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Google launching their own web browser

post #1 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:01am
Thread Starter 
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/7593106.stm

Quote:
The browser is designed to be lightweight and fast, and to cope with the next generation of web applications that rely on graphics and multimedia.

Called Chrome, it will launch as a beta for Windows machines in 100 countries, with Mac and Linux versions to come.

"We realised... we needed to completely rethink the browser," said Google's Sundar Pichai in a blog post.

The new browser will help Google take advantage of developments it is pushing online in rich web applications that are challenging traditional desktop programs.

Google has a suite of web apps, such as Documents, Picasa and Maps which offer functionality that is beginning to replace offline software.

"What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build," Mr Pichai, VP Product Management, wrote.

The launch of a beta version of Chrome on Tuesday will be Google's latest assault on Microsoft's dominance of the PC business. The firm's Internet Explorer program dominates the browser landscape, with 80% of the market.
So who's going to try this out and give the review?
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post #2 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:08am
The comic book on the google site gives a good technical overview of it. The main thing is the approach of using multiple processes for each browser tab in order to prevent your whole browser from crashing due to a buggy page/app, and the many optimizations they've done to their Javascript engine.

They do mention it takes up more memory for the multi-process approach, so that is a concern, but maybe they reduced the amount of global memory needed by each tab so that there is not too much waste.

Anyways, this is what it looks like:



Cool usability feature in the "new tab" is that it will show recently accessed pages, searches etc trying to guess if you want to see something you've been interested before instead of just showing a default or blank page.
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post #3 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:44am
I'm really happy with Firefox 3, but I'll give this a shot. More competition is a good thing, fuck IE.
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post #4 of 67
9/2/08 at 6:49am
Yeah, I agree more competition might be a winner here.

The multiple processes element is certainly a possible firefox killer for me. That, and the shitty flash memory leak.
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post #5 of 67
9/2/08 at 8:41am
Quote:
Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica View Post
Cool usability feature in the "new tab" is that it will show recently accessed pages, searches etc trying to guess if you want to see something you've been interested before instead of just showing a default or blank page.
I think Opera does something similar.
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post #6 of 67
9/2/08 at 8:45am
Do this have some "feedback" function that funnels data back to google? I don´t trust google the least when it comes to amassing data.
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post #7 of 67
9/2/08 at 8:47am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jan View Post
Do this have some "feedback" function that funnels data back to google? I don´t trust google the least when it comes to amassing data.
I've never understood this position...google is up front and honest about their data collection - they have made it their mission to collect and archive all of the data out there. What horrible thing have they done to earn this level of mistrust?
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post #8 of 67
9/2/08 at 8:51am
To be fair that is not a problem of Google in particular but of the Internet in general. It is just a problem that the amount of collected data, especially what would be considered private, opens the gates for a lot of abuse. In theory at least.
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post #9 of 67
9/2/08 at 9:44am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Jared Melton View Post
I've never understood this position...google is up front and honest about their data collection - they have made it their mission to collect and archive all of the data out there. What horrible thing have they done to earn this level of mistrust?
http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?s...35251&from=rss

http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/20...data-to-brazil

http://eneve.wordpress.com/2006/03/1...nt-of-justice/

Google's not the problem, its the people who demand this data. It's why all the world's data should not be archived. It gets abused.

Sure their goal might sound innocent, but since it's open to this abuse - and they've already proven they'll give it up - they should simply stop accumulating it.

Oh wait, it's for advertising purposes. That's ok.
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post #10 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:09pm
Trying out Chrome right now. So far so good.

You can opt out of data collection during the installation process.
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post #11 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:14pm
Using it now as well. Too early to give anything but a 'so far so good' echo.
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post #12 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:15pm
As happy as I am with Firefox, I'll give this a try.

I've also got the beta for IE 8.0 and it's pretty damn fast. But it's still just IE desperately trying to be Firefox.
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post #13 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:40pm
Oh, good. The YouTube/Flash Firefox bug (no sound, two seconds of video playback) is present in Chrome, too.

Since Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Safari I'd hoped that wouldn't be the case.
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post #14 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:42pm
I hate that. What causes that?
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post #15 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:42pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Russ Fischer View Post
Oh, good. The YouTube/Flash Firefox bug (no sound, two seconds of video playback) is present in Chrome, too.

Since Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Safari I'd hoped that wouldn't be the case.
How does this keep happening? You'd figure that Adobe would want this resolved as quickly as possible.
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post #16 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:46pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by devincf View Post
I hate that. What causes that?
No idea. I've read three or four different explanations, each with an accompanying solution. But since none of the solutions have worked for me I put no faith in the explanations.
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post #17 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:47pm
The only solution I have found is a browser reboot.
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post #18 of 67
9/2/08 at 4:51pm
Same here, but that's shit when I've usually got 10-30 tabs open. I don't want to bookmark all that shit just to re-open the browser. Permanent solution needed.
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post #19 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:06pm
Also: the Chud back end and Chrome don't quite work with one another.
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post #20 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:06pm
It also doesn't work well with the new facebook.
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post #21 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:48pm
Well, I'm glad I'm not the only one with the Flash (no audio, 2 second video) problem. I get this all the time, I thought it was one of my plugins.
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post #22 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:57pm
I think the YouTube bug has to do with iTunes/QuickTime -- a browser reboot does the trick as well, but it seems that updating that duo will rid the bug until the next update. On my end, anyways. Not sure why the hell those programs would fuck up YouTube's performance, but that's what I've figured out.

