seanmonstar

Exciting news for Android. It’s always been a wonder why the stock Browser wasn’t Chrome, and now it is. And it really rocks. The tab interface is fun to use.

However, since it uses an updated version of the webkit rendering engine, it should need to load that library upon initialization. The standard engine is always in memory, something that’s held back Firefox for Android. Yet, Chrome doesn’t seem to suffer from this.

Perhaps the mobile Firefox engineers already know, but I can think of 3 possibilities:

• There’s a way to keep the new libraries in memory.
• There’s a way to replace the default engine
• Or they just handle the loading in a better way.

Whichever it is, hopefully mobile Firefox can find a way to improve their loading to be close to equivalent to Chrome’s loading.

I was slowly working on an add-on to block social buttons on websites, but I recently just found Ghostery. They have an extension for Chrome and Firefox, and it rocks.

When people ask me why they should use Chrome or Firefox, I tell them that feature-wise they’re pretty competitive. This sums up the difference greatly:

This is a Google product and it has to benefit Google. It isn’t merely about making the web better, it is also about promoting Google products and giving them an advantage over competing services. […] Even if it requires violating your privacy.

Firefox wants the web to be better, and Chrome wants Google to be better.

Web Intents are a seriously cool and useful idea. Android already has Intents, and I love them. It let’s applications that know nothing about each other be able to interact. The Google Chrome team and Mozilla are both hard at work making this a reality.

I’ve got two Cr-48’s, and I love them¹. However, I would never spend $500 on one. It’s still just a browser. I can spend $500 on a Windows laptop, and get Chrome, plus a bunch of other software.

Google is trying to force everyone off of closed codecs like H.264 and use open codecs, like WebM. Other companies have tried to force away bad technologies, and while they were hated at first, eventually everyone realized it was a good move.

What’s surprising (perhaps it shouldn’t be), is that one of the companies to have done this previously is Apple, and yet, much of the Apple crowd have grabbed their pitchforks. It seems to me, that just like Apple, the company, those Apple fans care less about open standards, and more about Apple’s standards.¹

Update

Regarding why Google isn’t doing the same for Flash: Chrome bundles Flash for security reasons. Most people would download Flash anyways, but they likely wouldn’t bother to keep it up to date. That means their web experience would be riskier.

HTML5 video is still very new, so it’s still pretty easy to mold the direction it is going. Besides mobile devices, most web users don’t see an HTML5 video player. At this point, it makes more sense to ask, “Apple, why do I need an extra encoded version just for you?”

Chrome’s JavaScript engine, V8, just got even faster:

Overall, Crankshaft boosts V8’s performance by 50% on the V8 benchmark suite. This is the biggest performance improvement since we launched Chrome in 2008.

What steps will reproduce the problem?

1. Shift+Esc
2. Right click on any process
3. Select “Goats teleported”

What is the expected result?

I expected Google Chrome to teleport maybe three, maximum five goats!

What happens instead?

About 3*10^6 goats get teleported! I won’t be able to pay for teleportation of such huge amount of goats!

Super awesome book explaining how the Internet and web browsers work in layman’s terms. And, the technology powering this site is impressive, with page turning animations, and pushState.