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Google's Chrome OS Event

Florence Ion — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 12:16:03 -0600

You may have heard around the Internet rumor mill that Google is currently hosting a Chrome OS event where journalists and bloggers alike were invited to preview the brand new operating system from everyone's favorite search provider. Well, we're not there, but Gizmodo is! We'll provide you with some key highlights from the event as time progresses. Stay tuned! And check back at the end of the day for all the relevant Apple/Google Chrome OS information.

- In Chrome OS, every application is a web application

- Google is a YEAR away from announcement, but no beta as of yet.

- Chrome for Mac will be coming "this year", "very close to launch.."

- Google Chrome OS hopefully be as close to a regular OS in functionality as possible while still being web based.

- All this is open source so you can download AND build it today.

- All Chrome OS devices will be solid state drives. No moving parts.

- Chrome OS devices will be in the price range that people are used to, which means it depends on the hardware partners.

- Chrome OS will run Android apps (possible to have an application store, Google toying with idea)

- To get Chrome OS up and running, you'll need a netbookand a screwdriverfor recommended components

- Google working on performance intensive deksktop apps to be writtein in Chrome OS andno plans yet to work with Microsoft

- Hardware details announced in middle of year; for now it may just be netbooks

- Google working on reducing disk space

- Only supporting web apps

- Same advertisement experience as you now have with Google

- You can use the source code with virtual machine

Don't know what Chrome OS is? Watch the video:

Microsoft Announces Silverlight 4 Beta, Adds Chrome Support

Cory Bohon — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 14:46:32 -0600

Today, Microsoft announced version 4 of their Flash-like software for web browsers.

According to TechCrunch, the software, which is currently in beta, now has support for Google's Chrome browser. The new version also includes support for fluid animations, webcam, microphone, and printing support. TC is also reporting that the software has a 200 percent faster start time than its predecessor.

Silverlight 4 also comes with the ability to take web applications and sites like Facebook and turn them into a seperate application on your desktop, similar to the functionalities of Adobe-AIR.

Silverlight 4 makes it seem that Microsoft is closing in on Adobe and their Flash software that could turn out to be clunky in comparison. You can read the full details and see more screenshots on the TechCrunch website.

Google holding special Chrome OS Event Thursday

Andrew Villa — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 12:31:35 -0600

According to TechCrunch, Google is planning on holding a special Chrome OS even tomorrow at its headquarters in Mountain View, Calif. Google plans on giving technical background information and showing off its new open source operating system.

The company will also present a "complete overview" of the new OS, which is due for widespread release next year. Sundar Pichai, Google's VP of Product Management, and Matthew Papakipos, Google Engineering Director for Chrome OS will also be speaking at the event and headlining a Q&A session afterwards.

Previously announced in July, Google gave very few details on the Chrome OS, but hinted that it will be open source and targeted towards netbook users.

Long-awaited Chrome Beta May Be Near

Brian Proffit — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 16:49:01 -0600

CNET reports that the long-awaited Chrome browser from Google will be released into beta in early December. The information came from a post in Google’s online discussion group for developers of extensions to Chrome. In it, Nick Baum encourages extension developers to be ready “for our Beta launch in early December.”

The post was in reference to new Browser Actions technology in Chrome that Google is encouraging all extension developers to use. Frustratingly, though, Baum continued to urge developers to look at adopting the Linux and Windows versions, saying, "We’ll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can.”

Google hasn’t yet confirmed the beta release date on their Chrome site or in their official blog.

Chrome for Mac in My Stocking?

J Keirn-Swanson — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 22:23:30 -0500

If you have a tolerance for a buggy build of a browser that crashes or freezes regularly, you can have Google Chrome on your Mac. If you want a stable, proper release, unfortunately you'll need a PC (or run Parallels, ugh). For everyday users, there's been little Mac love. That's soon to change.

According to Google CEO Eric Schmidt, himself late of the Apple Board of Directors, there's a good chance we'll be seeing a Mac release shortly before Christmas, ahead of the scheduled release date of some time in 2010. At a recent conference in New York, Schmidt said, "A lot of very sophisticated people are using Macs now and we need to get a version of Chrome out for that, which we'll have in a couple of months."

Source: Engadget

Google's official Chrome page and Chrome blog mention nothing about an updated schedule of development, making the announcement something less than official. And while vague CEO promises aren't anything to base your life around, Schmidt's recent history as having a foot in both camps give his words a little more heft than just any CEO's.

