Google Chrome

The Internet is Googles business, it started life as a web page indexer and search engine and has since expanded into dozens of other services in the web domain including email, personal organisation, video, instant messaging, VoIP, Office applications, picture hosting, blog hosting, web page construction, book scanning and a shit load more.

We're talking about a load of services hosted 'in the cloud' on Google servers and accessed via a web browser. This takes the imperative off the ability of the users computer to execute processes and places it on the Internet browsers ability to handle web-based programming languages and standards. Such reliance on 3rd party software vendors effectively ties the potential of Googles services to that of the browser running them.

Perhaps then it should be of little surprise that Google have joined in the infamous 'browser wars' with a product of their own dubbed Google Chrome. Introducing their own browser to the fray allows Google to ensure that the browser is optimised for their services thereby producing the best experience for their users for those services.

Technologically Chrome has a lot going on under the hood. Chrome is an Open Source project that brings together a multitude of open source components both Google developed (Chromium) and 3rd party developed (including Apple and Mozilla). For most of us the precise goings on are unimportant, what’s important is how Chrome impacts our day-to-day web use and how it compares to other browsers.

The measure of a browser essentially comes down to four basic elements: Speed, Security, Stability and Usability.

Speed

Chrome is the fastest browser currently available and every milestone update to the program increases its speed. For example, when Google Chrome initially hit the market it was the fastest browser available, version 4, currently in development, is said to be 400% faster than that – so that's pretty fast. In terms of usability the speed difference between Chrome and something like Firefox is barely perceptible, but between Chrome and Opera is very noticeable indeed.

The speed of Internet browsing comes down to two major bottlenecks, the speed/quality of your connection and the ability of your browser to render the page. With the advent of JavaScript as the web programmers language of choice the quality of the browsers JavaScript engine has become paramount to Browser speed. Chrome has pretty much maintained a consistent lead in this regard since its initial release.

Bottom line on speed is that across the same good quality connection Chrome will load pages faster.

Security

Security in Chrome comes in two flavours, one is a standard blacklist that warns of known malicious sites, the other is to allocate tabs into their own processes. This is quite a complex system that is supposed to prevent malware installing or from tabs interacting with each other unduly. No browser is airtight on the security front and vulnerabilities are constantly identified and fixed, but Chrome certainly performs better than most in this regard. A Chrome user can feel more confident their browsing is protected than an Internet Explorer user.

Stability

The stability of Chrome owes much to the same process architecture that contributes to its security. As each tab is in effect its own process if something goes tits up in one tab it only affects that tab and not the entire browser. The downside to this behaviour is that Chrome may take up more memory tab-for-tab than other browsers. This may concern people on older systems with limited RAM and running a busy Chrome browser may impact the multi-tasking of the rest of the system, however modern systems typically come with 2-4GB of RAM which should leave plenty of overhead even when running a dozen tabs or more.

Usability

On the usability stakes Google have run with the “simpler is better” philosophy. They’ve put a lot of effort in to minimising the interface while maximising the feature set.

The interface - is the most simple of any of the other browsers out there right now. By default there are only three bars on the screen at any one time, the tab bar, the address bar and an optional Bookmarks bar which you can pop in and out with ctrl+B – effectively allowing you only two bars on the interface. There is a status bar at the bottom left of the screen, but this only appears during page loads or when you hover over a link thus further increasing the screens retail space during general browsing. The amount of screen space is further enhanced by having the tab bar placed on top of the address/tool bar and placing it tight against what we historically call the title bar (contains the close/max/min buttons and tells you what the program is), if I compare this with other browsers the amount of space between the title bar and the closest functional part of the interface is larger. But even better than that, when the Chrome pane is maximised the tabs actually sit on top of the title bar thus the interface only takes up one bar of space rather than 2 – note that I say maximised and not full screen mode, when full screened chrome removes all UI elements except scroll bars.

Aside from the space they take up the the bars are very spartan affairs, the only browser controls are back/forward, a combined reload/stop and a home button, you have an address box (with built-in bookmarker, naturally) while all the functions normally provided by the entire menu bar are reduced right down to two drop down menus accessed from the extreme right of the address bar.

