stefcep2 wrote:
tonyyeb wrote:
Seems to run quicker than FF3 to me. Renders nice and quick, new tabs load quickly. All round seems great and working dandy! Might just replace FF for me.
And then you'll be supporting another corporate monolith (Google) at the expense of the Firefox developers. Most of the innovation in web browsers that has happened in recent times has been due to firefox, not MS and IE. If the google browser gets a hold- and everyone know "Google" these days, so that won't be too hard to do as opposed to far fewr knowing about firefox- it will follow the same path as MS with IE ie they'll create their own HTML "standards", eventually REQUIRING you to use the internet the way THEY want you to, and if that means putting up with pop advertising you can' stop or banner ads you can't stop, or incorrectly rendering pages of competitor search engines or companies they don't like, well what are you gonna do about it?
We all should support open source as much as possible.
Chrome uses WebKit, is open source, and should probably push a fair bit upstream to WebKit.
Interestingly, some other "also-ran" projects (like GNOME Epiphany, which was pretty good circa 2003*) are also switching to WebKit, and of course even the few released modern Amiga browsers have been based on it.
That's fairly good news for the Web, since it prevents the Mozilla Foundation from having an "open" monopoly on the introduction of new features/"standards."
Gears, and "browser as runtime" special treatment of Google properties, look iffy, but you do need that sort of thing if you want the browser to be a runtime. I think some of us who were drawn to the "DE" concept (or Java, or REBOL, or..) hoped that the "browser" would stay a browser and the "executable Internet" would become something else (so we'd have more consistent control over using it).
That didn't happen, and people (both Google and others) want to deploy "rich" "web services" (for, y'know, things like mapping and all that), so making AJAX less of a hack and more of a stable runtime is of great importance to them. It's a strange world, but we do have to live in it, and the profiling/"task manager" feature at least acknowledges it.
Finally: Google is spooky, I agree, but it's spooky for having become as successful as Ma Bell in an unregulated environment. The EULA is clearly a major and awful oversight (unless, in fact, they stick by it rather than rewrite it); however, the fact is, they get
so much value out of seeing your searches that they don't actually
need to snoop more, and so don't need to turn people off with new intrusions on privacy. They (when being sane to their business interests) mostly want everyone to be comfortable so they'll conduct more searches and see more ads. Part of that is by doing the "obvious" of making computers and smartphones less costly or crappy, so people will actually use them more.
(What's spooky again is that the cost of "doing the obvious" is almost nothing against the investment they've received based on their potential ad revenue. Stuff people have waited a decade for, projects that've killed smaller companies, keep getting realized as employee side-projects at the Googleplex. Mandatory side-projects, of course.)
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* Footnote, almost forgotten: If you could bear to install the whole GNOME stack, Epiphany was pretty cool during the pre- and immediately-post Phoenix/Firefox churnover. It did "obvious" metaphor-complete things like draggable tabs long before anything else, AFAIK. But since Ubuntu and everyone else went with official Firefox, few people noticed how decent it was, and now, if you look, tab-dragging has been broken for at least a year due to outstanding Mozilla.org bugs. Which themselves demonstrate why, despite the early promise, embedded Mozilla implementations remain few and far between; WebKit has certainly proved itself much more practically portable in practice. :crazy:
