Google's browser - Chrome beta release

blatantninja said:
I heard that it doesn't have a pop-up blocker. That right there would kill it for me.
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Pop-up blocking works much like in Firefox. You get a small notice about it in the corner of your window, with the option to open it.
 
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I got curious and installed it. Initial impression is very positive -- the UI is minimalistic, immediately understandable, and very, very clean, it renders pages faster than Firefox 3, which means it's the fastest I've seen so far, and it even imported all of my past history from Firefox. It also renders RPGWatch without a hitch, and has some very nice little features like "stretchable" textareas (like the one I'm typing into). Nice!
 
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Yup, it seems like a win, as soon as we get some plug-ins for it.
 
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Hmm, guess I got some bad info! Might have to give it a shot. Like the privacy mode of it for browsing at work.
 
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I don't think having a GMail account makes any difference. The EULA does have some... oddities, but for a number of reasons I don't really worry about EULA's much, especially absurd ones.

By the way, at least Flash works fine, and that's a plugin. I think they've implemented the Mozilla plugin interface, which means well-behaved Mozilla plugins ought to work out of the box, more or less.

Yep-o, looks like Chrome FTW.
 
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Prime Junta said:
I don't quite understand what he's saying there. Some of it doesn't even seem to be making much sense. Could you elaborate? What do you mean by "sites can be given incorrectly" or "correcting those errors?"
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He said that the flash player software is unstable and that they are the ones that should fix it. Instead google now made a browser that corrects the faulty code.

For me it doesn't make much sense too, PJ. I will try to get a more elaborate answer from him tomorrow.
 
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OK, I see. Yeah, definitely Adobe should fix its Flash player, but a more robust browser certainly won't do any harm. What's more, there's no way to force people to update their Flash players.

I don't think Chrome can fix problems *inside* the Flash player, though; what it can do is prevent the entire browser from crashing if the plugin crashes. Which is not a bad thing IMO -- Flash has become pretty much ubiquitous, and we get lots of sometimes badly-made Flash advertising content on our browsers whether we want it or not.
 
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As an aside: I've decided to make Chrome my default browser on my home box, which runs Vista. The reason? Firefox 3 munges up one site I regularly visit, namely the Freakonomics blog on NY Times. Chrome renders it perfectly. That's one concrete benefit I'm getting from it, and thus far nothing seems broken.

Whatever the rationale, Google seems to have done its job well.
 
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I'd like to see that one enforced in court. Or, rather, I wouldn't, but you get my drift.
 
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Reviews and comments start coming out about the new browser. From InformationWeek:

When Google (NSDQ: GOOG) announced its own open-source Chrome browser Monday, it made no sense. Why build an open source Web browser when Firefox is open source, an excellent browser, and available today? Google's behavior seemed the very definition of reinventing the wheel.

But Google answers the question in its comic-book-formatted explanation of its new browser technology: Google wanted to build a new browser from scratch, designed specifically to be used with the new generation of Web applications. Many of those applications are, of course, Google's own: Gmail, Google Docs, Google Reader, and more.

Google designed the browser to be lightweight, fast, have a minimalist user interface, and to resist crashing under the heavy JavaScript demands of Web applications.

Google succeeded in its goals. The browser performs well, it's easy to use, it has some really nice user interface features that demonstrate a fresh approach to the old problem of viewing and navigating Web pages.

Many people are going to want to use Chrome as their primary browser. But others, I think, will want to wait, because Chrome has some rough edges, missing features, and stability problems. Chrome is an early beta, and it shows.
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I will stick to Firefox 3 for now, and see how the next version of Chrome does before deciding to move over or not. Hopefully the other browser vendors would put more efforts into the new competition.
 
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I suggest you take it for a spin. It's working better than FF3 for me.
 
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My Internet has been virtually ad-free for a long time, I'm not going to give that up for any sort of other advantages Chome might have. That said, I'm still going to try it out eventually, if only to see if there are any issues with this site.
 
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Found a ridiculous bug on Slashdot: Type:
:%
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... in the address bar and the whole browser will crash, no elegant tab crash here.
 
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KazikluBey said:
Found a ridiculous bug on Slashdot: Type:

... in the address bar and the whole browser will crash, no elegant tab crash here.
Click to expand...

Yup, it does. I would suspect an encoding oops; the % character is used to escape stuff in URL's. Someone was careless with the parser in the address bar.

Then again, this *is* an early beta.
 
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They've done a mea culpa on the EULA, although I'd point out those terms aren't very friendly regardless of the product they were meant for.

As I said, way too many important addons in FF for me to consider switching at this point.
 
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