Google Chrome 3.0 | Hacker News Reader

Google Chrome 3.0

googlesystem.blogspot.com

49 pointsnreece52 comments

"You shouldn't read too much into Google Chrome's version numbers. Just because you can now install Google Chrome 3.0, it doesn't mean that Google wants to appear more mature than it already is."

* cough(bullshit)

Really they have caught up to firefox without implementing new features.

The lady doth protest too much.
Can't really blame, them, though. They're aiming for the corporate market, and there, the people deciding between Chrome 2.0 and IE 8.0 really don't care for the difference between Java and JavaScript. Well, maybe not the people deciding, but certainly the people they have to explain those decisions to.

Well, if you compare Chrome 3.0 vs Firefox 3.0 (or 3.5), what features does Chrome not have? As far as I can tell it's only missing Firefox's extensions so if you can live without Adblock, Firebug, etc you can trade the extensions for Chrome's outright speed.

It's worth noting that WebKit's "Web Inspector" is present in Chrome, which is roughly equivalent to Firebug...so you're not really having to live without that, even.

And still no full release version for Mac / Linux. I find this particularly interesting considering the Google "Operating System" is going to be a custom interface on top of a Linux kernel.

I've been using the Linux version for several month now and honestly cannot tell the difference between it and the windows version. Just as stable, just as fast, and flash works without any problems. I'm guessing there is a good reason why they're not comfortable releasing it yet, but as an end user I haven't run across that reason.

Chrome for Mac is similar. Firefox is my main browser, but I give Chrome a whirl once a week or so and have yet to notice any deficiencies.

Well, one obvious deficiency is the lack of integration with password managers. That's deal-breaker for me.

Printing doesn't work on OS X or on Linux yet either.

What is this "printing" of which you speak?

I use SuperGenPass, which is just a js bookmarklet... It works equally well on Firefox, Safari, Mobile Safari, and Chrome.
http://supergenpass.com/

I'm running Chromium on Ubuntu x86_64, and I've yet to get Flash to work with anything other than YouTube.

How did you do that? I have zero flash. (I'm on x86_32 though).

I have --enable-plugins turned on atm and I don't see any difference between chromium's flash and firefox's, except that when the plugin crashes on chromium, I reload the page instead of the entire browser.

It depends on whether you're using the chromium-daily PPA or you used Google's deb (the former looks for Firefox's libflashplayer.so, the latter needs you to install it).
If you're using the chromium-daily PPA (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa), Chromium will look in a bunch of folders[1] for plugins, including ~/.mozilla/plugins. I suggest you get the tarball from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and put its libflashplayer.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins. Chromium will look here for it upon startup and you're set.
If you installed using Google's deb (http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel), it doesn't yet search the Mozilla plugin dirs, and thus you need to make an /opt/google/chrome/plugins dir and put the libflashplayer.so in there and it'll work.
Edit: if you're using Google's deb, you have to run google-chrome with the --enable-plugins switch. The deb adds their repo to sources.list.d, but I have no idea when they'll enable plugins by default in their repo. I'd ride the chromium-daily channel, since lots of shit is broken anyway.
[1]: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/th...

For those running Ubuntu AMD64, you can put both 32 and 64-bit versions of libflashplayer.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins (call them libflashplayer32.so and libflashplayer64.so if you like), and 32-bit Firefox will load the 32-bit plugin, and Chromium 64-bit will load the 64-bit plugin. You can get the 64-bit Flash plugin here:
http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html
And if anyone's wondering why I'm not running 64-bit Firefox 3.5, it's because the Ubuntu (and possibly Debian, I've no idea) packagers still have it branded 'Shiretoko', which throws off every site searching for 'Firefox' in your UA. Hopefully by Karmic's release they'll have this sorted out.
Also, why does Mozilla not provide 64-bit builds?

On the other hand, Chromium under GNU/Linux distributions is nowhere near there, probably due to the excess embedded code copies.

Will browser companies skip version 6? In the same way hotels skip the 13th floor?

Hopefully browser companies will be more rigorous about migrating their users to newer versions so that we avoid the issues IE6 has presented by still having a large install base even after two subsequent versions have been released.

I realize there is probably no place for it in marketing banter, but it bothers me that they don't give the WebKit project any visible credit.

That would steal focus away from Google's promotion of their secret magic sauce that they sprinkle on everything to make it better.

Well, the sauce is nice, but more realistically, why should every story about chrome mention webkit? How could we (google) police that? We mention webkit all the time and , more importantly, try to get our fixes and patches upstream.

I just searched the Chrome blog for "webkit" and here's the results:
http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=...
In general I think Google is very good about promoting Open Source awareness, my post was my attempt at humour :D.

The Webkit user agent string already mentions like 5 other browsers/render brands, I think that may be considered enough mentioning.

I feel the same about Safari and Webkit towards KHTML.

Back when Safari first came out, there was a lot of credit given to KHTML, and Apple quickly had public-facing Subversion repositories available with full product history so that KHTML could adopt any changes they wanted. Since then, WebKit and KHTML have gone radically different directions, to the point that I'm not honestly sure the latter exists anymore.
Apple, I thought, did the right thing by providing a full hat-tip to KHTML at the time of the fork. I also think their attitude towards KHTML since then has been completely fair.

