Burning Chrome

http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/27/burning-chrome/

by ggordan • 15 years ago

80 56 15 years ago

pnathan• 15 years ago

Well, I've personally been real happy with Chrome. I've got it on OSX/Windows/Linux.

It's not a weird-ux like IE, it's snappy unlike Firefox, it isn't a memory-hog like Safari, and it's well-supported (unlike the runner-ups).

It also has an epically nice PDF reader, which could be its own product and I would be very, very happy.

Confusion• 15 years ago

Not a memory hog?! The smallest tab currently opened takes 18MB; the largest 83MB for a single tab. Each extension takes an additional ~13MB. It's using a grand total of 725 MB private memory, for 18 tabs.

borism2• 15 years ago

well, it doesn't feel like memory hog due to having many processes. when you close all those tabs the memory is freed.

for some unknown to me reason after having few sites open in Safari and closing everything, it still takes up 500MB in memory.

in short, you have to restart Safari to free-up memory. with Chrome closing tabs is sufficient.

rtaycher2• 15 years ago

not a weird-ux ?

nhangen4• 15 years ago

I used to love Chrome, but as of late it's crashing on a daily basis. Perhaps it is a flash issue, but Safari seems to handle it OK.

CWIZO• 15 years ago

What channel are you using? The stable, beta or dev?

nhangen4• 15 years ago

stable - 9.0.597.102

Griever• 15 years ago

Dev channel user here. Can't say I experience this at all. However, I have heard from other users that some extensions can cause the browser to crash. Not sure which, unfortunately.

nhangen4• 15 years ago

That's strange. I thought about that, but the only extension I have is the Google Blacklist extension.

peregrine• 15 years ago

Did you try contacting the developers? They are very open to bugs and helping out. In my experience.

hk9565• 15 years ago

Statistically speaking, our crash rates have been going down with each release. However, there are, of course, always more crashers. If you'd be willing to help us diagnose the issue, we'd be appreciative.

Here are some tips for reporting a crash bug:

http://www.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-guidelines...

Thanks!

levesque• 15 years ago

I have been experiencing wierd crashes with some HTML 5 games where the whole browser crashes. It's funny because they are supposed to be standalone processes.

Charuru• 15 years ago

I agree with most of the article. Android and Chrome OS are great products, I just don't see how Google is going to make money from them.

Not sure about Chrome, but I feel like Android is a defensive measure against a possible monopoly. If one company controlled mobile then Google might be locked out of whatever greater potential mobile could reach. So Android doesn't necessarily have to be financially awesome to be strategically successful.

MikeCapone2• 15 years ago

The influence of Chrome and Android on web development are very probably part of what Google is aiming for. It's the anti-Facebook/Apple, in a way, which should help Google Search keep earning enough money to support all the other peripheral projects.

rmrm• 15 years ago

I read recently that 90% of HTTPS traffic for Google properties <> Chrome is handled using SPDY. Interesting also that Google continues to put more and more of their properties on HTTPS.

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ

I think Chrome is useful for them for just this reason, rather than solely trying to cajole others, they can just do things. I imagine this will continue to accrue benefits to them for quite some time.

retlehs• 15 years ago

I absolutely love Chrome. I recently ditched Firefox + Firebug for Chrome [Canary build] + Developer Tools.

It didn't take any time to get adjusted with the new Firebug like CSS editing and I no longer have to deal with having to regularly restart Firefox once it becomes sluggish.

Check out "Google Chrome Developer Tools: 12 Tricks to Develop Quicker" by Paul Irish: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI

nkassis• 15 years ago

Gotta say, that pause button(last tip) is genius!

willifred4• 15 years ago

I love Chrome, but I hate silent updates.

The majority of Chrome users have no idea that their browser is silently updating itself without their knowledge or consent, and if they did, they wouldn't have any idea how to shut it off.

I can think of plenty of cases where most users would want to turn it off—tethered to a slow data network, throttled bandwidth, etc—but the precedent it sets bothers me more than any hypothetical inconvenience. It's like I'm suddenly, unknowingly leasing a little space on my machine to Google, and I'm not always sure what they're installing.

div2• 15 years ago

I love the silent updates.