While Chrome's percent of market share isn't exactly worth bragging about and its minimalist design and lack of extensions don't currently make the browser much of a challenger to any of the big three, Chrome does boast impressive speeds in launching and page loading. Plus, the browser's isolation of each tab into separate processes is a worthy security feature, so much so that Chrome was the last browser standing at this year's CanSecWest conference during the Pwn2Own event.

OS X Browser Speed Wars: May the Fastest App Win

Michelle Delio — Thu, 17 Sep 2009 18:59:34 -0500

No matter how happy you are with your current Web browser, chances are you’ve wondered if another browser would make your Web wanderings faster, easier, or at least a little more festive. We speculate about that too (probably far too often), so we decided to run some tests, compare features and figure out which browser currently rules the Web.

The Lineup

Browsers are powered by engines which transform a raw mess of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript into a more or less tidy website. Mac browsers typically use the Mozilla Gecko or Webkit engines. Opera uses its own proprietary engine, Presto.

Current releases of Mozilla Gecko-based browsers for the Mac include:

Firefox 3.5.1: Once the geeky alternative, now almost mainstream, known for its customizability
Flock 2.5: A browser for the socially-minded Mac user
Camino 1.6.8: Firefox, basically, but tweaked for Macs

Current Webkit-based browsers include:

Safari 4.0.2: Apple’s very own browser.
Stainless 0.6.5: Cool features for the technically inclined (under development).
Cruz 0.2: For the social networker who likes to multi-task (under development).

If a browser has not yet reached version 1.0, we didn’t include it in our overall benchmark scoring as it could have skewed the results. Early-stage stripped-down betas can appear superfast, and could lack some functions that can skew benchmark-based comparisons.

Testing Methodology

To gauge basic performance levels we used Mozilla's Dromaeo JavaScript testing suite which aggregates a number of tools including Dromaeo, Apple's SunSpider suite and Google's V8. We measured CPU/Memory usage with iStat pro. Streaming video playback was determined by comparing how smoothly the same set of three YouTube videos played in each browser.

We installed freshly-downloaded copies of each browser and tested on a Mac Pro (2.66GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon with 8GB of SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7) and a MacBook Pro (2.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with 8GB SDRAM running OS X 10.5.7). Each browser ran in its default configuration with no third-party plug-ins and a minimum set of bookmarks. That’s the closest we could get to creating a level playing field but there’s a flaw here: over long-term usage, a browser’s performance may slow as information is added to its database, extensions can also bog things down.

Bottom line: Benchmarks are not the Voice of God. There are too many variables that come into play, such as network latency when testing browsers. And while a sluggish but feature-rich application is not a good application, features and functionality matter far more to most of us than whether a browser can load 15 tabs a few fractions of a second faster than another browser.

Test results

General Performance:

Overall, Safari was the fastest of all the browsers we tested, with Camino a hair behind Safari.

Firefox exhibited the slowest startup times of any tested browser, but beats Safari by an average of two seconds in speedy page rendering, primarily due to its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Opera was a bit faster than Firefox on start-up times but really shone in the tab-tests -- opening up eight, and then 15 tabs faster (but we’re talking percents of seconds here) than the other browsers. Safari was the next fastest on the tab test, with Firefox and Camino neck in neck near the back of the pack.

Flock didn’t score well at all, coming in dead last in all tests but its capabilities not its performance are what makes this browser attractive to some.

Resource Usage We tested each browser by opening 15 tabs -- nine of them flash-heavy -- and checked CPU and memory usage in iStat pro after 10, 20, and 30 minutes.

Firefox, Safari and Opera did the best on this test; Firefox showed 9% CPU utilization at 30 minutes, Safari and Opera had consumed 11%. Camino was in second-to-last place, with a 13% CPU utilization score. Flock ate up the most resources, spiking to 15% on occasion.

None of the browsers gobbled enough resources to create a performance lags in other applications or the browser.

NEXT: Video Playback, Features Compared and Your Next Browser.

Video Playback:

All of the browsers rendered good playback of three YouTube videos, with the glaring exception of Firefox 3.5.1 which stuttered disturbingly. Having run into this issue before, we were not surprised; some folks suspect the problem is due to Firefox’s crash recovery system which takes frequent snapshots of the browser’s state. (In case you’re experiencing this problem, a previous experiment in about:config changing the browser.sessionstore.interval from 10000 to 120000 alleviated the issue somewhat, but not entirely.)

