This one has potential for alternative captions. If your feeling creative, leave a comment.
Hat Tip: I Can Has Cheezburger
This one has potential for alternative captions. If your feeling creative, leave a comment.
Hat Tip: I Can Has Cheezburger
Google is now promoting Google Chrome on it’s homepage. Just a few days after release. Previously Firefox 2.0 was promoted on the homepage, a privilege normally reserved for Google products. The text link is a bit more subtle though. Maybe that’s because it’s beta and not 2.0.
It’s being shown to Firefox Safari and IE users. Interestingly it’s being shown to Mac users in addition to Windows users, despite no Mac support as of yet.
This is what you see when you visit about:internets. This is freaking awesome.
Years ago there was an idea to include the kitchen sink in Mozilla (you can view it here, not sure if that works in IE). It was a good idea considering it had everything else at the time.
I initially thought it was written using <canvas/>
. I tried the typical view-source:, but in this case it doesn’t seem to work. The performance was really smooth with minimal CPU, more than <canvas/>
typically allows. Now I was curious.
Then looking at the source it became obvious in about 0.1 seconds:
It’s using the actual Windows screensaver (which is why it doesn’t work in Vista I presume). I hope for the Mac and Linux port they bundle jwz’s excellent XScreenSaver. Due to jwz’s impact in browsers and open source, I think there would be even better easter egg. From a quick look at the code it seems it’s not hard to do since every tab is it’s own process, it’s essentially just running the process inside the view.
For those who don’t understand why this is all so amusing, read this Wikipedia article about the “Series of Tubes“. It will only kill a small percentage of brain cells since it’s just the Wikipedia article explaining it. There are other Tubes references as I mentioned last night.
Thanks to those who left a comment in my last post for pointing this out.
By the way, check out Brendan’s post on TraceMonkey performance. He did a better comparison at actual JS performance. I only looked at selectors really quick.
I figured I’d blog my initial thoughts on Google chrome. Rather than a hard to read essay, I figured bullet points are easier to read/scan, so that’s what I’ll do.
Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13
. Noteworthy that they keep “Safari
” in there. This looks like what I’d expect.about:
, about:memory
, about:plugins
.Despite Google’s claims that Chrome is fast, it was notably slower in my tests at the common task of launching Web pages than either Firefox or Safari. However, it proved faster than the latest version of IE — also a beta version — called IE8.
Overall it seems pretty smooth. From what I’ve seen, the process model does result in more memory in total than Firefox 3, since most tabs I open stay open for quite a while. It’s clearly still a little rough, but it’s not even out for 12hrs yet.
I await a Mac release. I just realized Pinkerton is working on Chromium as well, so I have a feeling the Mac release won’t suck but will be a real port that looks and feels like a Mac application should.
I don’t think it was mentioned in the press conference, but the Chromium blog is open.
Wired has a great article on inside the project. In addition to the names I mentioned yesterday, Bryan Ryner was also involved in at least the prototype.
I’ll make one prediction: The code most likely to find it’s way into other browsers is the GreenBorders stuff. It was originally for IE/Firefox, making it most suitable for possible adaptation to be included in other browsers. I’m not sure how much of it remains and how easy to adapt it would be though.
I’ll leave this “review” right here and unfinished since it’s still an ongoing project. Just wanted to share my initial thoughts. I’ll follow up at some point in the future when I feel it’s right to do so.
Any thoughts/additions? Feel free to leave a comment.
Edit [9/2/2008 @ 10:55 PM EST] – Added prediction about GreenBorders and link to Wired Article.
I’ve mentioned the long fabled Google browser for ages now “googlefox” as it began. Some more interesting news came today regarding “Google Chrome“.
Some of the features touted by the comic include:
Also interesting were some of the names mentioned in the comic. While long known a few Mozilla hackers went to Google, here’s a list that are mentioned in the comic: Darin Fisher, Ben Goodger, Brett Wilson (various Mozilla contributions via Google), Arnaud Weber (Netscape).
Check the comic for more details. This is pretty much the main info in there for those who don’t have the time to sift through it all.
Edit [9/1/2008 @ 6:23 PM EST]: Google Blog post.
Edit [9/1/2008 @ 7:45 PM EST]: John Lilly’s Thoughts on Chrome & More.
Edit [9/1/2008 @ 9:05 PM EST]: Apparently this was announced prematurely due to someone not realizing that it Labor Day isn’t in Germany. As a side note, how does one get on that mailing list?
Edit [9/2/2008 @ 8:55 AM EST]: Code should appear here.
The Big Picture Blog has a great series of photos for STS-125, the Space Shuttle Atlantis mission to repair the Hubble Space Telescope. It’s just a collection of NASA pictures, but the ones selected are really great.