Of course, I still usually just opt to reboot.
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post #23 of 67
9/2/08 at 5:57pm
As for Chrome, pretty good so far, although it's having trouble handling the CHUD boards from time to time.
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post #24 of 67
9/2/08 at 6:10pm
I just installed it and started tooling around. It's swift, that's for sure. I've been loving Firefox, but this might actually make a suitable replacement. I feel sad and whorish for that.
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post #25 of 67
9/2/08 at 6:15pm
It looks pretty. Doesn't seem to be much different yet, but i'll give it a chance.
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post #26 of 67
9/2/08 at 6:17pm
Using it now ... kind of neat.

I'm not sure I'm fond of the super minimalist UI though, like overlying status bar information for example ...
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post #27 of 67
9/2/08 at 6:46pm
There's this growing trend to lose as much of the interface as possible. Admittedly I haven't found anything missing - and the overlying status bar makes kinda a lot of sense. It's only needed when it's being used. Otherwise it's a waste of screen realestate.
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post #28 of 67
9/2/08 at 8:59pm
I read at softpedia that FF is releasing a 3.1 in the next months. Now Chrome is faster that any other browser. (BTW I don't like the name...)
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post #29 of 67
9/2/08 at 9:07pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by Russ Fischer View Post
Same here, but that's shit when I've usually got 10-30 tabs open. I don't want to bookmark all that shit just to re-open the browser. Permanent solution needed.
Save Session and Exit. You reboot the browser without losing your tabs.
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post #30 of 67
9/2/08 at 9:17pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by The LD View Post
How does this keep happening? You'd figure that Adobe would want this resolved as quickly as possible.
People having stupid Flash problems might want to give the version 10 release candidate a shot - on my Linux machine it was the difference between Flash being nearly unusable and working pretty much correctly - and on Mac it seems to work fine too. YMMV as it seems CHUD skews heavily Windows and I can't speak to how Flash 10 is working on a platform I don't use.
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post #31 of 67
9/3/08 at 10:51am
Since FF & Chrome are open source, and the transition FF to Chrome is too easy I think that they will keep disguising FF as the most customizable until the big collision.
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post #32 of 67
9/3/08 at 11:13am
Chrome sure didn't seem faster when I tried it at home last night.
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post #33 of 67
9/3/08 at 11:15am
I tried it out and while it's pretty fast it did seem to have problems actually going to the 'latest post' on the CHUD message boards (it scrolled down to far). And while I don't use it all the time, sometimes I like to adblock pages that are going Flash crazy or if my CPU utilization is too high.

Since Google is in the business of selling ads though, I can't imagine that Chrome will be that friendly to any sort of ad blocking software.

I'm all for getting more market share for different HTML rendering engines. Because what I really want to do when I make a website is have to test it on yet ANOTHER browser.
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post #34 of 67
9/3/08 at 11:18am
Quote:
Originally Posted by Russ Fischer View Post
Oh, good. The YouTube/Flash Firefox bug (no sound, two seconds of video playback) is present in Chrome, too.

Since Chrome uses the same rendering engine as Safari I'd hoped that wouldn't be the case.
That bug is in Opera too and the problem is with Flash itself. The latest Flash beta seemed to fix it for me.
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post #35 of 67
9/3/08 at 1:29pm
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13505_3-10030185-16.html

I totally agree with the author
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post #36 of 67
9/3/08 at 1:37pm
Well, Google has proven they can deliver desktop software with more than Desktop search. Google Earth and sketchup are pretty popular, as well as Google Talk.

So they have a lot of more obscure products, who cares? That's the whole point of their approach, they experiment in different areas and see what sticks. I don't see that as a weakness at all.

On the open source stuff, Google has a lot of Open Source projects they drive that are quite successful and popular, GWT comes to mind.

Firefox is getting a bit bloated and slow for me, I still use it as my main browser but I welcome Google coming up with new ways of optimizing the browser. Their multi process approach for tabs is a bit retro and wasteful, but is not a bad idea. Was kind of funny watching the processes popup as I open a new tab then killing one of them just to see that Mac icon for a broken tab.
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post #37 of 67
9/3/08 at 1:57pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica View Post
Firefox is getting a bit bloated and slow for me, I still use it as my main browser but I welcome Google coming up with new ways of optimizing the browser. Their multi process approach for tabs is a bit retro and wasteful, but is not a bad idea.
I like the faster browsing too (I'm using it right now). The multi seems odd for me.
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post #38 of 67
9/3/08 at 2:02pm
Well, it's a great idea. Browsers are pretty unstable and die because of ill behaved web applications or just bugs.