The Results

Looking at all these scores as a whole, Safari is leading the pack but there’s just not enough of a significant difference to crown one browser as the ultimate for everyday use. So let’s have a look at what features each contender offers:

Firefox: Firefox has morphed from the scrappy little renegade browser to a solid -- dare we say unexciting? -- workhorse. Not that this is a bad thing, Firefox 3.5.3 manages to combine stable, fast performance with the widest range of user-customizable features of any browser. None of Firefox’s newer features are astounding (TraceMonkey is its biggest tech advantage) it’s the ability to tweak every component of the browser that is its main technical appeal. If you don’t love tinkering with settings and plug-ins and scripts, it’s difficult to make a case for Firefox over Safari on a Mac.

Camino: So you like Firefox, but wish it was more Mac-like? Download Camino and you’ll have a 100% open source browser, built on the Gecko engine and optimized for use on Macs. You can access native Mac OS X features such as the services menu and system Keychain. Camino 1.6.9 offers Firefox’s uber-customability, built-in Flashblock and “Annoyance Control” pop-up stopper, Session Restore and other Firefox-like features for a solid but bloat-free browser that often delivers better performance on Macs than the Fox. (Camino 2.0 Beta 3 is already reasonably stable and includes some great features: enhanced AppleScript capabilities, Growl notifications for completed downloads, drag and drop tabs, and the ability to disable "Block Flash animation" on a per-site basis). The only thing that’s missing: Camino doesn’t have a built-in RSS feed reader, it hands off feeds to the reader of your choice.

Safari: If you’re running Leopard on your Mac, you’ll likely get the best overall performance from Safari or Camino. Among Safari’s recently introduced features, you’ll either love Cover Flow, a 3D view of your most frequently accessed web pages or dismiss it as eye candy. In general, we find the starred indications of new content useful, but would prefer to choose the sites displayed in Cover Flow rather than have them automatically populated. Safari’s full history search (look on the lower right-hand corner of the Top Sites window) makes it easy to find sites you’ve visited before, even if you only remember a word or two that appeared on the page. Private browsing keeps your strolls through the Web’s less brightly lit neighborhoods off the grid. Safari supports plug-ins, but is less customizable than Firefox.

Opera: Poor little Opera really doesn’t get the attention it deserves, possibly because some people still think you have to pay to get a copy and it doesn’t appeal to geeky early adopters as it isn’t open source. It’s a shame because Opera 10 boasts super-snappy performance and is packed with great features including Speed Dial, which serves the same purpose as Safari’s Top Sites but is far more configurable, built-in page compression to speed page downloads over slow or cruddy connections, a nice-looking tab bar that suits wide screen monitors and displays pretty thumbnails of each tab’s contents and a great email client, etc. Try Opera 10 with Opera Unite, which adds a streamlined web server to Opera for media sharing. We just wish that it had a privacy mode.

Flock: Flock is for the extroverts among us, as well as introverts who are pretending to be the sort of people that need people. It’s a tad sluggish compared to Safari, Opera and Firefox/Camino, but it excels at social networking. To share content you drag and drop photos, videos, URLs, chunks of text or whatever else onto a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar. You can update your own Facebook newsfeed in a similar fashion, and drag content right into Facebook chats. Twitter Search is baked in, and FlockCast lets you post to multiple locations simultaneously, type a URL in a Twitter message and Flock automatically shortens it, and etc. It really is a well-thought out browser for its target audience. But unless you make a living doing social media, you might want to boot up another browser for the days when you actually have to get work done.

Your Next Browser

Google Chrome: Chrome for OS X comes with a stern warning that it’s not at all suitable for daily use from stability and functionality standpoints. And while we’re used to Google’s offerings being Beta forever, this one really is in its early days. It’s impossible to predict how the final version will measure up to existing browsers, but it looks very promising -- the speediest browser we’ve seen so far, in fact. Each tab runs as an independent process, so if one page crashes the browser won’t throw a hissy fit. If you can set aside your bitterness over Google making us wait so long for Chrome, this browser may be your favorite once it hits version 1.0 -- maybe in a few months. Meanwhile the brave can preview it here.

Cruz: Cruz was created for OS X 10.5 Leopard and later, by Todd Ditchendorf, who also created Fluid. Todd bills it as a social networking browser but it’s also great for multi-taskers, you can create panels along each side of the central browser window and fully load websites in each panel, and you can configure links in the panels to open in the main window (or within a new tab in the main window). Fluid underpinnings provides a lot of potential options here, and the tech savvy can use scripting and plugins to make Cruz their own. It also supports session saving as well as site screenshot thumbnails, which may become more useful as more sites implement it. Cruz is a very early beta but it’s already reasonably stable.