You raise a valid point about not knowing exactly what is being installed, but the flip side of the coin is that security fixes and new feature support get adopted much faster.

It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch.

rkudeshi• 15 years ago

> It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security patch.

Even though I still use Firefox personally, this is why I've transitioned every family member to Chrome.

willifred4• 15 years ago

Security and convenience at the expense of control and privacy.

I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I realize that I'm going to have to go into the future kicking and screaming.

eklitzke2• 15 years ago

The updates are really small. As they've detailed in a number of blog posts, the patch format is a custom binary diff that understands the format of ELF/EXE/etc. file formats to get the smallest diffs possible.

Also, on Linux systems Chrome does not automatically update. When you download the deb/rpm from Google it sets up a package repository (e.g. by adding a file like /etc/yum.repos.d/google-chrome.repo) and you get updates via the usual package update mechanism on your system. I have no idea if this will ever happen, but it seems like if there was a better integrated update system for OS X and Windows then Chrome on those systems could have an option to work in a similar way.

Fargren• 15 years ago

It's not really the size but the principle of it. Google is installing something on my PC without asking me about it. Ev6en if in this case the result is good, it's not the kind of thing a program should do.

I know that when one installs Chrome, they are implicitly accepting that it will update itself, but it still is a very unique behaviour that wouldn't be accepeted in most programs.

djahng• 15 years ago

I think what Chrome really needs is the ability to watch HTML5 video in full screen (not just fill the browser window). At least this is Chrome's functionality on my Mac. I realize full screen video is not part of the HTML5 spec, it's left to the browser to implement. Safari will do full screen HTML5 video...

patrickaljord• 15 years ago

Just press F11 (on linux) and you'll get full screen.

mixmastamyk• 15 years ago

He means the video full screen, the page being full screen is not so helpful unless still running at 1024x768.

hasenj2• 15 years ago

The bit about the Cloud being like electricity is very insightful.

However, if you've lived anywhere outside the US and Europe, you know that grid electricity is not as available as you're used to. In third world countries, electricity goes off periodically, specially in places where there are wars.

When I was young (and living in the middle east) I heard a joke where 3 men: an American, an Arab, and an African were asked the question: what's your opinion about electricity going off? The American says: does electricity go off? The African says: what's electricity? The Arab says: what's an opinion?

I visited Iraq in 2000; practically everyone had an electricity generator at home. I had to learn how to operate it and refill it with gas.

nochiel• 15 years ago

"The African says: what's electricity?"

That should read "The Africa says, 'What electricity?'"

We certainly know what electricity is; we've heard of it and understand its usefulness; we even use it almost daily. However, as you aptly noted, its availability is sufficiently irregular and inconsistent that we expect it to be off as much as it is on.

tkahn6• 15 years ago

Um, that hyperbole is part of the joke. Americans know that electricity goes off and Arabs have opinions.

ewald• 15 years ago

Why do people generalize stuff about third world countries?

I live in Brazil, and electricity is as reliable as in the US and Europe.

hasenj2• 15 years ago

Sure, maybe it's not bad in Brazil, but there are many places where it's not super good.

In Syria and Jordan, it goes off for about 3 hours every two weeks, or something like that (not scheduled, just randomly). I think the same is true for Egypt. I've heard the same about India. In fact, I've heard from a trusted person that computer/software offices in India have their own backup power generators. I can only assume the same applies to hotels and factories.

alanh• 15 years ago

> Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon

Um… not that hard, if you aren’t so cheap as to only run Windows.

mkramlich• 15 years ago

As I read the article, and only a paragraph or two into it, I was reminded once again why I think Google naming both their browser and their Linux distro "Chrome" was a bad idea. Feels like an amateur mistake the kind I wouldn't expect them to make but they did. Yes, technically, one is called ChromeOS, but obviously many folks are going to drop the -OS part when talking about it, thus causing confusion.

Burning Chrome

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