The ultimate effect is a very clean looking browser with an absolute maximum of actual browsing area, which is a great concept to have.

Although Chrome bears an exceedingly simple interface this hasn’t come at the cost of usability. In fact over the last few days of use I have found Chrome to be incredibly usable. A lot of that comes down to the sheer speed and stability of the program, but it also comes down to the fact that everything works so well.

Extensibility - Many users, particularly Firefox users who have come to rely on the myriad of add-ons available for that platform may view Chrome with some scepticism, “sure it’s fast, but can it jump through hoops too?” Well the answer is yes, it can, but right now the number of hoops is quite small. Chrome has Extension capabilities, but for now they’re very much still in development and you’ll need to be using the very latest developer preview builds of Chrome ver 4 to find any worth while. Additionally Google haven’t opened up their Extensions website to the general public yet, only extension developers are permitted access to upload their extensions at present. Presumably it’ll go live prior to the Stable release of Chrome 4. In the mean time there are 3rd party sites offering Extensions for download.

The concept of Extensions in the future is great, but the reality for now is that most of them are lacking in capability compared to their Firefox cousins and not all (hardly any in all probability) of your FF add-ons will have a Chrome counterpart just yet. Extensions in Chrome are in their infancy, and Google themselves need to work on improving their Extension engine (as indicated by this blog post from the Xmarks people), but it’s all a step in the right direction.

So far I’ve found a mere handful of extensions worth using. Mouse Gestures is a must for any browser in my opinion, and there is a Chrome extension that adds this functionality. I find it a bit less tight than the native gestures function in Opera or the FireFox add-ons I’ve used, but it’s usable and as an early build it’s pretty decent. The only negative side is that it doesn’t work on non-http tabs, therefore it can’t be used to generate a new tab on the extensions tab for example.

Chrome has a version of AdBlock+, although it doesn’t work quite like the FF version. Rather than ubiquitously block all ads users are required to block individual elements. Confusingly there is still the subscription dialogue, it just doesn’t appear to do anything. Presumably it’s a work in progress and full functionality will be introduced later – but right now AdBlock+ for Chrome is a bit useless.

One extension I feel works very well in Chrome is FlashBlock. It’s roughly equivalent to NoScript, but makes it easier to identify blocked elements on the page although it doesn’t appear to have any way to remember which elements shouldn’t be blocked in future. Again, another work in progress.

The only other extensions I have worthy of note are related to Google Reader, one adds an icon in the address bar that allows you to add feeds detected on the page to Google Reader while the other notifies you how many unread feeds you have.

Final Thoughts

Chrome is a very impressive browser, certainly a worthy alternative to most of the other browsers on the market. Ultimately whether this suits you or not will depend on your tastes, I would definitely recommend taking this for a test run at the very least.

Even if Chrome doesn’t suit you now it may be worth keeping an eye on, in a years time the Extension framework should be mature enough to rival FireFox.

freedoms_stain, browsing faster than you do, out.

The Internet Just Got Bigger

This is Google Wave, a web app in development from the Google team that aims to revolutionise the way we communicate online.

And I must say, from the developer preview they've just showcased it looks pretty damned exciting. It's like a new take at email, combining principals of Instant Messaging, message boards and email itself into something that's very much unique. Anyone who has used Gmail knows that Google is fond of the concept of "Conversations" and Wave is very much a fulfilment of that concept.

Email is very linear - it works well on a one-to-one basis where participants are easily able to message and reply to messages, and Gmail is very good at collating messages that form a conversation (something that classic mail clients can be poor at). But when it comes to group conversations email becomes cumbersome and the more participants involved the more cumbersome it becomes. If a message is sent by one person to another 4, all of whom reply to the original message and all of whom subsequently comment on each others replies you quickly end up with a confusing myriad of messages that are difficult to collate into a coherent narrative. Wave aims to bring everything together into a single conversation at a central location much like a Message Board/Forum but far more flexible than that.

