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Thoughts on Google Chrome
So Google Chrome - Google's attempt at an open source browser, came out yesterday and I took it out for a spin. At its heart is the Webkit engine (also open source) and Google Gears, powered by SQLite (can MySQL rival SQLite in applications like this?). Here are my thoughts.
- Fast - Chrome loads extremely fast, blazing even. Granted, my Firefox would probably load fast if I didn't have any addons as well. Sites like Amazon or Digg load very fast. New tabs open instantly.
- Slow - http://www.blinkx.com/videos/channel:itn, seems like the combination of flash and html (or JS) on one page makes scrolling and redrawing quite slow.
- Very fluid design - I love how the tabs flow around when you drag them or make them pop in or out, I love how fluid animation and resizing is.
- Internal task manager - an absolutely brilliant idea. Since each tab and plugin get their own process, they don't affect each other. Any freezes are isolated to the process itself, so the days of hung browsers because of some buggy javascript should be gone gone (I'll actually have to see how well it works first).
- Great Google search integration and overall Firefox3-like url bar behavior.
- The word search functionality is amazing - best out of all browsers. It's incredibly fast, even on large pages, highlights all the matches, with the current one in orange, and more importantly, gives count (finally!). The search popup complements the fluidity perfectly.
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History - looks great and has a timeline style. It's like reading a journal.
- View Source - again, best in class. Highlighting and line numbers by default. Url access style: view-source:http://digg.com. Search spread highlighting on the right. It's close to perfect, without using any plugins.
- My bookmarks, where art though? Where's the bookmarks menu? I know the homepage has them, and there's a pretty hidden way to make the bookmarks bar appear all the time (right click on it while on the home page and check 'Always show bookmarks bar' but that's not what I want. I like placing many-many bookmarks named with 1 or 2 letters onto the bookmarks bar (I found a way to emulate the behavior in the screenshot below). How can I create duplicates of the same bookmark in different places? It seems you can only bookmark in one. The interface to get around managing the bookmarks isn't well thought out, you can get to certain places only the certain way. How do you export/import bookmarks after the initial installation (I chose to skip mine)? Edit: Apparently, you can't yet.
- The homepage button is missing (though it can be enabled by Options->Show Home button on the toolbar). Why is it not on by default?
- I also enabled the following option right away (the main reason I use TabMix Plus for Firefox):
- Scrolling is very choppy and goes in huge jumps on my laptop (not the case in Firefox).
- Status bar - why do you disappear automatically when I get close to you? You can be so useful and display so much useful info? Stop disappearing!
- What with the Vista-style buttons? I have Win2k menus, which I find a lot simpler and easier on the eye. Why not inherit the window style?
- No Linux support. Hopefully coming soon.
- No addons supported or announced yet.
In conclusion, I understand the browser is very new and will probably go through many facelifts, UI changes, bug fixes, and enhancements but it has a lot to cover and if it's going to try to rival the giants, it better fix some things fast. I personally won't start using it until some addons start showing up, like the AI Roboform (AI Roboform has actually responded to this guy about such addon possibility) and Adblock Plus ones. However, for occasional browsing, it's great. Give it a spin.
Similar Posts:For Those Who Say I Never Take Photos...
I often get accused, especially by my European friends, of not being a true geek for two reasons: I don't carry an expensive camera with me at all times — nice Fisheye lens, Kaj! — and because I don't indulge in video games. Well, for all you Jay-ain't-a-true-geekers out there, I offer two photos today to prove my geekhood.
As some of you know, I live in Columbus, Ohio, with 2 dogs, 2 cats, and my lovely wife Julie. Last night, we got hammered with the most snow we've seen in March in over 40 years. By my estimation, there is about 18 inches of snow on the ground. The photo to the right was taken this morning, while the snow was still coming down, from my back door. You can see my garage and the ground covered in snow, but the most telling part of the photo is the amount of snow on the table on our back deck. I think there's at least 18 inches of snow on it. At the very bottom of the photo, you see the height of the snow on the ground; that strip on the very bottom is my back door threshold...
