Topic: Google Chrome - A Browser by Google

is it official? we'll see. update: digg.com says it's official.....so the post seems to be legit. the features look promising though....i bet chrome comes with native gmail and calendar support as well. i'd appreciate that.
what do you think? http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.html

The Space Between Us | My Blog: lukas.grumet.at

(Edited by mas on 09-01-2008 23:28)

As long as it's just a GUI on top of an established engine (WebKit?) and they keep it in sync with Safari releases, it doesn't bother me.

(Edited by reisio on 09-01-2008 23:39)

It's a bit more than that : it's webkit + a new JavaScript VM, the whole thing runing one process per tab, with good thinking of the security, a minimalist GUI including a new tabs page mixing some ideas of Opera Speed Dial + Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 suggestions + and a bit of Mozilla Ubiquity ( for the search engines thing ), and a webApp mode with even less UI a bit a la Mozilla Prism.

Really interesting.


It looks official as most of domains mentionned in the comics have been registered by Google, or affiliates, plus similar news was posted on thetruthaboutmozilla blog 6 months ago. Also note that www.google.com/chrome gives an Apache style 404 instead of Google's error pages.

[edit] Officiality (?) confirmed on the official Google blog. The windows beta of Google Chrome is to be released tomorrow. [edit]



(Edited by poi on 09-01-2008 23:56)

I just read through the comic, and I have to say it looks pretty tasty. I doubt I'll be downloading the beta version, though. I'd like to help out in the development process, but with my schedule these days I need something solid.

I imagine some of the inmates here will be using the beta, though, and I'm looking forward to hearing about it!


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

quote:

---

poi said:

It's a bit more than that : it's webkit +?

---

The rendering engine is all I care about. They have to use an established engine, and keep it in sync with the established browser that's already using it, otherwise we'll probably have to add another browser onto the list of those that must be debugged... and I know JS is your thing, but it's much less essential than HTML & CSS (besides, chances are a new JS engine designed to suck less is going to do just that). I guess we'll see.

quote:

---

They have to use an established engine, and keep it in sync with the established browser that's already using it, otherwise we'll probably have to add another browser onto the list of those that must be debugged... and I know JS is your thing, but it's much less essential than HTML & CSS (besides, chances are a new JS engine designed to suck less is going to do just that). I guess we'll see.

---

I am p01, and I approve this message


I'm also looking forward to the process manager. It'll be interesting to be able to monitor the CPU, memory and network usage of individual tabs.

beta tomorrow? nice, will download it for sure. can't wait to post some reviews

Wow, things are moving fast at Google HQ, make sure we post a link to download that bad boy I want to scrutinize! (If it works on Linux)

Blaise: The post on Google's blog says the beta is Windows only, first.

heard on NPR this morning that it was released. Anyone got a download link? I'd like to check it out

Later,

C:\

cprompt: i just checked the social bookmarking platforms, but was unable to spot any news regarding the release. guess we'll have to wait a few more hours...

Out: http://www.google.com/chrome/

http://reisio.com/temp/chrome/acid2/

No built-in text anti-aliasing, & note the difference in rendering of the nose.

Someone's told me that during a press conference the guy in charge of rendering said something about planning to use the same versions of WebKit as Safari (but I got the impression they aren't quite doing that yet).

(Edited by reisio on 09-02-2008 21:38)

here's a quickie:
-clean interface. the whole thing doesn't use much space of your screen.
- feels very "light" and fast
- incognito window actually opens a new window (do not like)
- seems to eat a little bit more ram than opera
- the integrated task manager is awesome. has a button that says statistics for computerfreaks (now letz see how much cpu some of poi's js toys eat )
- bookmarking is about the same as in firefox.

more to come...hopefully from other inmates as well...

Super quick impression.

Pleasant streamlined UI, no full page zoom :\, apparently no possibility to change the keyboard shortcuts :\ ( I want my shift+enter and ctrl+shift+enter back ), really sweet task manager and memory tab ( too bad it doesn't auto-refresh ), pretty good rendering engine ( well that's webkit so of course it's good, altough a bit buggy with Canvas ), the JS engine is freaking fast ( twice faster than Safari 4 ). The debugger is bascially the one found in Safari 3-4 ( so quite good too ). Like Safari 4, it some times takes a ridiculous time to load a page. Haven't figured why yet. Neja made the JS debugger cry due to the BMP images generated on the fly that it kept appending to the Resources tab. Hum. And FWIW 63/100 on Acid 3. And holy smoke, 3DTomb II is really fast in Chrome.

Definitely a good start.



(Edited by poi on 09-02-2008 21:55)

some more impressions:

- no mouse gestures (so no go for me yet, this is a must have)
- the incognito window tells me that i should watch out for people standing behind me thanks google!
- fullpage zoom is missing
- i now checked the ram usage of ff 3 and IE8b2 as well. chrome remains on top.
edit: right click a page and check inspect element (translated from german...but you should know what i mean). this is superawesome!

(Edited by mas on 09-02-2008 22:04)

does anyone know what version it uses for the flash-plugin? activeX or the dll one?

and does anyone know, if you can get javaplugins to run in it?

Typing a domain name then ALT to search feels a little weird. At least at first. I couldn't find a way to create a custom search engine like in Firefox and Opera, meaning it's up to the good folks at Google to decide which sites you can easily search on

mas: Inspect element is part of Safari's ( more likely webkit's actually ? ) debuger.

GRUMBLE: youTube worked for me. And a processing page pointed me to http://java.sun.com/products/plugin/downloads/index.html but I didn't try.

shame on me, have to admit that i havent used much safari so far....still an awesome feature!

just tried it out for a few mins, ultra fast load time under 1 second in vista ultimate 64 seems to run much faster in vista than firefox. will play round with it some more later.

mmh Chromes adds automatically the search pages to its list of search engines once you used them once. Neat. And right click on the address bar lets you look at the list, edit it, and toggle the Google suggest feature. The auto detection, after one use is neat but I kinda prefer the explicit way of Firefox and Opera : right click on a FORM field > Create Search Engine

I prefer bookmark keywords, but I guess some people can't use things they can't see.

Just ran a whole load of browsers, all with different scripting engines, through the SunSpider benchmark. Here's some comparative results. (The total time that I list for each browser is linked to the full results page for that browser.)

http://web-graphics.com/2008/09/02/scripting-engines-just-got-a-whole-lot-faster/

--
var Liorean = {
abode: "http://liorean.web-graphics.com/",
profile: "http://codingforums.com/member.php?u=5798"};

Excellent! I knew I could come here for some early feedback.

If I have time this weekend I may download it and try it out for kicks.


___________________________
Suho: www.liminality.org | Cell 270 | Sig Rotator | the Fellowship of Sup

so far, I'm digging Chrome. The way the search engine thing works is pretty nice.

Later,

C:\

poi, you see this? http://www.funnypictures.net.au/south-america-africa-trex/ (muauahahahahah hijack'd)

yep.
That "reality bites" sig is mostly for the Philosophy and other Silliness threads. Ichtys taste so sweet with a pinch of salt.

btw, here are some good reads about chromes privacy issues.
http://blogsearch.google.com/blogsearch?q=google+chrome+privacy&hl=en&um=1&ie=UTF-8&sa=X&oi=blogsearch&ct=title

and: http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080903-google-on-chrome-eula-controversy-our-bad-well-change-it.html

Well, DLed and installed it.

Looks interesting so far - I do not think it will replace my FF as my favorite, however.

I do consider it better than IE.

WebShaman | The keenest sorrow (and greatest truth) is to recognize ourselves as the sole cause of all our adversities.
- Sophocles