It appears that Google scored a PR success with their Chrome browser. In short, the promise is a web experience where web pages are allowed to behave more like desktop applications. This is done by boosting the abilities of common web pages in terms of performance, while also allowing ‘plugins’ to enrich the user experience of certain other pages. As it seems, the announcement shot at the heads of people who’ve been holding their breath for the fabled Google Operating System. However in the following text I will demonstrate that Chrome [based on what we are allowed to know] puts strain on the Designer and Developer communities, is not innovative (save for one feature), and copies ideas liberally from Google’s worst enemy.
In order to explain the product, Google has appointed Blogoscoped to create a cartoon story that explains the product. I really feel that the explanations given in it do a disservice to the public, by making them want things that they don’t fully understand. I also feel that if they did, they wouldn’t want them anyway.
My greatest problem with the cartoon strip is that while it’s supposed to explain how Chrome works, it really explains how all major browsers work, implying that these features were invented for Chrome alone.
So I’d like to count pages with you dear reader and comment on what I read.
This is the first fallacy, and it’s being introduced early because it’s fundamental to the rhetoric that follows. Web pages, are fundamentally still html (presentation markup) and javascript (behavioral logic). Javascript especially, while being quite capable, is still several orders of magnitude slower than code running in the OS. Therefore it almost always is used to process the presentation of the application, while the actual processing is done at a web server.
Next up, a figure wonders if it would be great to have a new browser. Apparently, it could be great. On the other hand designers, that will have yet another browser to test their pages against, wouldn’t be delighted. Neither would plugin developers such as Adobe, Sun and Microsoft that would have yet another environment to support for their Flash, Java and Media Player + Silverlight plugins.
Next up an engineer is suggesting that it would be great if every browser page was isolated in a different process. This would mean greater memory consumption, but on the far end better stability and so on. Further along, they suggest that this requires more headstart memory but leads to less memory use further along. This is exactly how tabs work in Internet Explorer 8. Each tab is isolated in a process, it can’t even communicate with other tabs and so on. Furthermore, when a tab crashes, it alone is eradicated, the memory is freed and the tab is rebooted. By chance, Google’s Chrome does the same.
This however flat out leads to greater memory consumption. There is no way that the end overhead is smaller, except if a browser’s javascript engine or a plugin attached to the process is leaking memory. Google is willfully misguiding readers when stating this. There is no way that this would lead to less ‘bloat’. IE8 also uses a lot more memory than IE7 precisely because of this.
As mentioned, Google banks on the idea that browser tabs are leaking memory. Thankfully there is an easy fix for this. Either use IE8, or when loading a demanding web page, do so in a new browser window, which operates on a separate process.
Next up a process manager is suggested. This is indeed a useful idea, and a beneficial one. It remains to be seen if users want their browsers to be as complex an experience as managing their desktop. A big part of the success of the web lies in the idea that there is less management to be done. Google’s idea here is that pages will be very demanding in terms of processing either because the html + javascript combination is so inefficient that it can’t even handle the presentation layer of an application, or because they plan to move more business logic to the user end.
Then the authors suggest that there is extensive automated testing done to ensure that Chrome works with a great deal of web pages. This implies two things: either they want to ensure that it doesn’t crash, or that the browser may introduce rendering or javascript incompatibilities. So Google is deliberately putting it’s weight behind a project that will put even more stress to Designers who are debugging their CSS and Developers that produce popular javascript libraries such as JQuery, Dojo and so on.
The next page explains clearly that Google has indeed modified the webkit renderer and therefore is indeed a new platform that will have to be tested against.
And as expected a new javascript engine to be tested against was also introduced. The idea of using a virtual machine to serve javascript is also used by Microsoft in the Silverlight containers, pushing to massive performance gains. The difference is that Microsoft isn’t pushing this in the browser itself, making it a target for testing in traditional web pages.
As more details get revealed, we are told that the fact that the script engine is fully virtualized and that it uses more memory to keep tabs on how the rest of the memory is used is a good thing. While it is true that this will lead to a more acceptable experience in demanding applications, it’s putting a significant overhead on simpler ones that do basic things.
And then the real intentions are revealed. This is all meant to enable real heavy pages, not benefit the vast majority of use cases. It would be great if we knew the overall percent difference in memory usage on the pages that are tested for rendering conformance.
This is a very bold claim, and incidentally it’s how the Opera browser works. This makes sense initially, however it means a few things:
- You have to traverse more pixels each time you switch to a page.
- The only reason why you wouldn’t want the traditional model where buttons effect the active tab is that you want web pages to be able to change the UI to better adapt the user experience. However if you’ve ever been rickrolled, you know you don’t want the web site to have that much control on your experience.
- Looking at it carefully. The tabs are essentially a taskbar like in Windows. If you add a start menu to the left, you have the Windows Shell, pure and simple.
The omnibox concept exists already in Firefox and IE8 alike. The comic strip suggests that it’s more developed, but the drawing doesn’t reveal anything like that.
Again, similar features exist in Opera and IE8. Opera in fact is identical to this behavior.
Which is exactly how things work in Safari and IE8.
The browser also uses your history to feed the front page. This leaves a gap however. There are many decent sites that are not work safe. Essentially this leaves users either risking their image towards others or loosing convenience by browsing in Incognito mode.
To address the security problems that will inevitably arise (as is correctly pointed out), the concept of sandboxing is introduced. This too is not innovative. Privilege isolation is part of all major browsers, and most of all, part of the ones shipped inside Windows and OSX since the browsers are actually used for many processes intrinsic to these OSes.
This could not be more true. It is however also misleading. This is clearly aimed at Flash’s architecture where the main Flash process which runs with almost driver-like privileges serves all the instances of the plugin. This however is done to reduce memory consumption. Instead of replicating all the t0 overhead, Adobe’s engineers chose to reuse the memory at hand. With all it’s drawbacks, the decision is clearly the correct one.
Protecting users from phishing sites is done using the same black list that Mozilla already uses. The same kind of service also existed in IE7 and Opera.
Overall, I’d also like to point out that the entire comic has a clear marketing flair to it, targeted at making users want something they aren’t sure they would. The little technical accuracy in it is also designed to arm the hands of less savvy tech writers with an existing bias for Google’s ventures. Throughout the strip, Google employees appear as whitecoats or apprentice magicians, pushing quotes that don’t stand to scrutiny. There is also a great deal of self appraise and flattery. There is a bit of goodwill, where the characters recognize that they have adopted ideas from others, but these pieces are always downplayed and secondary.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I’ve been using Chrome for a few hours, and so far I’m liking it more than IE and Firefox. It’s quite snappy and despite it being labeled with the classic google “beta” tag, it’s very polished.
The thing that bothers me here is that you say it’s harmful because A) It does things that other browsers do and B) It’ll put more strain on developers because a new browser will induce having to test against a yet another browser. So? If you’re too lazy to debug your code against a browser that your users like, then maybe you don’t deserve visitors?
Edited 2008-09-03 15:49 UTC
And I think it’s really just using Webkit and then have their own javascript engine. But seriously, if you code your javascript “standardly” and cleanly, I imagine you should be fine. (of course, you need to test on IE since it’s… different…)
Lol, in context this was a rather funny comment. As even Googles web developers don’t do this. GMail or Google maps anyone. Always fun to see what their browser check decides to throw your way.
Well, it has unfixed security bugs in Webkit.
And your privacy is not really respected. Google wants to know _everything_ you do in the browser.
And I think they won’t make it easy to build a adblock feature. ( That is why so many bloggers and the online press love it so much. )
For me all this means that:
I will wait for a Linuxfork that respects my privacy and enables adblocking.