The great thing about Wave is that it removes the linearity that existing methods of online communication suffer from. If we go back to our group email, if the original message contained 5 points or questions then each participant would give their responses in one solid block which everyone would have to read as a single unit, possibly referring back to the original. With Wave any part of the original message can be replied to in isolation, therefore each participant can provide each of their replies directly under the point/question and reply directly to each other in the same location. The result is a single location for the conversation that can be contributed to in a fluid manner with contributors able to contribute anywhere within the conversation/Wave, even within other contributions. The Wave also has a playback feature that will playback every contribution to the Wave in order allowing the user to quickly track the progress of the Wave up to that point.

Another useful feature is the ability to embed content directly into the Wave, pictures, maps, videos, links, whatever you need really can be added to the Wave to enhance the conversation.

There is a whole slew of other shit going on here, and no doubt there'll be mountains more stuff to come, check out the video linked above to get the whole story so far - if you have 1hr 20mins to waste.

Wave is still developer-only at the moment, but it's expected to go into public beta later this year. I reckon there's a decent chance Wave could replace email as the online personal communication method of choice - it might even threaten IM protocols if they can get it to work fast enough. I do think email and IM have a place in the world with Wave, but I think their roles will change significantly. There is a strong possibility that Gmail and Wave could be combined at some point in the future, and with Googles strong commitment to integrating their web apps there's a strong probability Wave will be integrated too.

freedoms_stain, intrigued, and out.

30p to Pee, Andy Murray at No. 3! (amongst other things)

I haven't had time to make any entries this weekend so I'm just going to splurge right here, right now... If you've visited any major Network rail station in the last decade or so you're well aware of the fact that there's a toll for using the toilet facilities, presumably because unlike local station toilets the major station toilets are permanently manned. I wouldn't mind the fee if this ensured the manned toilets were kept in decent order, toilet paper and soap dispensers never empty, pee cleaned off the floor and toilet seats, blocked and unflushed toilets unblocked and flushed and broken locks and hand dryers quickly repaired. But that doesn't seem to happen in most of them. The staff manning the toilets appear to be there to make sure people don't jump the turnstile and actual maintenance of the bathrooms appears secondary. Glasgow Central and Queen Street rank among the worst in my experience, particularly Queen Street which has a permanent unwavering stench of pee and frequent pools of fuck-knows-what at random intervals on the floor. So, Network Rail, earn our 30p's or make it free to pee! Turns out that Novak Djokovic's loss to Nadal at the Rome Masters this past weekend will see him swap places with Andy Murray this week despite Murrays inferior results in the last 2 tournaments (I declined to comment on Murrays exit from Rome at the time as it was just too painful :(). Anyhoo, Djokovics loss will put Murray at No.3 and make him the first British man in the history of the rankings to reach the No.3 spot. Murray was the tour leader until very recently and is obviously having a great season thus far. Fingers crossed for the upcoming Grand Slams of the year. My girlfriends flat was burgled a few weeks ago and the insurance company coughed up a replacement laptop last week. It actually exceeds the specs on her stolen one (which was only a few months old) in many respects, which is pretty cool. One of the things that interested me about it was that it came pre-installed with Google Desktop. I like the idea of Google Desktop, which is essentially a search engine for your computer files coupled with a desktop widget engine. I already have Windows Search on my computer which is decent, however its recognition of file types is limited. For example Ogg Vorbis and flac files aren't recognised as music and open document format files aren't recognised as documents without installation of additional Ifilters, I've been looking but thus far I can't find an Ifilter that'll pick up ogg or flac as music files or read the vorbis comments. Looking for Windows Search Ifilters I found an interesting Windows addition in the form of Audioshell which adds additional tabs in the properties of several types of media file to allow the reading and editing of metadata for file types not natively supported by Windows. Useful for Vorbis and flac users like myself. Back to Google Desktop, although it has plugins that would allow me to correctly index all my files and the widget engine I feel slightly wary of letting Google directly into my computer. They claim they'll never access anything I don't allow them to in their privacy policy, but Google also mandate that the privacy policy is subject to change without notification - which is a little worrying. It's less of an issue with the other services of theirs I use because I choose not to allow anything too sensitive to get around on those, however my personal computer does contain private information I don't want to share with unknowns. I might try it out anyway and keep my nose to the ground for privacy issues. Also I managed to pick up an In Flames CD I didn't have for £3 in Fopp today - nice :D Incidentally I've been watching the Max Payne film while I type this and it's painfully shite.