Google Chrome

Surprised nobody mentioned it was officially released on 11th December, unless I missed it.

Seems much faster and more solid than FF3.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Yuck.

Google made Chrome just so it could watch more users, more closely.

I started this thread in case anybody was interested in using it/looking at it - not as a vehicle for yet another of your absurd conspiracy theories.

I use chrome a lot, its really quick... and since Ive got ad-muncher working with it, its "nearly" my full-time browser... the only thing that is missing for me is a plug in for Robo-Form.

It is not a conspiracy.

Read, if you wish:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/internet/browsers/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=212000284

Surely you mean it's not a theory? It could hardly not be a conspiracy if it were actually happening.

On Topic: Faster at what than FireFox 3? I'm always confused when people talk about browser speed because some people mean the time it takes to follow a link when you click it, others mean how responsive the client is while on a page, and yet others mean how long it takes to load the browser the first time.

Difficult to explain...

Its a lot more responsive than Firefox and loads pretty much instantly. When you click something you don't get a moment of nothing happening like you do with FF. It also seems to render pages much faster and uses less than half the resources that FF does.

So, it feels better all round, imho.

Well I like the sound of it loading up faster, so I'll give it a go. I like FF, and I don't really have any problems with it any more, but it can take a while to load up when you don't already have a window open. And it thrashes the hard disk a bit when it's doing that which can be inconvenient.

I only just fully switched to FireFox and find it a very good browser. All the lockups I was getting on Digital Spy with IE don't affect FF but also FF doesn't seem to lockup or crash. Sometimes about 2 times every couple of hours IE7 used to lockup for about a minute and the message that it wasn't responding would show when I tried to click the window. FireFox hasn't done this once since I started using it.

I tried Google Chrome a while ago when it was in beta and it seemed a little buggy but as it was a beta I thought I'd wait for an official release.

As for all this collecting data stuff by google, well it's not new news. I'm not fussed with it at all. I've been using GMAL for years and it does the same thing and I've been using the Google Toolbar and Google search since they first appeard. Along time really. I've never suffered any breach of privacy eg details being leaked, never suffered any fraud or been bothered because of google data storage.

Either way if whatever happens with all this privacy stuff, whether legislation forces google to change or not I'm not going to stop using the technology simple because Google is Badass.

[edit]One more thing about FF. Adblock is a miracle. :)

[edit2] Damn that was the fastest Browser install ever. I'll test it over the weekend and make another post about it. Google Chrome that it.

Yes, especially for blocking images, like those found in forum signatures.

Chrome does not have plugin support, and although Google claims it is a 1.0 release, it is still very much beta.

It's been my browser of choice for some time now. It's fast to fire up, very fast to render pages, and I really like the way that the tabs run in their own threads.

If Chrome was a ferrari, Firefox would be a Tank.

well i know which one i would want to go to war with :)

Seriously, faster facebook would be a bad thing for my productivity.

At the current point Chrome is talking too much home, if you dissalow certain communications in the firewall it gets into an unhealty state and crashes after some time. I like the basic concepts behind but a.o. it still has render issues and is simply talking too much to the mothership, Mac version is missing too.

Could an article be more outdated and wrong than that one?

As far as Chrome not having an ad blocker is concerned, I don't really mind the lack. It deals with annoying popups really well, and any time / bandwidth saving the ad blocker in Firefox affords is already achieved in Chrome by superior design. The browser is fast enough that the ads have absolutely no impact whatsoever on performance.

Outdated? I'm surprised a month is considered outdated.

Wrong?
lol.

something else potentially of interest to chrome-lovers: http://www.blogsdna.com/1035/free-download-google-chrome-clone-browser-srware-iron-021520-installer.htm

The article is about an old beta version. Chrome isn't in beta anymore. That is outdated. It would be like trying to compare the current version of BMax against a review of the initial release.

Unless you have some info the rest of the world doesn't, then yes its wrong. That feature is capable of easily being disabled. Of course the article won't mention that as it doesn't fit in the story of the "evil Google hiding under your bed".

I am not sure what ad problems people are having to need an adblock feature. Its almost like people don't know how to use their hosts file properly. I spend five seconds updating my hosts file once a month.

Of course Firefox routinely makes the top of the list of most vulnerable apps, and requires third-party plugins to get the browser secure and speedy.

Sure, but the general public wont know that you can turn it off, even less that they would know Google watches them.

It's amazing just *how* many ads you get bombarded with.