I love the UI and the technology, but I also like Firefox and it will soon get a much faster JS engine too.
Edited 2008-09-03 16:32 UTC
Huh? Aside from things being sent to the search engine, which you can change, Chrome and Google.com do not communicate aside from some really mundane stuff like updates. Explain to me how that is not respecting my privacy?
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
Check that out, Matt Cutts debunks a lot of myths surrounding the browser, especially since there’s a lot of Googlophobia lately.
Have a read through Chrome’s privacy policy. What I didn’t like is that “Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers.” and “When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google”.
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
That’s probably because as you type into the address bar, complete url’s are suggested not only based on where you’ve been before, but also on Google search results.
Since it is open source (it should be BSD code), patched and sane versions will probably come out.
What I would *love* is a compatibility layer between Firefox addons and Chrome.
Oh my days, talk about jump the gun.
The whole thing is open source, all of it.
Anybody can add an AdBlock extension however they please.
Your “fork it” attitude is totally disrespectful to the hard work the engineers have done giving all this away for free. In case you hadn’t realised, a Linux version is on its way.
The privacy in Chrome is actually very good (*way* better than IE), but then, you didn’t bother to actually research that.
http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/privacy.html
http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/google-chrome-communication/
Edited 2008-09-03 16:37 UTC
Well:
Security holes:
http://www.heise-online.co.uk/security/Google-Chrome-beta-comes-wit…
And defaults matter. From the privacy notice:
When you type URLs or queries in the address bar, the letters you type are sent to Google so the Suggest feature can automatically recommend terms or URLs you may be looking for. If you choose to share usage statistics with Google and you accept a suggested query or URL, Google Chrome will send that information to Google as well. You can disable this feature as explained here.
And:
Your copy of Google Chrome includes one or more unique application numbers. These numbers and information about your installation of the browser (e.g., version number, language) will be sent to Google when you first install and use it and when Google Chrome automatically checks for updates. If you choose to send usage statistics and crash reports to Google, the browser will send us this information along with a unique application number as well. Crash reports can contain information from files, applications and services that were running at the time of a malfunction. We use crash reports to diagnose and try to fix any problems with the browser.
And forking is something totally normal and Google encourages the use of their source code. In no way it is disrespectful.
I will only use it once it has been audited / forked by a third party and all the addons I need are there.
Otherwise like I said it is great technology. Although I think they should have mentioned KHTML somewhere along the line. Give credit where credit is due.
Edit:
And Matt is slightly wrong on some points. For example when you surf the web without adblocker all sites you visit with google ads will track your surfing habits .. the list goes on ..
Edited 2008-09-03 16:53 UTC
Actually WebKit has been so blown over KHtml that I don’t think credit is due anymore. I noticed and agreed with that choice, that’s why I didn’t comment on it.
Download and browse amond the sources to see what I’m talking about.
Hmm… There is something I recall reading that addresses the security hole thing…. let me find… Oh! right, its a beta!!
I think it’s only fair to point out some contrary viewpoints about those alleged flaws:
About the carpet bombing attack:
http://blog.internetnews.com/skerner/2008/09/google-chrome-not-at-r…
About the protocol handling:
http://lists.grok.org.uk/pipermail/full-disclosure/2008-September/0…
uhh…
Google is not tracking my usage behavior. I opted out of that.
I’ve been using it for a day now and I’ve had it randomly lockup and crash on random websites.
bleh. hope they fix all that. I also despise the tab management.
Javascript especially, while being quite capable, is still several orders of magnitude slower than code running in the OS.
The whole purpose of the new javascript engine of Chrome and Firefox tracemonkey is not to make the slow javascript “a bit faster”, but to make javascript’s speed comparable to native code. The Chrome javascript engine is in fact a javascript compiler to native code – no interpretation, no bytecodes. It will be sure slower than C/C++, but it’s “fast enought” to compete with native code.
Suddenly the most used language in the world became performance-competitive. Guess what will happen in the programming world in the next years?
On the other hand designers, that will have yet another browser to test their pages against
With Chrome, Safari and Firefox developers are starting to stop coding “for a browser”. They code for standards. No, a new standards-compliant browser is not going to harm them, is actually going to make EASIER to develop web pages because it makes standards more relevant.
Google is deliberately putting it’s weight behind a project that will put even more stress to Designers who are debugging their CSS and Developers that produce popular javascript libraries such as JQuery, Dojo and so on.
See above.
While it is true that this will lead to a more acceptable experience in demanding applications, it’s putting a significant overhead on simpler ones that do basic things.
So far, reports are that Chrome is faster and lighter than other browsers. Could you care to backup your performance and memory usage statements with real data?
And then the real intentions are revealed. This is all meant to enable real heavy pages, not benefit the vast majority of use cases.
Thanks to Chrome, in a few years even the simplest pages will be “real heavy pages”. You dont build software only for today – tomorrow is also important.
Again, similar features exist in Opera and IE8. Opera in fact is identical to this behavior.
Yeah. And guess what? Chrome has them too. Big deal. I’m sure users will decide what browser they’ll use considering who was first to introduce something, and not the quality and usability of the whole program.
The browser also uses your history to feed the front page. This leaves a gap however. There are many decent sites that are not work safe
Blame your boss.
Instead of replicating all the t0 overhead, Adobe’s engineers chose to reuse the memory at hand. With all it’s drawbacks, the decision is clearly the correct one.
Depends on how much you care about security. By the way, have you noticed that the whole point of html5 and browser like chrome is to try to make flash and silverlight irrelevant?
Aah at last a response with some meat to it. Unlike Eugenia’s vague ‘no you’re wrong’ .
Javascript will *never* be as fast as native code. In fact I’m even claiming that it can never be as fast as Java’s and .net’s VMs.
The reason for this is that even with the hidden classes that allow for some of the class’s meat to be kept immutable, in Javascript there is no type safety,no assumtpions for the type of a field and so on. In Javascript, classes are just associative arrays. There is no room for SSA optimizations etc. Not even a guarantee on weather you can find a certain field at a given offset in memory.
Just ask Eugenia’s husband.
Imho a programming language is as useful as the libraries behind it and *gasp* the IDEs available for it.
All CSS Standards devised by the W3C to this date are derived from the original nonstandard work of the Opera browser. The standards are also vague. Just try to render a CSS 2.0 page with all the browsers that pass the acid 2 test and watch what breaks. FYI these are Opera9, IE8, Safari2 and Firefox3 ofcourse.
I didn’t say that Chrome is not performant. I said that I find it real sad that Google didn’t put it’s weight behind the Mozilla corp’s work.
>> Again, similar features exist in Opera and IE8. Opera in fact is identical to this behavior.
> Yeah. And guess what? Chrome has them too. Big deal.
I’m confused, are you supporting *my* point ?
> Blame your boss.
You can’t be serious.
> Depends on how much you care about security. By the way, have you noticed that the whole point of html5 and browser like chrome is to try to make flash and silverlight irrelevant?
Just go browse around in Youtube in Chrome and watch it collapse into shards.
Have you even read the html5 proposals ? XForms and stuff ? I have. There is no competition or desire for competition with Flash or Silverlight.
Oh look! A CSS 2.0 webpage that all the browsers that pass the acid 2 test render fine-
http://camendesign.com
I am sure you are correct in the whole the Javascript will never be as fast as say C# but V8 determines the type of the var and makes optimisations based on that. So if you have an application that has a function which gets used repeatedly without page refreshes then you can get those optimisations.
The installer is 620K, but the installer downloads what I am sure is considerably more than 620K. Go ahead download the installer, disconnect from network and run the installer and see how far you progress.