This is in keeping with their idea of having a web platform that makes Windows irrelevant, but in order to do this they have to tackle the instability problem. I've worked on apps where we decided not to do them as web apps because of it, we couldn't afford to have a mission critical app blow up because you went to gmail and some javascript make the thing break or hang.

What is needed are OS enhancements for thread isolation, but since the whole point of threads is to share common resources among each other it makes it difficult to isolate threads from each other.
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post #39 of 67
9/3/08 at 2:44pm

Now I kinda get it...

Quote:
Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica View Post
This is in keeping with their idea of having a web platform that makes Windows irrelevant, but in order to do this they have to tackle the instability problem. I've worked on apps where we decided not to do them as web apps because of it, we couldn't afford to have a mission critical app blow up because you went to gmail and some javascript make the thing break or hang.
I read at the soon to become a shitty site regrading news Softpedia, that FF was developing the strategy that could make it stable offline. That ability coupled with Google docs sounded promising. Now it's real.
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post #40 of 67
9/3/08 at 2:51pm
Eh?

Google Chrome EULA Claims Ownership of Everything You Create on Chrome, From Blog Posts to Emails
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post #41 of 67
9/3/08 at 2:59pm
I've just realised I completely ignore Chrome whenever I go to launch any of my browsers. It's habit - but I have to force myself to use Chrome. Which I don't feel the need to do since Firefox is absolutely fine.

Apparently Firefox is a spelling mistake too.
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post #42 of 67
9/3/08 at 3:08pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by ElCapitanAmerica View Post
Firefox is getting a bit bloated and slow for me, I still use it as my main browser but I welcome Google coming up with new ways of optimizing the browser. Their multi process approach for tabs is a bit retro and wasteful, but is not a bad idea. Was kind of funny watching the processes popup as I open a new tab then killing one of them just to see that Mac icon for a broken tab.
In Ubuntu Linux, where Flash 9 is a great big pile of fail that makes one long for the stability of the Windows version, a "wrapper" was eventually brought into play that forces Flash to run as a totally independent process instead of one inexorably tied to Firefox, so when (not if) it shat the bed, it would only kill itself and not take Firefox down with it - and everything could just be sorted by clicking "reload". This seems like the most common-sense approach to the issue I can think of. With version 10 it's less of an issue, but I still use the wrapper because it's good insurance against bad Adobe software.
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post #43 of 67
9/3/08 at 5:57pm
I tried it out on the XP side of my MBP, and liked what I saw, but I haven't found anything yet that makes me want to abandon Firefox. I'll give it a second chance when the Mac version is released.
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post #44 of 67
9/3/08 at 6:01pm
The key will be the plugins, which I think they have a plan to support but I see no menu or option for them.

I think they said plugins would run in their own processes, but imagine the performance hog that is going to be though ( I have lots of plugins in Firefox )
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post #45 of 67
9/3/08 at 6:04pm
On a Mac, why bother? I can see it on Windows, where Safari sucks, but Mac users have already got a world-class WebKit-based browser. I use WebKit nightly builds and they're demonically fast and rock solid for me.
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post #46 of 67
9/3/08 at 6:06pm
See that's the thing, there's nothing that gives Chrome a significant advantage. It's a good browser, but Firefox still has that underdog card with me, so until I see something that Firefox just can't do, I'm going to be sticking with them.

Found this on Gizmodo: Enable Chrome's Best Features in Firefox
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post #47 of 67
9/3/08 at 8:05pm
Well, this is pretty cool and firefox doesn't do it.
Flash crashed on my browser and it didn't go down at all ...

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post #48 of 67
9/3/08 at 8:14pm
The "isolate Flash from the browser" business is sweet, it's originally derived from Adobe refusing to do a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux. A program called nspluginwrapper was created to allow the 32-bit version of Flash to work in 64-bit Linux versions of Firefox, and was recompiled for 32-bit Linux because a side effect happened to be isolating Firefox from Flash crashes. Glad to see it spreading to the wide world of Windows, because it's really a good idea.

How did you visit at 7:48 PM from Florida when it's 7:11 on the East Coast as I type this?
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post #49 of 67
9/3/08 at 8:16pm
Your post shows up as "11:14PM" here. I think I never setup the timezone settings when I registered.
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post #50 of 67
9/3/08 at 11:46pm
Quote:
Originally Posted by reggie-wanker View Post
The "isolate Flash from the browser" business is sweet, it's originally derived from Adobe refusing to do a 64-bit version of Flash for Linux. A program called nspluginwrapper was created to allow the 32-bit version of Flash to work in 64-bit Linux versions of Firefox, and was recompiled for 32-bit Linux because a side effect happened to be isolating Firefox from Flash crashes. Glad to see it spreading to the wide world of Windows, because it's really a good idea.
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