My browser (Avant) had a basic adblocker built-in already, but I also have a fairly massive host file that redirects a bunch of crap to 127.0.0.1

The apache logs show 19,993 errors (= unwanted ads etc.) that were redirected to 127.0.0.1 by my hosts files over the past 3 months. Absolutely insane.
(I use a custom 404 error handler so any embedded html is just returned blank, and a request for a .jpg or .gif returns a blank image, so I don't have to look at error messages in the browser either)

How is it handling Flash games now?
Last time I tried it was horrible and buggy

As for piracy/tracking concerns (and posted by xlsior above) give IRON a go -> Iron - Chrome without the Spyware

I'll give iron a look since it has a standalone portable version with no installer :). Google are starting to get quite invasive what with street view where you get two skyboxes of the front of my house in 3D see both my cars and travel down the street in a fashion similar to the old doomsday book from the 80's only MUCH more detailed and thorough mapping of the streets.

Thanks for pointing out Iron, i'll give it a try.

Google are the devils knacker sacks... It said so in the Daily Star so I must go forth and warn everyone in the world of this atrocity.

On a much lighter, less serious note, Zimbabweans are still dying from cholera...

DAMN YOU GOOGLE

Seriously though, lets have a bit of reflection here.

Dabz

So is Microsoft, but people still mark out and buy Windows and use IE.

I'd be willing to gamble here that 95% of internet users, probably more, don't know how to edit the hosts file.

I did like google chrome when i tried it, a good while ago, the the user agreement somewhat put me off. It's probably changed, but who knows :o)

Does Chrome support auto scolling yet (by clicking mouse wheel), or whatever it's called?

Yeah well some people like their privacy and don't want freaky people like dodgy father inlaws and other stalkers nabbing your address, and then checking out where you live, what cars you drive, whether they are worth stealing, how easy your house is to burgle etc. I prefer to keep some privacy and the father thing is a real problem for my wife. For some people on not so nice areas there are far worse people than him out there snooping around.

couple of blocks from my house



Iron does I just tried it, so I guess chrome does too.

I have been using Chrome exclusively for about 3 weeks now and have had no problems with it. Just had to get used to a few differences with Firefox.

The reason I switched is because the developers of Firefox refuse to fix the glaring memory problems it has. I run my browser 100% of the time, never closing it. Keep about 6 tabs open all the time and just spawn more to browse other stuff. Firefox quickly climbs to using about a half a gig of physical memory and half a gig of virtual memory. And no matter how many tabs I close, it never returns that memory unless I close it and open it again. It has pretty much always done this and I do not understand why they won't fix it.

I can't figure out how to save bookmarks in iron. no right click menu for it, toolbar icon, or anything. There is a bookmark bar, tried drag and drop.

Hope theres a way to save regular bookmarks because I'm quite liking the simple elegant look and feel but am a bit stumped on the Bookmarks thing.

UPDATE: Never mind figured it out, it's not automatic, you have to type or paste the URL and give it a label manually.

Chrome rocks.

Mmmmmm...... shiny rocks. :D

Just click on the little star icon that looks like it's part of the left of the address bar.

Lol, thanks xlsior, how on earth did I miss that (blushing)

Hehehe. It's hard to miss one where there's only like 4 buttons in the toolbar altogether... Although to be fair it does kind of look like it's part of the address bar.

By the way: your signature isn't rendering properly.

Well, that's interesting... Chapin Information Services tested all the major browsers with 21 password security related tests, and Google Chrome came out as the least secure one among with Safari (both passed 2 tests out of 21) followed by IE7 (which passed 5 tests), and finally Opera 9.62 and Firefox 3.0.4 (which passed 7 tests).

Admittedly, even the most secure ones did fail most of the tests, but Chrome and Safari were considered by CIS as "essentially tied for the worst password manager built into a major web browser", and added that "currently, the password manager that is closest to solving the first three [password manager] problems is built into Opera 9.62".

News:
http://news.softpedia.com/news/IE7-vs-Chrome-1-0-vs-Opera-9-62-vs-Firefox-3-0-4-vs-Safari-3-2-vs-Password-Security-100103.shtml

Detailed info on the holes, plus interactive tests:
http://www.info-svc.com/news/2008/12-12/

Last I tried, Chrome did not support non-ascii characters in passwords, which is one of the main reasons I'm not using it (or rather Chromium).

As for speed, that's a great advantage to FF3. I hope they make the next version lighter. (As if...)

Yeah. I'm using it simply for the speed and because I consider webkit the "lowest common denominator" regarding layout engines. If it'll work in Chrome, it'll work in everything. And it starts in shorter time than it takes Windows to connect to my WiFi.