Silverlight and Flash will never be irrelevant.
Frankly, I see HTML5 as being nothing like what the fanboys are making it out to be. Silverlight and Flash will still allow you to do much more interesting things than Javascript and HTML 5 will allow.
and beyond that, silverlight will make it very easy for developers of a desktop application to port it over to the web. Just make sure you keep your UI separate from your logic and you will be 99% there.
This is why so much GUI on programs suck.
They consider GUI to be 1% of the program, 1% of the effort.
(Sorry about the off-topic. Just a little frustrated by the internal software where I live and the attitude of the developers there… =/ )
I did not mean to insinuate that the GUI is only 1% of the program. I was talking about the work of moving it over to a web app. Just have the designers create a web UI and all the programmers need to do is connect the UI to their program.
“It’s really hard to design products by focus groups. A lot of times, people don’t know what they want until you show it to them.”
— Steve Jobs, BusinessWeek, May 25 1998
Edited 2008-09-03 16:10 UTC
And who are you paid by?
How can you write “Google Chrome Considered Harmful” and link to your own article? Thats not OSnews worthy news. Thats your own poorly researched and pithy opinion.
Care to try the product and do some research before you vomit crap onto the web next time?
And maybe, just maybe, it would be a good idea if the editors of Osnews did their job and would post such rubbish “articles” in the first place.
I’m confused. Where did I link to myself ? I did extra work to make sure there’s not a vestige of self flattery in the article.
He’s refering to the headline.
If you claim that chrome is considered harmful, people naturally expect that in you story you show that it actually is considered harmful.
However, that’s not what you do.
Instead you write a (rather terrible) story about why you think it should be considered harmful.
So your headline is misleading at best.
Aside from the fact that the cartoon wasn’t from Blogoscoped, despite being available there aswell – so a badly researched and opinionated article.
“fabled Google Operating System”
its not fabled, here is a link to it. http://www.thinkgos.com/ it’s called gOS (about 5 steps down from the BeOS, sorry i couldnt resist the lame humor).
Everyone got really excited about googles web browser, i felt like i was the only one who felt threatend by this. If people were worried about an MS monopoly this is far more scary. Lets think of how many companies have ties with google and how many apps you download regularly that ask if you want to install the google toolbar. now replace toolbar (or add) with the google browser. every person who just “next’s” there way though a software install will have this thing. this is remenisant of apple including safari with iTunes.
(for the record i was ok with that as prior to safari being avalible for windows there was no, and correct me if i am wrong, webkit/khtml browser for windows, and for web developers having one really helped with cross platform web design).
but back on topic. I fear the google broswers intentions, once gadgets is flawlessly integrated i have a feeling web malware will be able to run freely and be far more easily distributed. of course this is all speculation.
on second thought i don’t know where i was going with this, so in sumory i feel that google is taking over as the big all powerfull giant, and if they so chhose it wouldnt be dificult to completely destroy its competition to the point of non existance. i see a future where google could easily sway web “standards” to googles way of thinking and become the new MS. …who knows
Ehm. gOS has nothing to do with a Google OS. Wikipedia says: “gOS is a Linux distribution created by ‘Good OS LLC’, a Los Angeles-based corporation. The company initially advertised it as “An alternative OS with Google Apps and other Web 2.0 apps for the modern user.””
ah you are absolutly right, I tip my hat. i even went looking after that to see if google has funded that company or has any stake in it, it appears they dont. my mistake.
It’s like you’ve only just discovered the concept of Software.
*Everything* released has new bits, modified bits, goals for profit. Good grief, welcome to Computing.
I have trouble faulting google in any way. Chrome is a lightweight and fast browser (620k!), it addresses the primary cause of slow page loading through its upgraded javascript engine, and its pretty, to boot.
I like the lack of options. I like the auto IE, FF import.
I tried it against some of our corporate apps and it failed miserably. Probably due to browser checks (I didn’t see an option to impersonate however). Google also labelled it as a beta.
Pretty sweet offering, imho..
Morglum
an ability to clear the entire history at once would be nice.
And your point is?
What I think you miss is that Chrome isn’t particularly aimed at today. It’s aimed at the next few years. Why? Because what it’s really about isn’t web pages, it’s running applications from the cloud. That’ll be Google apps from the Google cloud. Not yet of course, but soon. The folks from Redmond, let alone the Opera bunch, are probably feeling rather unwell at the moment. They’ll feel a lot worse before this one’s over.
I find this article poorly researched, and full of wrong ideas about a group of engineers who deserve better.
As I wrote on my blog yesterday, I would need something like “NoScript” (the firefox extension) to truly consider switching to Chrome, but other than that (and especially if I didn’t use Windows which needs NoScript more than other OSes), I find it a great effort.
Besides, you can’t deem “harmful” a piece of code that pushes the envelope in terms of engineering. No one said that this is the complete, Chrome 1.0 version either, so I don’t see why some people are so skeptical about it.
I hate to say it, but this may be one of the worst articles I’ve seen on OSNews. I’m really not sure what it’s doing here.
I can’t help but fault the article from frame 1. Most of what is contained therein is splitting hairs about a comic designed to communicate some very technical concepts to non-techy users. If the author of an article genuinely complains that web pages are referred to as applications, they’re just looking for a fight. Personally, I can’t find anything redeeming about the article, except that it does point out some nice features of Opera and I.E. 8 that I didn’t know about (because they didn’t write a comic). Let me break this down.
The primary real complaint in this article is “I don’t want another browser to test against.” This, of course, goes against the idea that all browsers should adhere to standards, and those standards define what works and what doesn’t. When we were just an I.E. and Netscape world, those standards didn’t mean anything. Now with I.E, Firefox, Konqueror, Safari, Opera, Cellphone browsers, etc, standards have come a long way to the forefront of development. Sure, none of them quite agree on tables yet (!!!), but compared to how things behaved in 2001 this is an amazing improvement, driven by our multi-browser environment. Quite frankly, saying that competition in the browser market is inherently bad just smacks of intellectual lazyness.
They even complain that Google emphasizing debugging time is just going to put stress on designers.
“Google is willfully misguiding readers when stating [that multiprocess design leads to less memory bloat]” They, of course, explain this later on due to leakyness. The author dismisses this claim, stating that leakyness is a thing of the past, and all plug-ins have been perfectly vetted. Have we already forgotten the sieve that was Firefox 2? Have you checked your memory after surfing flash-heavy sites for a while? Personally, I’ve found Chrome to use less memory than Opera, though Opera self-bloats and diets in an attempt to maximize ram usage.
The author’s solution of loading new web pages in new windows is false, in that these do not generally spawn new processes. Similarly, if past performance is any indication saying “Use I.E. 8” is not a good solution.
They complain that while the script engine will improve demanding applications, it will also “put a significant overhead on simple applications that do basic things.”… Wouldn’t the best-case scenario of simple scripts be exactly the time you’d have processor and RAM overhead to use? Given the choice, optimizing for the worst case seems like the best thing to do. “This is all meant to enable real heavy pages, not benefit the vast majority of use cases.” In other words, why design a car that can go over 45 mph if the user is doing mostly city driving?
The author then complains that tabs on top breaks the traditional model… Menus that effect tabs that effect pages. As a designer, tabs in the middles of pages has bugged me for years. Tabs on top A: far better fits the physical model that people inherently understand, and B: structures the data heirchy correctly (url bar related to the page data, not independent of it!). Firefox’s habit of putting tabs underneath the URL fundamentally misrepresents the information structure.
