One More Chrome Post

December 27th, 2008

So, like some of the nuts on the internet, when Chrome came out I tried to make the complete switch away from Firefox, and went right back. After abandoning the switch, I kept my Chrome icon right next to Firefox in my quicklaunch, and it still gets clicked a lot. Anytime I need to check something quickly, or don’t want to do any real “work” on the web, Chrome is the browser I use.

I’m embarking on a new experiment to see if I can easily set up a second profile for FireFox that will launch the browser with no extensions and see how it works for small jobs. When FireFox goes 3.1 it will have all of the features I like most about Chrome (except for the separate process architecture which really makes me want Chrome to ‘win’ in the end), and I’d really rather be a one-browser man.

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Google Chrome Officially Leaves Beta

December 11th, 2008

I’m in the middle of the road with Chrome. It’s good enough that I use it when I don’t need add-ons. It launches fast, is stable and reliable, but I can’t switch yet. I believe that Firefox has gained most of its share of the browser space by being extensible and filling needs that IE doesn’t provide, not simply by being more compliant to web standards. Once add-ons are supported in Chrome, Firefox will have a run for its money.

The Firefox extension that I miss the most in Chrome is Ubiquity.

Google Chrome Officially Leaves Beta

By Adam Pash, 10:42 AM on Thu Dec 11 2008

Windows only: Google’s new web browser, Google Chrome, has officially left its beta tag in the dust, graduating to a full-fledged 1.0 release today just 100 days after the initial release.

Yesterday we told you Google Chrome would be leaving beta soon, but we had no idea it would be this soon. According to the Official Google Blog:

We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux.

Good news all around for folks excited about what Google Chrome has to offer. If you’ve been waiting to try it out until Chrome dropped the beta tag, check out our power user’s guide to Google Chrome. Still a Firefox die-hard but like a few of Chrome’s better features? Here’s how to enable Chrome’s best features in Fireox.

Google Chrome [via Official Google Blog]

via Featured Windows Download: Google Chrome Officially Leaves Beta.

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Chromed Out

September 12th, 2008

Google has a nice product in Chrome, but I’ve decided to move back to Firefox while Chrome bakes a little longer. A few reasons for switching back to Firefox:

  • Chrome was unable to access a linksys control panel on my friend’s network, other random pages break as well
  • Chrome crashed my gmail tab with a ctrl+z while typing email more times than I can forgive
  • I miss my Firefox addons

Google has given me a taste of something new, and I hope the overall conceptual improvements in Chrome make their way to Firefox, but let’s face it, we all live in the browser these days. I need the web to work, and I get more utility with Firefox without webapps that break. Chrome still kicks the crap out of safari though. Nobody on earth should be using that trash. Seriously.

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Chrome

September 2nd, 2008

Like many others, I had to download Google’s new browser Chrome today to see what it’s all about. The major features that are being bragged about by Google are

  • tabs isolated in separate processes
  • plugins isolated in separate processes
  • awesome automated testing
  • sandboxes for each tab
  • webkit for html rendering
  • v8 javascript interpreter/compiler
  • the omnibox
  • gears integration
Having a new process for each tab does require a bit of memory. Very informally I’ve seen tabs take about 20 ~ 45 mb each. I don’t mind having the extra overhead since each individual tab is well behaved, they all seem to stay rather small in size, and no single tab can kill the whole browser.
For a beta browser Chrome has been more stable than the first few betas of Firefox 3 that I used. That doesn’t surprise me though since Google tests Chrome by using it to automatically crawl thousands to millions of sites with each new build. At this point I get the feeling that it might be a day or two before I actually hit a page that kills a tab. Once developers start creating extensions for the browser that will likely start to mess with things too.
I won’t bother to cover all of the other features in depth, but I do have to applaud the V8 javascript virtual machine. All of the ajax I played around with today was as fast or faster than anything I’ve ever seen. Whether Chrome survives on its own, or if its features get incorporated into future versions of Firefox, Safari, or even IE, the web will be a different place starting today.
It’s not all good though. I miss my favorite extensions from firefox, especially adblock plus, mouse gestures, weave and ubiquity. Bookmark organization is missing, and I’m sure the options panel can be beefed up to allow more browser settings to be adjusted.
A lot of functionality still needs to be added, but it’s an excellent browser if you’re just checking your morning/evening internets.

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Windows’ File Permissions

May 21st, 2008

I nearly tore my left arm off to use as a club for smashing my computer tonight. A while ago at work we began migrating to active directory, and so my laptop got added to the corporate domain. As part of the magic performed by the migration script, I got a new profile on my computer. That’s a standard part of setting up on a domain. The other half of the magic is that the new profile really just rides on top of the old one, and uses a lot of its local settings.

