Burning Chrome
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
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.
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.
I don't know if data like this exists in an easily understandable format (i.e. not just cryptic massif dumps that would only make sense to WebKit hackers), but it would be interesting to see a heap profile of a WebKit/Safari session to see what's using all of the memory in an "empty" browser session.
Being a memory hog AND being slow really just makes me hate the software (Firefox - although I hear it's getting better in 4+ which I have not tried).
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.
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.
I live in Brazil, and electricity is as reliable as in the US and Europe.
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.
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
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.
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.
Even though I still use Firefox personally, this is why I've transitioned every family member to Chrome.
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.
The only thing which you don't really know anymore is when or to what version it is currently updating. But why would you care anyway about that.
It's also possible to turn off the autoupdates.
It's debatable what the best default setting would be, and wether or not average users:
a) know how to disable this b) care to disable it
Like you say, it necessitates a level of comfort with a company. I suppose most people don't give this a lot of thought, and thus feel pretty comfortable with any company.
Wether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate discussion imo.
The browser update policy is a great example. Probably the world would be a better place on average if mom and pop auto-updated, but the policy has serious downsides. For one, it's a pain for me as a geek who likes to know what is running on his machine (and who, frankly, doesn't trust Google as far as he could throw it). It's also a pain for me as a web developer, because of the various breaking changes Google is demonstrably willing to make in its browser, as discussed in several recent HN threads.
There are other problems with "one size fits all" that I think undermine the entire premise of the article, though. If Chrome is to be the new OS, then does that mean every application front-end in the world has to be written in JavaScript? On the evidence to date, this is not going to be a success...
Similarly, "[Google App Engine] just runs the code you give it, and you don’t much care how" sounds like a great argument, until you realise that you have to write your code using the tiny fraction of the available programming tools that happen to be supported by GAE.
Given that in this business, the two most common scenarios are keeping geek opinion on your side or your company failing rather horribly, I think we can safely assume that nothing Google offers today is even close to comprehensive enough to displace native apps and make cloud/browser software the norm. Oh, and if the article author thinks that broadband-speed wireless is going to become as ubiquitous as electricity within a few years, I think he probably needs to go back to physics school. :-)
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.
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.
If you think about it, the only reason we want the control is because we don't trust software companies not to mess up our system. The crazy thing is wanting manual updates, because it implies gross incompetence from the software industry.
Well. Gmail doesn't actually install anything on your machine.
In the case of gmail, I rely on their code only for checking/sending mail. And they have access to just my mail data. When something runs on my machine, I need to be a lot more careful about what data that code has access to and what privileges it has.
Here are some tips for reporting a crash bug:
http://www.chromium.org/for-testers/bug-reporting-guidelines...
Thanks!
Um… not that hard, if you aren’t so cheap as to only run Windows.
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.
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.