Author then goes on to complain that the “Omnibox” concept is already present in Firefox and IE8. This is not true. They don’t take search data and relate what the user is typing in realtime. Opera allows you to use their URL box as a mini-command line to run special searches and do other actions, but that is an advanced feature that requires experience to remember. Also, it doesn’t present search results inline either.
Author complains that the “nine most visited pages here” behavior is “identical” in Opera. This is not true. Opera clearly inspired this feature, but Opera’s 9 behave like manually installed bookmarks… Like a page? Drag it to a speed-dial number. Automatically gathering and updating the most used pages is a nifty trick, and simplifies an otherwise manual process.
The author complains that “many decent sites are not work safe,” and that if you don’t want them potentially showing up on your home page you have to lose convienience by browsing in incognito mode. That, of course, is exactly what incognito mode is for. If you’re browsing not work safe sites at work, you have much bigger avenues of discovery than people looking over your shoulder at your most visited pages. Even incognito mode can’t stop your administrator from seeing your traffic. I can’t help but feel like there is an agenda when the author complains that it takes a mild inconvienience to surf non-worksafe sites at work.
If you want to nitpick, the author also complains that Google is misleading readers by not mentioning how IE8 also isolates tabs by process. This is not strictly true: IE8 usually has fewer processes than tabs.
Overall, I can’t help but feel that the author simply has a bone to pick with Chrome. There is nothing of substantive merit to the complaints laid out here, let alone anything that would merit the headline “Google Chrome Considered Harmful.” Even if you accept the article at face value, which I urge you not to, the correct headline would be “Google’s PR is Vaguely Misleading.” Allow me to join the train of voices for an article thumbs-down feature.
“Javascript especially, while being quite capable, is still several orders of magnitude slower than code running in the OS…”
WRONG!
In my point of view, the idea behind chrome is
a) create a Virtual Machine for google apps.
b) thats it.
Google paid some serious money to mozilla, still chrome is X-times faster. So now they decided to give away their javascript VM because they probably lost faith in firefox ever producing a fast browser (eg. a VM or “platform”).
The next step: docs.google.com bundled with chrome as a windows “google-office.exe”, or google-mail.exe etc.
The upcoming VM in Firefox 3.1 is *faster* than V8. It’s only been landed for just *10 days*.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/tracemonkey…
Google haven’t lost faith in Firefox, they’ve lost faith in current engineering traditions that have stuck on only because of history.
A faster JS engine does not help when your entire browser crashes due to one of your web applications crashing on a tab that you don’t have in focus.
Google’s major advancement and reason for not helping Mozilla out is because they wanted to set up separate processes for each tab. Something that is near impossible in a project as mature as Firefox.
Lets fast forward to 5 years from now. you are using photoshop web edition, word web edition, the latest C# express web edition, connected to you live mesh media, listening to an MP3 on Windows Media Player Home Web Edition, and then Media Player has a hard crash because it is 1.0 software from MS.
If you are in Firefox, your entire browser crashes. If you are in Chrome, the Media Player tab crashes.
It’s STILL a great comic by ScottMcCloud!
I decided to test the 280 North website and presentation software and it works well. Everyone should try this software as it is very fascinating.
http://280north.com/
They created their own language called Objective-J which is based on Objective C but is for Javascript. I hope that Apple, Google, or someone else buys them out and advances their ability to create RIA’s. These are the kind of applications that Google has created their web browser for.
Also how does V8 compare to the current and upcoming Javascript implementations of other web browsers?
Wow, Chrome runs it better than any browser ever has. It makes it a viable application.
Here’s the real question I’m looking for an answer to; Why should I use Chrome over say Opera, which already has one of the fastest JavaScript engines on the Web.
Ive been using chrome since it was released and I like the simple interface and fast rendering, but it really seems like a an I.E. 8 and Opera ripoff. It works fine but I’m still comparing it to Opera’s latest offering and I’m not really seeing the advantage of making a switch to full time. With so many Browsers, any non-standards compliant browser is irrelevant to a web developer like me now because it’s pointless coding for all these different platforms. In fact Flash is looking better every day.
To me it seems like Chrome was released so Google can keep access to all your browsing data that I.E. 8s private mode was going to hide. This seems like a money play in the search wars. Microsoft was trying to back door Google’s stronghold on Web data so Google said hey, if were going to have our goldmine of info threatened, lets just go all in and see who can win the whole pot. This is interesting, because MS really is building a better Browser, but they’re doing it for the sole purpose of trying to get a hold of the Add revenue that Google has a strangle hold on.
Why should you pick Coke over Pepsi? Nissan over Toyota? Adidas over Nike?
Here’s the real question I’m looking for an answer to; Why should I use Chrome over say Opera, which already has one of the fastest JavaScript engines on the Web.
Not according to my testing. Webkit and Gecko both run the Sunspider benchmark significantly better than Opera on my computer and I haven’t even been able to test Tracemonkey properly becuase I am on 64-bit.
“Overall, I’d also like to point out that the entire comic has a clear marketing flair to it”
Now really, a marketing comic has a marketing flair to it. Wow, you must be a genius to have figured that out…
And chrome has features that one might also find in other browser, or in betas of other browsers, or maybe find in other form in other browsers?
Wow! Who would have thought!!11!!!1
And you my friend uncovered it! You’re on your way to become a great investigative journalist, I tell you. Apparently Woodward and Bernstein already fled the country…
There are a few things in the article that I don’t agree with. For example, I don’t run Flash precisely because of the annoyance of the content and the instability (and vulnerabilities) it brings (not to mention the proprietary nature of the whole thing), and I cannot bring myself to consider Adobe’s technical strategy as “the correct one” if that strategy can be summarised as “slightly increased efficiency trumps stability”. Indeed, many people would probably benefit from the process manager downplayed in the article and better control over content such as that provided by Flash, and I think Mozilla and friends have let their users down by not offering sufficient control over such content. Amusingly, by embracing rather than rejecting the process-per-tab model, offering such control would likely be easier, and it would certainly be better than suggesting that users, “when loading a demanding web page, do so in a new browser window”.
All this said, the author raises some good points, notably with regard to the apparent need by some people to continually push the desktop paradigm into all places regardless of suitability – the “how can I make my Web page behave like the Mac?” mentality – and to question the assumption that this is what people want is healthy skepticism. The other points about interface customisation are also apt, and I can see how the author’s criticism of tab placement might infuriate the unquestioning adherents of Fitts’ Law common to these pages.
As for Chrome being harmful, some alarming things have already been noted about the EULA. Perhaps the enthusiasts should suspend their excitement for a while and reflect on those issues, too, instead of having tantrums about how some guy didn’t cut that poor, dominant multinational company some slack.
I agree, it amazes me that anyone would point to Flash as a standard for anything but hogging behaviour. A classic example for me is Yahoo Fantasy Sports. They used to use Flash for their StatTracker application (tells you how your league is doing). The Java version was very lightweight and fast – it ram well on even my older computers. Then one day someone at Yahoo drank the Flash kool-aid, and now the StatTracker is a monstrously large, slow, 100-percent CPU hogging app. If it wasn’t for flash-block and plugins of that nature, Flash could single-handedly bring down the internet!! To think that ANYONE would look to Flash as something to imitate is beyond me. Heavens no!!
“This is exactly how tabs work in Internet Explorer 8. Each tab is isolated in a process, it can’t even communicate with other tabs and so on. Furthermore, when a tab crashes, it alone is eradicated, the memory is freed and the tab is rebooted. By chance, Google’s Chrome does the same.”
‘By chance’? Are you implying that something so fundamentally built into the browser as this concept obviously is wasn’t around at it’s early development around 2 years ago? And from that you have deduced that google have somehow copied IE8.