For quite a while, Apple were jerks about contributing there changes back. The patches they submitted to KHTML were huge, undocumented, and full of OSX-specific code. It tooks many months of griping by KHTML, GPL advocates and the community before Apple opened up thier KHTML fork as a CVS repo, and some time later, simply open-sourcing Webkit itself. But at the beginning, it was quite a fight to get Apple to acknowledge Webkit's open-source roots.
The KDE project has now dropped KHTML and switched to Webkit.

This is inaccurate, KDE still uses KHTML. I've certainly seen the point argued back and forth amongst KDE developers, but all versions of KDE still use KHTML, and I assume it's still maintained somewhat. KHTML and WebKit aren't just interchangeable pieces of Konqueror, see http://www.kdedevelopers.org/node/3998 .
thiago from #kde informs me that "the guy [who claimed that KHTML is gone] is completely wrong", "[KHTML] is happily in use and cannot even be dropped yet".
I was also informed that "there are plans [to change to Webkit], but they're slowgoing" and "nothing concrete has happened yet". If anyone has access to an official announcement to this effect, I'd appreciate a link, because last I knew there were just developers bickering back and forth about which to keep.
Also, I assume that with WebKit SFX would become the KDE browser's JavaScript engine instead of KJS, and that would be nice. KJS is much slower in my experience.

I stand corrected on the last point. Someone needs to tell Ars and update Wikipedia:
In July 2007, the Ars Technica website published an article announcing that the KDE team would move from KHTML to WebKit.[13]
( From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WebKit#cite_ref-arsunfork_12-0 )

"Chrome includes video codecs that allow you to embed videos without using slow and unreliable plug-ins like Adobe Flash."
Compared to quicktime/media player and the slew of plugins from the previous generation, flash is much much more reliable.

Compared to QuickTime _on Windows_. On Mac it's not so slow and doesn't load CPU that much (compared to Flash/Mac).

Bullshit. Load a hour long quicktime video from blip tv using safari. It will hang your browser every time. This is on a latest gen Macbook Pro

If you want the lowest common quality video, yes. Flash video performance and quality are noticeably lower, though, so it really doesn't scale well beyond YouTube-level video.
In practice, widely deployed beat better quality handily.

I like Chrome, and the new version does a feel a tad quicker, but goddammit already how much longer until extensions are in the official releases?

They were recently enabled by default in the Chromium builds. Lots of features are still missing (all of the interface/toolbar stuff only works in Windows right now, for example, and installed extensions are purged with every restart of the browser on OS X/Linux). The extension API is lightweight and fantastic though, so I'm with you in hoping that they get make it into Chrome sooner rather than later.

Does anyone find that chrome is just unnecessary? It seems like google got to the game just when all the other browsers hot a point when they are all good.
Not long ago, FF seemed like a real edge. Now I just use it cuz I'm used to it and it has extensions that I am used to. Safari is also good and even the new IE is good. I wouldn't mind using either of them or using chrome. The pace of improvement seems to be strong and even.
I have no beef with an extra competitor, but I am surprised to say I have a browser and its good.

I think we can fairly credit Chrome with dramatically raising the bar for javascript performance across the competing browser engines. The V8 virtual machine for Chrome compiles JS to machine code rather than interpreting it or running in bytecode. Mozilla has since responded with the TraceMonkey optimization for its javascript engine; WebKit developed SquirrelFish Extreme; and so on.

SUre. extra competition. An extra place for innovation to happen. All good. But it doesn't seem to amount to using the browser does it?

Awesome! Extensions being enabled by default in the dev channel is great news. I've been semi-following the documentation for it all and it's been improving at a nice steady pace (just like the browser :-))
Also, as mentioned from others it runs just fine on Linux for several months now so go ahead and try it! You'll realize quickly how you don't need all those Firefox extensions.

Not all of them. But if you think I'm surfing without AdBlock then you have another think coming...

You can get Adsweep for Chrome which works pretty well.
http://www.adsweep.org/
It's discontinued, but it works.

I don't know if anyone noticed, the page has an ad link for IE 8.0 at the very top before the article begins. That looked funny.

hopefully the back button will work more consistently now

still waiting to try the official mac version...

It is time for next-gen "no flash" browser games and "no java" web-apps.

Hell yeah! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825830

You know what's still missing and I'm surprised...
there's no way to see raw headers sent/received in the dev tools!

Is the Resources panel not adequate? Granted, it does format the headers, but it does show the HTTP method, the request headers, and the response headers for the page and each resource.

D'oh! You are absolutely right. Somehow I've missed that little sub-menu all this time.

Chrome + Firefox = one browser to rule them all.!

lol. To guys with 'good' karma: not LTR fans I take it?
It's worth noting that together these browsers will take significant market share from IE and Safari, especially when Chrome is released for mac later this year. Even more interesting is FF strong ties and history with Google.

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