Ever since the migration I’ve been running into little problems that I spend hours researching with no help from Google, only to trace them back to file permission issues. Tonight, the unhappy file is the one that is responsible for telling Quicktime which file types it can play in the browser. After granting the administrators group ownership of: C:\Documents and Settings\oldprofile\Local Settings\Application Data\Apple Computer\QuickTime\QuickTime.qtp, I can finally see quicktime videos again.

All of this because I have a Blackberry which Verizon won’t let receive picture/video messages because it doesn’t have a camera (even though it has full multi-media capabilities) forcing me to check video messages online. So in this rant I blame hours of frustration on Verizon for not enabling obvious features on their phones, Windows and it’s inability to recursively set file permissions, and Apple and their Quicktime installer which uses a mysterious registry key to point to the Local Settings folder of my old profile instead of the new one. The perfect storm of crappy software. May all who helped create any of these “features” die a slow death in a house fire.

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Goodbye Plaxo

May 20th, 2008

A while ago, I signed up for Plaxo, but never got interested in the service. It was all too closed up for me when compared to services like Twitter or FriendFeed. Then today I get an email that reads:

A Letter from the CEO and Founders

Dear Plaxo member,
We are excited to announce some of the biggest news in the history of Plaxo. Plaxo has signed a definitive agreement** to be acquired by Comcast, the nation’s leading provider of entertainment, information and communications products and services. We’ve got at least a few months to go before the acquisition is completed, but we wanted to send you this note to let you know what’s coming up and how it affects you and your account.

I already know how this will affect my account though; It’ll be deleted. I don’t want the company that throttles my bandwidth and inspects my packets to also own the kind of information that Plaxo stores.

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Power Restored

March 19th, 2008

A few months ago the folks at Google proudly announced, “we’ve linked up Reader with Google Talk,” and with one fell swoop stole something valuable from their Reader users: control. We lost the ability to exchange our shared items feeds by choice; the process was automated. Tonight the issue really got to me when I was looking through the list of contacts that Google asserts are my “friends,” and saw that it was impossible to stop sharing with several people to whom I would rather not automatically expose my feed. Starting now, I am all but abandoning use of Google Reader’s sharing feature. This is not the end of my shared items however. Sometime in the next day or two I will personally send my RSS feed to you, my real friends, so stay tuned. In the meantime, here’s what I’ve done. Try it if you’re a control freak like me.

First I tagged a story I wanted to share with a keyword (the only way to create a new tag as far as I know). Any keyword you choose will work just fine. Then I just moved my shared items to the tag, made the tag public, and burned a feed. The last bit with Feedburner, is optional. I just did it because I get a few extras that Google doesn’t provide, like stats on the number of people subscribing to my feed. I hope this helps a few of you take back control, and If you choose to re-privatize your feeds, I hope you choose to re-send me your url. :-)

By the way, when you’re viewing an item in reader just hit ‘t’ on the keyboard, then start typing your keyword (it will autocomplete), hit enter, and you’ve shared an item using your new tag. Not as elegant as before, but an acceptable trade off.

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Why Twitter?

March 9th, 2008

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OpenID

March 7th, 2008

So I began thinking the other day about the number of usernames and passwords I’ve collected over the past few months and remembered hearing something about OpenID. After some checking, I found that blogger, Plaxo, wordpress, and possibly other services that I use all accept OpenID for authentication. Of course I love the opportunity to play with new stuff, and this was no exception. I finally decided on Verisign as my provider, installed their seatbelt extension for firefox, and added a few services.

The whole thing works smoothly; I sign in once with Verisign (no need to have firefox remember the one password I’ll use everyday), then as I go to sites that accept OpenID, I supply them with my url. If it’s a service I’ve already approved, then I’m in. If not, I quickly get rerouted to Verisign and tell them if I want to allow the site to use my OpenID and how long it can use it, then I’m right back at the new service. You can even set up multiple OpenID’s as well if you want to keep authentication for sites separate, or if you just want redundancy. Man I hope Google embraces OpenID for more than just blogger, I’d really love to use this for everything.

Not convinced? Look at this slideshow.

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Ghosts

March 4th, 2008

I’ve really been enjoying the new Nine Inch Nails album tonight. I think I’m going to do the five dollar download tomorrow to get all four volumes. It’s all instrumental, and really exploratory. Also worth mentioning is the creativity behind the number of options available to fans (and skeptics) to enjoy the experience; from the free download of the first volume to a few hundred dollars for all four volumes in a highly collectible set for big fans with deep pockets. Take a look, have a listen.

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