So, what does this mean for me? A snow day? Heck no! I'm a MySQL employee and I work from home. I don't take snow days, of course, so while my wife has closed her yoga studio, I'm snug and warm and working from home on a Saturday on my slides for next week's presentation at PHP-Quebec on "Performance-minded MySQL for PHP Developers".
If you're in the Montreal area and want to go, I have two free passes to give away since Sun/MySQL is a sponsor for the event; we're sponsoring a cocktail party and job fair on Wednesday evening. So, if you're interested email me at my name at mysql dot com.
Which kind of leads me to my next photo... This one is of my dining room table covered with paper. What are all these pieces of paper? Well, each and every paper on the table is a separate form or agreement I needed to sign and fill out as part of becoming a Sun employee. Hmmm. I don't think I remember having to sign so much paperwork when I joined MySQL over two years ago. Oh, how I yearn for the simple days of a small company! 
Hope that the photo to the left doesn't scare anyone away from working at Sun! You know, we're hiring...
I finally get REST. Wow.
Moving to the Good Side of the Force
OK, so I returned from vacation late last night, after putting almost 1700 miles on my car this past four days. A friend of mine had his Master's thesis show (in furniture design) down in Savannah, Georgia. It was a fantastic time, and Ezra's work is truly astonishing, but I was quite exhausted after the long drives to and from Columbus, Ohio.
You may remember that I have been helping my twin brother learn PHP and MySQL programming. I'm pleased to say that he is progressing quite well! Every time we Skype chat, he seems to have picked up more and more programming vocabulary and is understanding some of the trickier concepts fairly well. My teaching is ongoing. I have advised him to try and learn five new PHP functions every time he sits down to code, and to practice the functions by using them in his work. For instance, in the last "session", we used the functions arsort(), preg_split(), array_key_exists(), array_map(), and explode() in learning about arrays. This is something that I recommend as a general principle when learning new languages of any kind. Bit off manageable chunks and use the newfound knowledge in your code/conversation. It helps you to remember the functions (or language elements) much faster and retain the knowledge longer.
Moving a New Jedi to the Good Side
So, tonight I have another challenge. A friend has officially had enough of Windows. The repeated crashes, spy and malware infestations, and the annoying habit of Windows applications doing "things that he can't see or control" have pushed him to his limit. Therefore, tonight, I will be backing up his data and moving him to Ubuntu. I'll be sure to post tomorrow the results of the move, along with solutions to any problems I might encounter. I've installed Ubuntu at least a half dozen times myself, and feel fairly confident that the process will go smoothly. But, you never know!
MySQL Camp Trip Booked
In other news, I booked my flights to and from San Jose for MySQL Camp, the unconference in November. I was reading Mark Shuttleworth's blog post this morning about the Ubuntu Developer Summit going on in Mountain View and was delighted to see that the conference was the few days prior to MySQL Camp, which may mean some Ubuntu developers might hang around Google HQ for the MySQL unconference. That would be mighty cool.
Interesting GPL Development Shaping Up
Read a NewsForge article today about how the two lead developers of the GPU Gnutella client have amended the GPL to include a provision that bans the software's use by military organizations. Specifically, provision states:
the program and its derivative work will neither be modified or executed to harm any human being nor through inaction permit any human being to be harmed.
Interestingly, Richard Stallman, founder of the Free Software movement, doesn't think distributors have the right to restrict the software user's activities by restricting the software's use in this way, though he said "Nonetheless, I don't think the requirement is entirely vacuous, so we cannot disregard it as legally void." It will be fascinating to see how this plays out, as it has further-ranging consequences than just this limited example. For instance, what about a clause that stated the program or its derivative work cannot be executed to spy on the privacy of citizens? ... Hmmm.