I realise you that you obviously believe what you’re saying but I also feel you need to research slightly more before speaking to a tech savy audience about something like this.
Although I take your point, another browser could be considered a strain on developers (like me) I have high hopes that the open source nature of this project due to the use of a pre-existing page renderer and the fact they adhere to standards. I’ve never had a headache between Safari, Opera and Firefox (or Chrome it appears, all my sites and JavaScript work and look fine), only between everything else and IE.
Finally, All open source projects borrow from each other and all browsers share various similar tools, all marketing teams in Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera and Safari will try and put a spin on how ‘original’ their new work is.
I’m not implying anything. That would mean industrial espionage among the teams that prepared Chrome and IE8 and it’s …
No I’m very confident that this didn’t happen. I’m just saying that it isn’t innovative in any way either.
It’s like saying that browser tabs work like Windows taskbar tabs. It’s a return to the past.
Heh, well while I’m not about to go into the possibility of corporate espionage either, in 2 years anything could have happened.
Personally, I like the multiple processes it’s a good way to look at what exactly is going on under the hood, but I guess that’s a preference thing. Certainly looking to the future I’d expect this to happen more and more, especially with the growing number of multicore chips being produced it allows the process load to be shared.
The real problem is nothing is really that innovative to me anymore, maybe I’m getting jaded, but as far as I can see it’s all a set of incremental improvements, Of course they are writing to make things sound fresh and new like you say but if they always referred to all the origins of every idea it would be a 60 page comic and my mind would melt (+ my boss would kill me for reading it at work).
I’m thinking the minor memory and processing overheads wont make enough of a difference to the general user, I find Chrome to be quite snappy in most respects. It’s refreshingly clean interface as well. Importantly it allows you to see what is using the lions share of memory within the browser, something I found quite revealing.
In summation I agree with much of what your saying, I can’t stand all these people who are just aggressively rude on comments, that’s unnecessary. I do think your tone was aggressive but that’s just the style of your article.
The most positive thing though, where I think we disagree, is on the inclusion of another browser into the pot. My personal thoughts on this is it pushes competition into the sphere which is always good (especially when it’s between 2 juggernauts). Just look at IE, it came out in 2001 and took 6 years for another version to come out, that, I think you’ll agree with me here, is pretty damn poor. Competition breeds growth, and improvement.
The reason it’s such an agony to build sites for various browsers is really because IE blatantly ignored w3C standards for a long time, which it could do with little negative effect when it held 95%+ of the market. Of course I’m not singing and dancing that I have to check things against *another* browser but as most (all?) open source browsers are converging on matching up to an agreed set of standards it motivates IE to do the same.
your thoughts?
You state that when google talks about memory fragmentation they are assuming that pages will leak memory. Do you understand what memory fragmentation means?
You also imply that it is incorrect to call web applications real applications because they are written in Javascript. WTF??
Simply talking about ‘memory fragmentation’ is dumb. Memory has constant access time, it doesn’t matter how distributed accross the system it is.
Have a look at this http://ub0.cc/41/p
He’s not talking about Windows memory defragmentation, he’s talking about the browsers’ internal memory allocation process that allocates virtual space to the browser. This article demonstrates memory fragmentation clearly http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/ and it does have a significant effect on the browser.
I know what he was talking about.
The way Chrome and IE8 split memory among processes doesn’t help with the danger of the OS paging out the memory of more than one tab which has been unused for long. The memory of each process may as well be intertwined and spanning accross many OS mem pages.
Your statement that memory has constant access time demonstrates your clear lack of comprehension of why computers have many levels of memory from the CPU register (fastest) to L1 cache (still very fast) to L2 cache (fast) to perhaps L3 (not too shabby if you’re not too concerned) to main RAM (lots of latencies for grabbing anything not currently in the previously mentioned levels of the hierarchy) to finally, paged RAM from a swap file (painfully slow) to offline storage (get out the hamsters!). They all have their place, as a result of the fact that higher speed=more money in a non-linear fashion for the speed.
Main RAM access is often these days at least a factor slower than on-CPU access, and swapped memory from a disk of ANY type is many orders of magnitude slower than that: once you’ve used enough RAM that hits the VM such that things start getting swapped out, everything can start operating much slower. Memory leaks often result in greater allocation usage that then brings on the need for swapping, but it is entirely possible (and I’ve seen applications purposely coded this way, though it’s not the way I do things) where the memory is allocated contiguously as far as total application memory goes, and nothing is ever freed: this solves the problem of internal memory fragmentation, sure, but it merely pushes the problem to a system level rather than only (if that’s possible: often not, if an application ever exceeds a fixed memory usage set at startup of the application, which most applications that aren’t embedded simply don’t do) the application level.
And then you have what’s known as memory fragmentation, which is far worse than disk fragmentation: in a filesystem, it’s no big deal management-wise if you have a file that gets fragmented, at least with most filesystems (ISO9660 being one where it isn’t allowed, but then, it isn’t a dynamically changing filesystem anyway, and is read-only after writing originally) since in most of them, chunks of the file are handled at the lowest level in increments of blocks of bytes, usually powers of 2, and in many done by extents of blocks that are stored this way, and these are all tracked, and files can be strewn amongst many of these and the OS makes it appear all contiguous from the point of view of all applications. Well, this just doesn’t happen in standard applications when they have memory fragmentation: what happens is that n bytes are allocated, n+m bytes are allocated, another m bytes are allocated, and then sooner or later the n+m bytes are released, leaving an n+m block free, but what if there isn’t something that exactly fits in that memory? That’s fragmentation: if it doesn’t fit exactly there, if the new memory allocation request is smaller, it might reused part of that block of n+m bytes, still leaving a small chunk that may be too small for some other useful allocation later, but if it is bigger, it must then find a chunk elsewhere in the application heap to allocate a new chunk that’s big enough, and forget about even using part of that memory for that new allocation: it’s not common for applications to work like a filesystem and link things together, and it’d be slow besides, for most cases, because of the previously mentioned levels of memory hierarchy. Of course, what happens over time (and web browsers are a prime example of extremes in memory allocations, with short strings of text using a few bytes to megs used per picture) is that there’s then all these small odd bits of unused memory between all the currently used chunks: the total amount of unused RAM may be >50% of total RAM used (granted, I’m just pulling a number out of a nether region) and to the uninformed user that doesn’t have a debugger and the code, that looks suspiciously like a memory leak. Of course, if there truly is a memory leak involved, that just compounds the error. What happens once the memory usage exceeds a certain amount? Why, of course: our favorite memory hierarchy starts playing a very important part where the non-constant access time matters: more RAM is allocated for that application’s heap, but that comes out of the VM and filesystem cache pool (depending on the OS) and… that can cause things to be swapped out, including memory used by that current application. Thus, things are no longer so linear, and actually can become unpredictably exponential, with all the overall application and system interactions.
It seems from the article that the writer has just enough background in theory to be dangerous: being able to recite some basic theory and the implications, without actually knowing how it all fits together in practice. This is a common oversight of many CS people that have no practical experience, and especially those that have not studied the actual hardware and understood its limitations in executing theoretical concepts in a real world practical space.
The entire piece seems to be written by an MS fanboy, an anti-Google zealot, or both.
As mentioned, Google banks on the idea that browser tabs are leaking memory. Thankfully there is an easy fix for this. Either use IE8, […]
Seems pretty clear.
Bye!
Edited 2008-09-03 17:00 UTC
Like many before you, you soil Dijkstra’s good name with this turd of an article. (Do OSNews editors filter stuff at all? How could this have gotten past them? Then again, inflammatory content (accurate or not) does attract more eyeballs.)