Stainless: Stainless started life as a proof-of-concept, quickly gained fans and is slowly becoming a real browser. Now at version 0.6.5, Stainless offers features sure to delight people who thrill to the idea of things like parallel sessions -- thanks to Stainless’ use of multiprocessing, you can log into a site using different credentials in separate tabs at the same time -- a boon for those of us who have multiple accounts that we can’t log into in one tab without being logged out in the other. Like Chrome, each tab runs as an independent process. Stainless also boasts a porn private browsing mode, a 'Bookmark Shelf' that lets you park favicon links on the sides of the browser window, and session aware bookmarking. Its developers freely admit this is not a browser for everyday use yet (and in testing Stainless did create a lockup that required a hard boot to clear) but it looks promising and is a little speed demon on multi-core machines.

Google Chrome: Still Smokin

J Keirn-Swanson — Sun, 16 Aug 2009 10:55:33 -0500

In recent benchmarking tests performed by CNET, the latest version of Google's Chromium (its developer title) buried the competition. In a SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, Chromium busted through with a 657ms final time, compared to 886ms for Safari, 1,508ms for Firefox, and Opera coming in at an embarrassingly slow 5,958ms.

In layman's terms, for loading and rendering pages that rely on JavaScript (which is a lot), Chromium smoked Safari and Firefox. Opera fared roughly as well as a tricycle would at the Indy 500.

And when it comes to Acid3's standards-compliancy tests, Chromium scored a perfect 100/100.

But wait, there's more.

Extensions and themes, long complained about as one of Chrome's greatest shortcomings, are slowly making their way into the builds. The most recent themes allowable were simple, worked across all platforms, and point towards the future universality of other goodies. The Google Chromium blog discusses some relevant issues as well as the eventual opening of a gallery of extensions much like Firefox has long had that will allow for user ratings and updates.

While the Chrome folks still haven't nailed Flash video rendering, they appear to be getting there. That this should be such an issue for the owners of YouTube is almost comically bizarre, but issues with the Flash plug-in aren't unique to Google's browser. HTML codec universality can't come fast enough (and we may never get there).

While the competition for the fastest browser will never be definitively won, the rivalry and the developer builds that push the envelope can only be good news for consumers. If Safari is your browser of choice, the Google team is only spurring the Mac developers to make your browser even faster. Likewise Firefox. Opera fans, I don't know what to tell you, but I'm sorry.

Chrome Soma

Ray Aguilera — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 03:32:00 -0600

The heavy 1970s seat belt buckle can also be used to knock out muggers.

You’ve gotta carry your laptop in something. But—let’s face it—there are a lot of ugly laptop bags out there. If you’re looking for something with a little more style, options can be limited. Then there’s the question of function. Plenty of briefcase-style bags offer loads of storage capacity for cables, peripherals, and other gear you need to get work done, but anyone who’s tried to lug around 15 pounds of gear in a poorly designed bag with a skimpy shoulder strap quickly learns how much thoughtful design counts when it comes to bags. For computer-toting road warriors, Chrome’s single-strap Soma bag succeeds where many other  bags fall short. While the two-tone color scheme is not the grooviest we’ve ever  seen, Chrome’s street style is evident, and  the bag is easy and comfortable to carry, even when loaded up with our MacBook and  a ton of extras.

The first thing we noticed about Soma was Chrome’s signature seat belt–buckle closure. Inserting the tab into the buckle makes a satisfying metallic click, a sound familiar to anyone who’s ever ridden in the backseat of a large American station wagon. The buckle closure makes for quick on-and-off, but the buckle can be somewhat cumbersome because of its heft. If you’re used to just tossing your bag down at home, be warned that doing so with the Soma can result in divots in wood floors and angry looks from significant others.

Inside, the Soma features a padded compartment for your laptop, along with an open compartment with several pockets. Your laptop fits in vertically, and the bag will fit up to a 15-inch MacBook Pro. There are pockets of varying sizes, although most are fairly shallow. A single pocket on the wall of the bag offers a zipper closure. Overall, the bag offers plenty of storage for everyday use, and we were even able to pack for an overnight trip—laptop included—with the Soma.

The Soma closes via a large flap over the top, fastened with plastic buckles. The strap is worn across your chest, messenger-style. It is easy to adjust while you’re wearing the bag, which is useful for making quick getaways—or in our case, sprinting after a bus. The Soma also features a small second chest strap to stabilize the bag when riding a bike, but we didn’t use it, and unfortunately it is permanently attached to the bag. The carry handle, on the other hand, proved quite useful.