411 tech news: Google Chrome
02
September
9/2/2008:
For the propeller-heads out there, you might be interested that Google introduced the public beta of their internet browser: Google Chrome.
From the looks of it, it’s an intelligently designed open source platform designed more towards “web applications.” It seems to also be more crash-proof, as now one “bad tab” cannot crash the entire browser session.
I downloaded it a few minutes ago, and it worked straight out of the box, with no plugins required, and imported all my firefox bookmarks, passwords and so on. Very fast page loads as well.
You can download it here http://gears.google.com/chrome (I had trouble there) or here http://google.com/chrome.
Give it a shot and let us know what you think!
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September 2nd 2008 - 17:15:15 |
Intelligently designed you say? Are you sure it is not simply the next critical adaptive mutation in a long evolution of browsers? Or was it created on the sixth day?
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September 2nd 2008 - 17:20:28 |
Haha.. I meant from a technical back-end. I like the way it manages memory when you close a tab.
After a day of browsing on firefox, I could have 800MB of memory used.. it’s a hog, and you have to re-start the browser quite often…
I’ve been watching the memory footprint as I use Chrome, and it stays level, even gets lower over time…
Give it a shot, and you’ll see.
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September 2nd 2008 - 17:26:25 |
Out of the 50 tabs I usually browse, I encountered one that “crashed” the tab so far. You get a cool error message, and the rest of your session remains intact.
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September 2nd 2008 - 17:37:04 |
Impressed so far. Much faster so far. But that can change over time.
The inspect element right click is pretty cool.
A super cool feature is the task manager feature which you can get by press shift + esc. It shows you each process and the memory and cpu utilization so you can kill the relevant process if starts freaking out.
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September 2nd 2008 - 18:11:08 |
I sort of take back the memory usage comment. When taking a look at the running processes, I failed to realize that it appears that each tab in Chrome uses it’s own image.
In this case, with only 13 tabs open, I was using about 475 MB of RAM… I can only imagine what’ll happen once I have my usual 50 tabs open.
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September 2nd 2008 - 18:39:17 |
What is that 226 MB process? That seems really large. The browser process on my machine is only running at 50MB. I have 12 tabs open with only 200 Mb of memory being used.
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September 2nd 2008 - 18:42:43 |
it since went down to 168MB… but maybe it depends on your resolution? What size is your display? Maybe the more objects it needs to render has something to do with it?
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September 2nd 2008 - 18:44:52 |
Also, that may be the core browser files, because there was one more process than actual tabs open… (i.e., 12 tabs, 13 processes, etc.)
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September 2nd 2008 - 18:56:53 |
FYI the memory hog was a Shockwave Flash plug-in… Hmmm..
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September 2nd 2008 - 20:02:27 |
hoboken411 wrote:
50 tabs?? That’s perverse!
I’ll check it out when the Mac version is released.
The amount of CPU-heavy stuff in a page definitely impacts how many resources it uses – with plugins like Flash or Shockwave being the biggest offenders. Resolution has little to do with it.
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September 2nd 2008 - 20:52:28 |
I don’t get why it is better than firefox, any remarks?
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September 2nd 2008 - 22:07:21 |
i’ll download it on my PC later, no version for mac yet…
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September 2nd 2008 - 23:13:16 |
A couple other issues I’ve found:
- Doesn’t like to remember certain passwords
- Forgets the Adobe Flash settings
- Some incompatibility with Wordpress functions
Other than that, it rocks.. uh… I think…
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September 2nd 2008 - 23:21:18 |
From the fine print on installation, not an issue for most, but made me take notice:
“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”
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September 2nd 2008 - 23:23:15 |
Franklin wrote:
Well, for the time being, it’s not necessarily better:
- The plugins/add-ons are limited.
- Some sites don’t work
- It seems to be a bit of a memory hog (for many tab-users)
However, it’s still in VERY early beta.. and for something so “fresh,” it works amazingly well.
Frankly, I’m impressed, and would expect once it reached “1.0″ status, will be a formidable player in the browser field. At the very least, it will keep the competition on their toes…
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September 3rd 2008 - 02:52:26 |
im using the ie8 beta and its working good anything from google i wait for it to be out for awhile before i try it
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September 3rd 2008 - 09:05:53 |
Rocker182 wrote:
this seems like backwards thought actually. anything from microsoft i wait for it to be out for a while! lol.
i’m off of IE though, they lost me ages ago.
firefox is the way to go for sure, but google might be able to win me over.
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