This is the first fallacy, and it’s being introduced early because it’s fundamental to the rhetoric that follows. Web pages, are fundamentally still html (presentation markup) and javascript (behavioral logic). Javascript especially, while being quite capable, is still several orders of magnitude slower than code running in the OS. Therefore it almost always is used to process the presentation of the application, while the actual processing is done at a web server.
1. It doesn’t matter that some of the processing is being done on the server. You’re still using an application.
2. Javascript being slow is irrelevant. How does the speed of the implementation language affect whether something is an application or not?
3. Where did you get the “several orders of magnitude slower” line? Let’s be generous and say that “several” means “at least 3”. Are you saying that Javascript runs 1,000 times slower than an equivalent program written in C? Even with old interpreted VMs this isn’t the case [1], let alone the newer JIT-based VMs.
[1] http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/debian/benchmark.php?test=all&lan…
4. The term “code running in the OS” is inappropriate. If you write a “real” application in Javascript, it will run at the same speed. If you write a browser-hosted applet in Java/C#, it’ll run at the same speed a “real” Java/C# application runs. It’s now whether it’s “running in the OS” or not, it’s how fast the language implementation is.
This however flat out leads to greater memory consumption. There is no way that the end overhead is smaller, except if a browser’s javascript engine or a plugin attached to the process is leaking memory. Google is willfully misguiding readers when stating this. There is no way that this would lead to less ‘bloat’.
Yes there is. Memory fragmentation. Maybe this could be offset by a better allocator or allocation policy, but the problem is real.
http://blog.pavlov.net/2007/11/10/memory-fragmentation/
Also, the precise garbage collection that you seem to dislike allows memory compaction, which eliminates fragmentation.
Did you even try to do some research before assuming they were lying?
Chrome is – even in beta – the answer to my prayers. A proper, multithreaded browser that’s REALLY lightweight (not merely marketed as such – *cough* Firefox), extremely fast, and so damn reliable it made my ears fall off. Oh and really, really good looking on Vista (less so on XP, however)
On my small Aspire One netbook (which runs Windows XP now, will explain later, maybe), Chrome runs ten million circles around Firefox. Firefox has just been made completely obsolete by a beta release.
Chrome is the TRUE next generation browser. It’s slightly lacking here and there (no bookmark export? No big off switch for tabbed browsing?), but it’s clear that Firefox, Opera, Safari, and IE have just been overrun by something much more 21st century. Chrome is indeed designed for MODERN browsing, and not for browsing as it was ten years ago.
My hats off to Google. Great piece of software.
And this restrictive voting system won’t let me vote up a good comment.
Errr… how can you tell how reliable it is in less than 1 day?
This is the most biased post I read here from long time ago. This post is even more misleading then google’s cartoons. It attacks on point that the cartoon explain them and the writer intentionally did not include those parts..
The cartoon explains the ideas behind the new browser and do not claim that all of them are NEW and I do not see why you said that google claim *ownership* of those ideas.
And then the real intentions are revealed. This is all meant to enable real heavy pages, not benefit the vast majority of use cases.
Actually most popular websites are using quite lot javascript. May be you heard of AJAX?
May be only 10% of the sites are *heavy* but that’s 90% of all user hits… so yes everybody should care about fast javascript.
You have to traverse more pixels each time you switch to a page.
Hm how did you measure this? Just another stupid manipulation?
The omnibox concept exists already in Firefox and IE8 alike.
Yes and it’s real crap compared to what google want to offer. But of course you did not include the part of the cartoon where it is explained? Another stupid manipulation…
And for the NEW TAB PAGE you are talking again only carp. The new tab in opera works with static pages
which you have to manually put there – so you have 9 pages which you *rated* yourself. Chrome is trying to be intelligent and to rate those top 9 pages for you. Another stupid manipulation…
I think you should go reread the cartoon, the blog and try the browser yourself before sending those HATE writings.
Also you are missing the point about all those combined features – Chrome currently even in beta is the fastest and most feature rich browser – it have most good stuff from FF,IE,Opera and Safari.
Thankfully there is an easy fix for this. Either use IE8, or when loading a demanding web page, do so in a new browser window, which operates on a separate process.
Ah I almost forget .. there is IE8 available for Linux, OSX and *BSD right? while I’m pretty sure there will be a version of Chrome …
So how do you know that a webpage is *demanding* and will probably crash your browsers ? I guess we should start new browser every time when we open a page for first time? Ban the tabs ? Or just start Opera for testing and FF for *trusted* pages?
This *demanding* paragraph was one of the most stupid things I read over the internet last month!
You are clear winner here ..
P.S. Sorry for my English .. it’s not my native language
The Virtual Machine term is a bit ambiguous. When it is related to a language, it just means interpreter machine. It does not mean any kind of hardware virtualization.
There is an internal similarity in that they both interpret commands, which are not native to the processor it runs on, it may be byte-pseudo-code, generated by language compiler or binary commands by another processor.
This article is just full of the author’s own personal opinions. Like for example the statement: “Instead of replicating all the t0 overhead, Adobe’s engineers chose to reuse the memory at hand. With all it’s drawbacks, the decision is clearly the correct one.” is a matter of personal opinion. I’d much rather have it run with lower privileges and not crashing the whole browser while taking a bit more memory than having it running with almost driver-like privileges and being able to do anything it wishes to your whole machine.
“Privilege isolation is part of all major browsers, and most of all, part of the ones shipped inside Windows and OSX since the browsers are actually used for many processes intrinsic to these OSes.”
Incorrect. Firefox is nowadays also considered a major browser yet it doesn’t sport sandboxing.
“There are many decent sites that are not work safe.”
Perhaps you shouldn’t be browsing them at work?
About Incognito: “Which is exactly how things work in Safari and IE8. ”
And? I see no point in whining about features that other browsers already have, unless the new browser does somehow seemingly worse job at it compared to other browsers. And the author has forgotten one thing: Chrome is coming to Linux, too, while Sarafi nor IE8 aren’t. I don’t know of any browser personally that runs under Linux, boasts the clean and very pretty interface that Chrome does, provides Incognito, does sandboxing…
I could go on and on, but mostly the author just seems to think copying features from other browsers is bad and bases his opinion that “Chrome is bad” on that. Talk about a useless article.
What the hell? I can’t even call it decent article. I wonder if anyone reviewed this prior to publication.
“It’s full of FUD!”
I have a very short experience of reading Osnews.com. This article, however, seems to be from entirely different site. It’s really bad.
#1, You can’t use a passive form in the title if you don’t refer to outside of your own opinions. You’re not a “we”. I think you need to be royalty for that to apply.
#2, Complaining about testing. Well, that’s tough, but consumers tend to vote with their feet. I’m sure your competitors won’t mind.
#3 Inaccurate small statements. Yeah, Opera has the 9 bookmark “stamps” too, but guess what? Because I had to manually change them, I very quickly stopped using that feature. So, it’s a bad thing someone makes something better?
#4 I can just click Gmail open and it takes about 10 M of memory (Ball park figure) and works essentially as a separate email program that won’t crash when flash kills some other webpage. That’s a bad thing?
#5 It’s too bad if you don’t like innovation.
#6 IE this, IE that. Yeah. Ever heard of Mac OS X? Linux?
Seriously editors is this the kind of drivel we can look forward to from now on? What happened to the unbiased, technical and honest writing that earnt this site its following.
Sorely disappointed and considering banishing OSNews from my many feed readers and bookmark collections.
