2008 a Chrome Odyssey

Did Stanley Kubrick join Google marketing?

Ever since Chrome released it's been like watching the online monkeys beat the monolith with bones like the intro of 2001 a Space Odyssey.

Sometimes people just make me want to smack them upside the head the way Gibbs dishes it out to DiNozzo on NCIS.

First, Google releases a beta product and everyone starts reviewing it like it's a finely polished shipping product. For those of you not in the software business there are various levels of beta which typically evolve into final beta, meaning that all features are frozen for that release, Then comes a beta gold candidate which appears to be as bug-free as possible and is about to become a shipping product. The initial release of Chrome is an obvious real beta that they want feedback on so get over it, it's an early beta, it's no where close to a final beta IMO but it's a damn good first release.

Second, a whole bunch of people are trying to steal Google's thunder comparing it to MSIE 8 primarily, which is also still in beta. If Google didn't already have those features coded then they wouldn't be in their initial beta either. It's not like someone at Google woke up on a Monday, read the MSIE 8 feature list, and wrote a whole bunch of new features for Chrome that just showed up in the release on Tuesday, get real. Most of those features were obviously in the works for quite some time but MSIE 8 was publicly known opposed to the closely held secrets of Chrome.

Thirdly, it's mostly just desperate cries for attention and link bait for people that have nothing better to do than bash Google on a good day and how there's more fuel for the fire.

Just remember, the first version of Firefox wasn't much to write home about which was initially distressing considering it's Netscape heritage, but it got better in a hurry until they bloated up Firefox 3, what a slug.

Additionally, Chrome is built on the same rendering engine that runs Safari so it has a lot of history already and should be pretty solid except for it's handling of some plug-ins which will be fixed.

Overall, I'm hopeful that Chrome gets the bugs patched quickly because I love the speed and snappy page displays like you get with Opera without all the javascript quirks.

I just hope it ships with add-on capability or more java script control like Firefox's NoScript and I'll be a happy boy.

Remember people, it's JUST BETA, give them a chance to polish it up.

Chrome Shines While Fat Lady Sings for Opera, Firefox and MSIE

I'm very hard to impress, an old school hard core programmer that detests software bloat from lazy assed programmers using poorly implemented cross-platform development environments.

I like fast and lean code, shit that makes an old laptop look all shiny and new and maybe that's why Google named their new browser chrome cause this fucker shines.

It was only yesterday that I threw my hands up in the air and ran screaming from Firefox 3's latest fat, bloated leaky slower than shit browser and declared Opera was one hell of a fast alternative.

Unfortunately, for all of Opera's speed there was a few quirks that meant it wasn't a 100% solution after all starting with the fact that some javascript in Horde Webmail (used in Plesk) had a few problems so it was only 95% usable, still workable and not a show stopper. 

The show stopper was Opera's copy & paste was unable to properly render text to an HMTL editor as the full HTML content that had been copied from a web page was stripped down to plain text. Plain text is expectected when you paste into something like Notepad, but not when you paste into an application capable of negotiating the data type and wishes to receive the full HTML content from the browser.

For us old school Windows programmers this is CLIPBOARD 101 kind of shit and Opera failed the class miserably.

Guess what?

Google chrome in BETA didn't have the javascript glitches in Horde Webmail and it knows how to properly paste HTML text, something Opera has had years to perfect.

Both Opera and Chrome are fast but the devil is in the little details and so far Chrome is in league with the devil.

OK, Chrome doesn't ship with Java, appears to crash with Quicktime (who gives a shit besides Apple and all their cultists) and has a few other plug-in problems, but for a BETA it's fucking phenomenal, it's DA BOMB!

Although I have to ask Google one simple question:

Where's the goddamn TITLE bar and the STATUS bar?

Don't make me drive down to Mtn. View and teach you Windows 101 coding, come on, these should've been there from the get go.

Other than that little peeve, and the lacking of security control given by Firefox add-ons like NoScript, I'm totally stoked. I'll cut Google some slack and assume they'll remedy the missing title and status bar, include Java, fix the quicktime crash, etc. and provide more control over javascript.

Google, a damn fine first showing, hats off, kudos, just fix the rest of this and I'm a solid Chromer for life.

BTW, I'm posting this using Google Chrome so this fucker does work.

YEEE HAW!

Opera 9.5 Smokes Firefox 3

The latest Firefox 3 upgrade was just pitiful and the memory footprint was fatter, it seemed to be leaking memory, page loads just crawled at a snails pace, it was an overall hog.

The options were limited:

- Go back to MSIE 7, which isn't much better, or

- Give Opera one last try as I've always found something that stopped me from using Opera in the past.

Well, the first thing I noticed is Opera 9.5 is faster than shit and loads some pages 3x-5x faster than Firefox, especially my own blog which makes Firefox choke. The second thing I noticed was the footprint of Opera 9.5 is about half that of Firefox when it loads and operates.

Seriously, Opera loaded pages so much faster than Firefox it felt like I was using a new computer!

So now I'm going to give Opera a try and see if there's any gotcha's that will stop me from using it but so far it's looking really good and I may just be the next Opera convert!

BTW, this blog post is my first in Opera!

FireFox 3 Bloated Leaky Pile of Shit

Firefox 3 with all it's much anticipated upgrades turned out to be a big fat flop that's annoying me to the point I'm thinking of switching back to Internet Explorer or giving Opera a try.

Some of the new features seem interesting but overall it's slower, bloated, and appears to be leaking faster than the Titanic after a close encounter with an ice cube.

The damn thing starts at about 40MB and just grows and grows.

Here I'm sitting with a lousy 2 tabs open after using it for a while and it's holding 100MB of memory and not releasing it.

Maybe it's one of the 2 plug-ins I'm using causing the leaks, who knows, but this hog is almost intolerable as it just grows and grows.

Ah well, you gave it a good run Mozilla, time to look elsewhere.