit thing because Safari has it. It is pretty cool, although it could seriously mess up a web page that can’t handle having its components resized.

    I recently installed it, too. I’ve noticed pages loading very quickly. I also noticed I couldn’t shut the damn thing down while it was waiting for a response from a server.

  3. #3 travc
    2008/09/02

    Nothing inherently wrong with displacing Firefox, if it really is better. If you’ve ever written a web application, you quickly realize that they (and the W3C framework in general) isn’t designed for it. AJAX is actually just a crude (and complicated) hack to allow you to do things that were never intended.

    My guess is that Google has much more in store for Chrome. The general framework sounds like it is designed to allow for more sane (and powerful) async extensions to replace AJAX. Wonder if they can get the W3C actually extend the standards, or are perhaps looking at some existing RFC or draft which I’m not aware of.

  4. #4 travc
    2008/09/02

    Sadly, I can’t actually try it out yet until the OSX and/or Linux versions are released.

    It is disappointing (but not surprising) that the Windoze version is released first… Really though, it should be developed on a *nix (or OSX) system first (much more reliable and standard development environment). Plus the population of users for initial beta testing are more likely to be able to track down (provide enough info for replication) and maybe even fix bugs.

  5. #5 Aerik
    2008/09/02

    I won’t be switching over until they allow you to tweak it and there’s a large community of addon developers for it. I think it should all be open-source, too. Firefox developers would probably love access to something that performs quicker than FF on javascript. Just look at how quickly the donation of source code from Adobe led to the Just-In-Time compiler and the Tracing method that’s going to speed up FF3.1′s javascript engine by 40%.

    [It is all open-source, no? Or so they say -W]

    Opera likes to brag about how they have widgets, but as Firefox’s community has showed, the corporate elitism of a company that doesn’t go open-source with it’s web browser drives away quality addon developers.

  6. #6 Chad
    2008/09/02

    I’m not impressed. I loaded a PDF and scrolling with the wheel became a hassle. chrome would take up 99% of the CPU’s resources. Scrolling by pulling the bar on the side didn’t cause any problems. Also, not having File,Edit,etc at the top is a little upsetting. I do however love the speed. I usually stay away from a site if I know or suspect there’s a java applet because we all know how firefox becomes dead weight until the applet loads.

  7. #7 PalMD
    2008/09/03

    im having the same scrolling prob…scrolling on the side of my mousepad is too damned fast and as of yet unfixable

  8. #8 Adam
    2008/09/03

    Not tried it yet but:

    “It allows me to drag this dialogue box I’m typing the text in to become bigger.”

    There is a FFX extension that allows you to do that. I forget it’s name because I hardly ever used it so removed it (that happens a reasonable amount, though there are many extensions that I now think are actually part of the base browser and get surprised aren’t there is using another machine – I will build USB mounted version one day).

  9. #9 Paul Schofield
    2008/09/03

    Scrolling seems to be a universal issue. Default scrolling is too fast, you can’t use the middle click scroll, and some people have been reporting that touchpad scrolling only works going down, not back up.

    I will admit that I like the base browser better than base FireFox, ignoring these little bugs. I just need my plugins too much to switch over yet. If they can make FireGestures and bring over certain other functions, then maybe…

    Oh, and Adam, I linked that extension above.

  10. #10 Adam
    2008/09/04

    Sorry Paul, only read as far as the tiddlywiki bit – must have thought the link was the post date or something. :)

  11. #11 Magnus W
    2008/09/04

    You where involved in modelling the north Atlantic drift and such? Have any one really done a good estimation of what a summer ice free Artic would do to that? Could it have any big impact? Something to blog about?

    [Not really involved in that. Not enough enough to know whether the models version of the drift is reliable or not.

    A first order take would be that its the brine rejection that matters, therefore the amount of sea ice created/destroyed each year that matters, rather than the absolute area. So you could look at how the amplitude of the seasonal cycle has changed (though ideally you'd look at volume not area) -W]

  12. #12 Magnus W
    2008/09/04

    Yes yes, I was thinking that starting from 0 would have quite a big impact? But don’t really know… as I understand the measurements out there are really few?

    (of the drift…)

  13. #13 Aerik
    2008/09/05

    Whoa, did you insert your own comment into my comment??? Most uncool!

    [Certainly did. Why should I not? -W]

    Anyhoo

    No, Google chrome is not on the same level of open-sourcedness as Mozilla is. No matter what, Google is going to determine how it changes. They’ll change it spontaneously to sync code with gmail and apps, and since those things are not open source, Chrome’s alleged transparency will always be for naught.

    [Its open source. It says so, and provides instructions for download that I haven't followed, but I have no reason to doubt (if they didn't work,I'm sure people would have complained). What you say is true, of course: Google remain the power behind it -W]