I disagree. The arguments were made in a reasonable manner. I disagree with many of the conclusions, but there are better ways of handling that that trashing the author. Rebut the points you disagree with. The article was well written – I liked it even though I disagreed with much of it. For instance, I disagreed with setting up Flash as some kind of gold standard, so I posted an comment to that effect.
Let me understand this – because of an article another reader SUBMITTED to OSNews, you’re going to entirely remove the site from your bookmarks?
Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable course of action.
“Let me understand this – because of an article another reader SUBMITTED to OSNews, you’re going to entirely remove the site from your bookmarks?
Yeah, that sounds like a reasonable course of action.”
He’s the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons but in the realm of operating systems.
Edited 2008-09-03 19:32 UTC
Yes I will too. And not because of One article. Because of several Really Crappy articles published last, let’s say 12, past months.
I usually don’t comment, I just read news and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one. But, Hell, I am so pissed I’ve just created an account to comment on this.
Just ask yourself, How come someone write an article based on a comic about a software he didn’t even care to test ! It’s so full of crap that I didn’t bothered to fully read it and from the comments I’ve glanced, I don’t regret it one bit.
I’ve started reading sometime in 2002 (don’t remember exactly) but this will probably end here. I’m just not interested anymore in what’s published. Too much noise, not enough signal. Fells every time more like The Inquirer.
I take a break. I’ll check in a few months. If quality is still as bad as now, I’ll be done with OSNews.
I would like to see a note near the article’s title:
[Reported by OS newser as Possibly Inaccurate]
Bye!
From what I’ve read, the program is installed into the user’s Application Data directory. So, it appears we’ve got a “browser for tomorrow” that installs as though it’s 1995!
Can has sane multi-user installation plz? Kthxbai!
I can confirm that on Vista, chrome.exe is installed in
C:\Users\<username>\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Applicati on
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, though. It allows non-admins to install the app since it only affects the user’s own folder (unlike when installing into a system wide folder like “Program Files”).
I’ve used Chrome for a day, and my feeling is that I like it because it’s “lightweight”, but not much beyond that. And I can, and have, make my own “lightweight” browser in minutes using VS C# Express with the IE control, so I’m not sure of the real value at this point. I’ll keep using it for a while though.
The article talks of the fact the plugin makers will have yet another browser to test against. I’m not sure how chrome is actually accessing the plugins installed in my system, but I tried a few. Flash seems to work fine, as does the WMP plugin. I went to some Silverlight sites, and the Silverlight applet actually does begin to load (which surprised me), but the loading procedure gets hung up somewhere and never finishes (doesn’t hang the tab itself). The Photosynth plugin doesn’t work at all.
Edited 2008-09-03 19:15 UTC
I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing, though. It allows non-admins to install the app since it only affects the user’s own folder (unlike when installing into a system wide folder like “Program Files”).
But that’s the whole problem – non-admin users should not be able to install programs, full stop. The correct way to install any program is to put its executables and read-only global data in Program Files where everyone can access them but only the Admin can modify/remove them, and put data files that are to be modified by each user in that user’s Application Data space.
Edited 2008-09-03 20:34 UTC
What’s to stop a user from running an exe from their desktop?
I agree that the installer should by default use Program Files if possible (or at least give the option to install system-wide for admin users), but I don’t think the default install location is really something to attack on the basis of system security.
I wonder how Google’s V8 compares to webkit’s SquirrelFish.
Ah, I’ve answered that myself:
http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown/
Edited 2008-09-03 18:44 UTC
This article is badly written. The logic is completely flawed. Aligning a certain number of points the AUTHOR doesn’t like, doesn’t make it a general rule for the others. Even with a dump of different ideas, the article facts are scarce and even wrong on some place : the comic wasn’t create by Blogoscoped, only “promoted”.
I believe the article would have been much better if it would have concentrate on one subject, like “what ideas does Chrome bring and what ideas are recycled from the others”.
Cheers,
zimbatm
So much hype when right now it’s little more than a less capable Safari, based on an OLDER version of webkit, with a slap of paint.
*** YAWN ***.
First, it’s webkit – if you aren’t already testing against at least ONE webkit build (safari) as a web developer, do us all a favor, hang up your shingle and go take up macrome weaving. Now that Safari is available for Windows there is no excuse to not be testing new pages against Safari 3, FF 2 & 3, Opera 9.2x and 9.5x and IE 5.5, 6 & 7. PERIOD. If you aren’t already doing that, “/FAIL/ at intarweb.”
I have yet to see any rendering differences between it and Safari, apart from the giant gaping security holes plugged in the latest safari that are still present in the older tree of webkit google used.
It is funny that most of the things they hold up as features in the crappy little comic (what, too cheap to hire and inker?) are indeed how opera does it… Though it’s equally sad as a beta how much like Safari it is, much to it’s shame. Not only does it not use the native UI widgets, not only does it make forms a living HELL for web designers with webkit’s head up it’s ass handling of inputs, but apart from the cutesy speed dial ripoff the rest of it’s user interface is like a trip in the wayback machine to Netscape 3 – Just like Safari.
I’m just hoping this is an alpha labelled beta, since a beta is supposed to be past the proof of concept stage, because if this is all they’re bringing to the table it should fall flat on it’s face.
Edited 2008-09-03 18:55 UTC
The comic says “less memory bloat”, not “less memory consumption”.
Really? Are you reading a different comic? Because that sure isn’t what the page you showed says.
Wow, no shit sherlock. It’s almost like…every other marketing or PR material ever released.
“Memory bloat” to the layman is memory consumption.
zOMG Chrome killed my parents and raped my sister.
This is the first time I want to down-mod an article in this site.
Firefox 3.1 alpha (JIT enable)
http://nontroppo.org/timer/progressive_raytracer.html
Time for full render: Finished in: 646.554 seconds
Chrome Beta
Finished in: 26.563 seconds
Opera 9.52
Finished in: 29.707 seconds
Machine: Vista, 32 bit, 3 G RAM, Q6600
Edited 2008-09-03 19:44 UTC
TraceMonkey isn’t enabled for recursion yet (they will). It’s only been on trunk for 10 days, give them a chance
That high figure will go down to chrome-like levels soon enough.
The author’s claim that you can get multiple processes by just opening a new window is bogus for Firefox, Safari, and Opera. Its only a half-truth with <IE8.
Similarly, he doesn’t seem to understand fragmentation at all, and has a lot of handwavy speculation to replace actual facts. In theory chrome should be more memory heavy than Fx or Opera. In practice, I’ve seen that if it is, the increase is so marginal as to be pointless to worry about. IE8 uses a lot of memory because it isn’t optimized very well.
All of the gibberish about it not mattering if JS is fast or not because it will always be “a few orders of magnitude slower” is also bunk. Try canvascape under Chrome and you’ll notice competitive performance with Flash and other plugins, which is the real point of this. This technology really does enable a lot of things that weren’t possible before.
Of course, it does introduce another platform to test against, but at least its a pretty good one.
…being circulated on the internets tubes since it was released. Especially about the EULA stuff. People need to not only read but think about it and not have a knee-jerk reaction. On the other hand, it does spark discussion and web traffic.
Well, Kaspersky blocked the installation! Google, why don’t you release a an installer that doesn’t connect to the net?
I have to turn Kaspersky off! Oh and when I change the proxy settings, it opens the IE proxy settings!
Yeah, typing this from Chrome.
I rarely comment on an opinion piece like this, because I usually get something out of even the worst of them. Opinion pieces, even ones you violently disagree with, will often give you an insite or two that you never considered.
