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September 1, 2008

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Understanding Googlechromazon

Can’t decide what’s cooler — Google Chrome or the fact that they had Scott MccCloud make an explainer comic book for it.

Yeah, probably the comic book.

Update: Whoops, no, it’s Chrome. This thing is beautiful.

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Posted September 1, 2008 at 9:30 | Comments (7) | Permasnark
File under: Briefly Noted

Comments

I'm pretty excited about Chrome itself. Overall I think the moves to make web apps play nice offline and on the desktop (Gears, Prism, Fluid) are also very exciting.

But can anyone explain to me why the Chrome book has to break the back button? Total faux pas and totally unnecessary for a simple page-by-page site.

Breaking the back button; not a good way to show your leadership of the future web...

Gotta give a shout out to my friend Ohad, who makes the Fluid-equivalent (and actually it predates Fluid) on Windows, called Bubbles:

http://bubbleshq.com/

But yeah, I agree. It's all a super-positive direction. But what I *really* hope is that Google now begins to use its titanic bank account and market power to push Chrome *hard*. Mozilla's been very clever w/ its promotions, but it's never used the kind of brute force that MSFT has.

Could Google just out-and-out pay Dell, etc. to include Chrome on new machines? I'll be they could. And I think they should.

Yes -- also, Prism is so janky and resource-heavy, not at all like the lightweight Firefox of old. Fluid is much better, but there are things that should be easy -- like tweaking a URL or switching from an insecure to a secure http connection -- that are impossible without recreating an app, relocating the icon, etc.

I am more and more of the mind that a general-purpose browser with infinitely more bookmarks and toolbars and extensions is not the future. I do the vast majority of my web browsing in NetNewsWire, which doesn't even have a history function, but manages RSS feeds and enclosure downloads like a champ. Why is Zotero a Firefox plugin and not a Gecko or Webkit-based application? Why isn't every web editor like Coda, combining HTML editing, manuals, FTP uploading, browser testing, in tabbed windows? Why do we have applications built solely around what network protocols they use and not what we want to use them for?

Ooh, love that last point. Really good. We don't need HTTP applications; we need editing apps, browsing apps, reading apps, video apps, etc.

E.g., I was a fan of Songbird -- the Mozilla app built for browsing music blogs, w/ lots of built-in tools for music playback, downloading MP3s, etc.

Writing this comment in Chrome. Woo!

First impressions: I was happy to see that the idea touted in the comic of putting the tabs at the very top of the window actually pays off. In the comic it wasn't clear that this would actually put the tabs all the way against the top of the screen. It does, meaning that you have full Fitts advantage of having an infinitely large target. This makes a lot more sense than the usual Windows (and last time I checked, a long time ago, OS X) convention of having a bunch of non-clickable space take up the top of the screen. It would be nice if Chrome could build further on this HCI improvement by letting me put my Delicious button all the way against the top of the screen too...

Disappointed that Chrome does not text search in text input fields. This was a problem with Firefox for so long and they finally got it right.

Also disappointing, the new JavaScript engine in Chrome, V8, seems to crash hard on my Google Map test page. This is a Google Map I made that displays a line wrapping around the Earth hundreds of times (why I made this is another story). Obviously this taxes the JavaScript engine, but Mozilla and IE seem to handle it with a only a little churning. V8 gives up entirely (try zooming out...). Warning: this could crash your browser (especially if you are running Chrome): http://tinyurl.com/3yzwuy

Hmm, concerns about V8 increasing. Not only does it not handle that page (above) well, but it doesn't seem to play very nice with the rest of my system. Of course, you could say that the page I created is poorly written in some way that causes V8 to die. But Google has been touting how well isolated the tab processes in Chrome are supposed to be from the rest of your system. I find that when V8 locks up on my test page, it basically brings my whole system (Vista) grinding to a halt. Apparently, V8 is not protected from hogging the entire processor...

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