[Zico 10]

Pretty big news in the IT circles, everyone was going on and on about this today.

Google has released a browser to rival Internet Explorer and Mozilla ( . . and Opera, Safari, .. ), and it's called Google Chrome.

http://www.google.com/chrome

I just installed it, and the first thing you notice is it's simplicity. It doesn't hog up the top of the screen to fit in all it's options like a traditional browser, and feels pretty lightweight.

Most other things on it seem a rip off of Opera, from the way it displays tabs, to the ripping off of Opera's 'speed dial' which they've changed slightly to show your most visited sites instead of your pre-determined sites. Not a good thing for those sensitive of privacy.

My laptop's touchpad doesn't seem to be able to scroll upwards on a page with it either (downwards works), whilst it can in every other program I've ever used.

For once, I think Google has had a hard time being innovative here. This is just like Opera to me, just with a few things tweaked to make it seem different, but the kicker is that Opera has been like that for several years already.

 

[Zico 10]

It is light, very light. But like I said, it's just a prettier Opera to me at the moment, it isn't showing any extra functionality worth making noise about.

I did forget to mention one piece of innovation though, which is that tabs are integrated into the top of the window. Hard to explain, so here's a screenshot;
http://img501.imageshack.us/img501/9629/chromewv2.jpg

It's nothing big, but it does make more use of the screen size. It might not matter to people on 4:3 resolutions, but to us using wide 16:9 screens, any extra use of vertical space is definitely an added and welcome bonus :thumbsup:

And there's this thing called incognito window, which opens basically a 'secret' browser window that doesn't show up on your Windows taskbar. Weird shit, and I don't really see the use in it, but it could be useful to some. You have to ALT-TAB between windows to get back to it.

One crack appeared so far is how it displays http://imageshack.us/

 

[Zico 10]

Using it now and I like it a lot. It's faster than IE, that's for certain. I will be using this from now on.

IE :frustrat:

I hate that browser with a passion. As if it wasn't bad enough as a user, having it locking up system resources, crashing like a tonne of bricks and everything else. Now that I've dabbled in some web development, it's ten times worse.

I basically have to prepare separate segments of CSS to make sure IE renders the page like Mozilla and every other browser on earth does. I have to use separate sets of images in certain cases because IE 6 doesn't support transparent images properly all the time. Had to make major tweaks to a CSS menu that works perfect in everything else (even IE 7) just to cater for IE 6.

And the kicker is that each release of IE tends to behave so differently from the last.

 

[Zico 10]

Yeah, but the browser is anti-porn in the way that it throws up your most viewed sites when you open a new tab

Seems like Chrome is identifying itself as Mozilla by the way.

Hotmail.com doesn't like it and recommends you upgrade your browser. Still quite a bit for the Google programmers to sort out, but it is looking good for such an early release (even if they did copy most of it I'm sure).

Google's reputation should still ensure it gets a large slice of the market, just like most users having Windows means that most users use IE, just not to that degree. But I can see this easily getting a larger share than Opera, and settling in behind Mozilla quite easily.

 

[Zico 10]

Looks exactly the same as my safari browser. I don't notice a difference.

The 'choose' button is horribly misplaced, it should look like this;

 

[Zico 10]

Definitely recommend Firefox, it's the closest thing to perfection in the world of browsers at this point.

Only issue with FF is that because good developers will design their sites for IE6 (it's still the predominant market share), sometimes, like 1 in 100, you come across a site designed for IE6 that wasn't tested for Mozilla. An example is Ato Boldon's website. The cause is almost always poorly written CSS, which is done wrong in the first place to make it work with IE.

For those who wonder why I'm going on and on about CSS, it's the styling applied to a website and is very, very important. Here's a peak at a site (40% complete site btw!), with and without CSS;

With CSS - http://www.anglofeb.com/devel
Without CSS - http://www.anglofeb.com/devel/index.php?template=anglofeb_nocss

The slideshow is also CSS driven, but that's something 3rd party that I threw in as is.

P.S - I'm on FF3 now.

EDIT - Atoboldon.com has fixed the background issue, so the above example doesn't hold anymore.

 

[Zico 10]

Yeah, I didn't do any reading on the browser when posting this thread. Still haven't done much reading, but I did come across the talk on V8 and it does sound interesting. I'm not so sure it'll really be that far ahead of the competition as they claim, and Mozilla is working on an updated JS engine too.

Problem is with the laptop I'm using, I can hardly tell the difference. I'll have to crack out one of the old systems at home and try out a few sites.

I've been using the browser when at home and it has grown on me to be honest. But it does need to iron out some of the more basic things because it's lack of support for Hotmail & Yahoo mail is just one thing that'll hold it back right now. That said, if it flies on Facebook, people on slightly older PC's will fall head over heels in love with Chrome.

 

[Zico 10]

Glad to see you're enjoying it, Opera is definitely very underrated.

It had tabbing long before most other browsers, integrated it's very own email client before the others, and was aiming to be a lightweight browser before them too. The speed dial has only been used now by Chrome, IE or Mozilla don't have anything like it.

It's always been right at the front of the game, but just hasn't had the marketing behind it to push it to the top.

 

[Zico 10]

Since there is no ad blocking plugin for Chrome (yet), this workaround does the job for now;

(It also works for Internet Explorer - even if you only do it for Chrome, it'll work on IE, you don't need to do the proxy settings twice)

1- Download and install Privoxy.
2- Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner.
3- Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings.
4- In the Internet Properties dialog's Connections tab, click on the LAN settings button.
5- Check off "Proxy settings" and in the address setting add 127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118.
6- If you have the option, you can also check off "Bypass proxy for local settings".
7- Click "OK," close Chrome and restart it.

 

[Zico 10]

Not really, though knowing Google it almost definitely is (or will be) tracking our web activity in one way or another.

It's also not the JavaScript king of browsers either. Still got a long way to go to get to Opera's level, let alone Mozilla's. That said it's my browser of preference now.

 

[Zico 10]

Google Chrome now offers addons, this is a massive step forward.

https://chrome.google.com/extensions?hl=en-GB

 

[Zico 10]

How about no to the Dragon Ball avatars :groan:

You guys should have grown up to a real cartoon, like Transformers!

 

[Zico 10]

Top Cat was alright, Flintstones, Jetsons etc.

But nothing ever came close to the Looney Toons franchise, that stuff is still very watchable and we're talking about cartoons that were made over 50 years ago.