There is nothing wrong with writing from a personal bias (thats kind of the point isnt it?), but this one is so badly constructed its shocking. Almost every point covered (actually, I would say it IS every point) is either twisted around with doublespeak to try and bolster the authors argument, or is just plain damn wrong.
The very first sentence is (I think) the only one that could be considered truly dead on accurate:
It appears that Google scored a PR success with their Chrome browser. In short, the promise is a web experience where web pages are allowed to behave more like desktop applications.
Then the silliness starts…
In order to explain the product, Google has appointed Blogoscoped to create a cartoon story that explains the product.
No they didnt… Scott McCloud did the cartoon. But whatever.
This is the first fallacy, and it’s being introduced early because it’s fundamental to the rhetoric that follows. Web pages, are fundamentally still html (presentation markup) and javascript (behavioral logic). Javascript especially, while being quite capable, is still several orders of magnitude slower than code running in the OS. Therefore it almost always is used to process the presentation of the application, while the actual processing is done at a web server.
Yes, that first part is mostly true if you look at the web as a whole, but read your first sentence… The whole POINT of chrome is to make web apps first class citizens, and to do so the development paradigm has to change. Its already happening, look around… I write web applications, and I promise you that a quite large percentage of my JS code is not presentational or behavioral, it is core logic. Anyone who does AJAX development sees this happening. The idealic web application is one where the server’s job is to send the application to the user and then act as a proxy to a storage and retrieval engine of some sort. The more capable the frontend becomes, the more likely it is to reach that goal. It is painfully obvious that every design choice made in Chrome was made in an attempt to accomplish that.
And Im sorry but Javascript is not “several orders of magnitude” slower… Depends on what your doing of course, but for the kind of stuff developers are actually using it for now (mostly string manipulation, integer math, all rather simple stuff really) it is probably on par with most other interpreted languages. Hopefully V8 will push the boundaries of what is feasible. The point though is that saying “JS is slow” as an argument against a product which is trying to make JS faster is kindy silly dont you think?
Next up, a figure wonders if it would be great to have a new browser. Apparently, it could be great. On the other hand designers, that will have yet another browser to test their pages against, wouldn’t be delighted.
Maybe not delighted about the extra work, that is certainly plausible. But I’m a developer, and I AM delighted. I don’t want more browsers necessarily, but I do want better ones. Should everyone stop trying?
Im just going to stop now… The rest of the article is no better than the beginning, but it would take too much energy to keep going like this.
I guess the author and I are not using the web the same way as I consider many webpages to be applications nowadays. Plus the author does not even bother to explain why they are not applications in his mind – just that they are slower !! which is exactly the point of Google.
I won’t stop using FF yet but I welcome competition – and so far (under XP) chrome is doing a really decent job.
This article is filled with unsubstantiated conjecture, and doesn’t meet the journalistic standards osnews.com should hold for itself.
It reads like a partisan Democrat’s review of John McCain or a partisan Republican’s review of Barack Obama.
[author]: Throughout the strip, Google employees appear as whitecoats or apprentice magicians, pushing quotes that don’t stand to scrutiny.
FUD alert! Just where do you see a lab coat in Scott McCloud’s Chrome comic? I see most everyone in regular shirts and t-shirts who are speaking for Google. And where the hell are magicians! It’s a comic rendering of concepts within a presentation. It could have easily been a bunch of Powerpoint slides, if you prefer that.
______________________________________
Go back and read Google’s comic book and their press release more carefully and you’ll see that they’re wanting some specific things from Chrome; that is, to have a browser that:
(1) Google itself can control, thus eliminating its middleman dependence on Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple, etc.;
(2) will give the company direct access to the user; and
(3) Google can write AIR/webware apps for;
(4) can potentially dominate the mobile and portable PC markets.
Think of cloud computing and your first reaction is: the weak link is the browser. Sure, this is a beta version. Gmail was in beta for years, so it will take a lot of feedback to bring this browser along. Thus, it’s no secret what Google is trying to achieve with Chrome. In fact, the Google blog announcement was quite frank:
On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn’t the browser that matters. It’s only a tool to run the important stuff — the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.
Chrome’s goal is to redefine the concept of the browser, and become a frame for other applications. Many people had the same fears about Gmail, but you look around now, and just about everyone has an account.
Edited 2008-09-03 23:48 UTC
Small little test for those that wonder. Both softwares without any changes. As you guys can see IE8 consumes more resources than Chrome.
http://img29.picoodle.com/data/img29/3/9/3/t_acid21m_69c2057.jpg
Edited 2008-09-04 00:40 UTC
.. because you have to test your website with every new version
If they don`t make a normal offline installation executable, they will loose lots of potential users, including me and my girl – quote her “i am not waiting for the bus, i will not wait anymore to install this stupid thing”
Edited 2008-09-04 06:57 UTC
“i am not waiting for the bus, i will not wait anymore to install this stupid thing”
She should learn some patience.
Has anyone done a direct comparison between the two on the Windows platform?
I’m curious why Safari hasn’t had as much uptake on the Windows platform. Is the current javascript engine in Safari significantly slower than the V8/Chrome engine?
There are a couple reason. One of which could be the interface, which is great in OSX but doesn’t translate all that well in Vista or XP. The other could be the font rendering issue when Safari was first released that may have put some people off since everything looked rather blurry. On OSX this is not an issue since fonts are render the same globally, but on windows this looks rather odd.
Like every other web 2.0 “app”, google’s are underwhelming.
Show me a decent web framework (other than objective-j) that doesn’t suck, isn’t slow and makes it easy to use with multiple languages – like you know on a *desktop*.
This current trend with web 2.0 is nothing but a trend.
The web is designed with pages in mind, not full-blown applications.
Silverlight and Adobe AIR are much better contenders than this underwhelming move from Google.
I am disappointed.
To comply with the MPL, AIUI google needs to release the source code used to build the stable version of Chrome which they are actually distributing, not just the bleeding-edge development branch of so-called “Chromium”.
Right now the most prominent page source is “coming soon”, which is obviously unacceptable license-wise. If you click around you can eventually find a big tarball burried a few pages deeper, so that’s a little better, but it’s not the same branch as that which was used to build the binary.
Releasing broken branches is a common type of free software license violation, and they seem at first glance to be doing it.
Opera’s “Speed Dial” doesn’t work anything at ALL like Chrome’s “Most Visited” does. The only similarity is that they are thumbnails of the page.
Opera’s Speed Dial: Defined manually by a user. Ordered by a user.
Chrome’s Most Visited: Generated based on where a user goes, and ordered as such.
I *much* prefer Opera’s speed dial because I have more control over it. Plus, since it doesn’t change the order, I can reliably open a new window and hit “Ctrl+8” to get to OS News, even if I haven’t visited in a few days — it’s just always there.
I really think Chrome is an neat idea and am waiting to see firefox get even better with new competition. Maybe this will usher in the era of compliance and passing ACID tests!
“and copies ideas liberally from Google’s worst enemy”
Yeah I know he means IE, but it seems like they borrowed a lot more stuff from Opera (interface & feature-wise)
Chrome features FTW. WebKit, separate tabs per process, faster JavaScript engine are all nice and makes Firefox looks kinda outdated. I like Firefox though and I hope they captch up soon.
Separate tabs per process: IE8. And uses a lot more memory.
Firefox’s new JS engine is already faster than Chrome’s V8. They published some benchmarks the other day. So apparently Chrome looks outdated now since Firefox is faster again.
Seriously. How about not using a completely stupid word like “outdated” just because one browser has marginally better performance in one specific JS test?
Google claims to have created a browser from scratch – an all new browser for an all new time, and that other browsers are really outdated.
But they simply used Apple’s WebKit (which is based on KHTML).