
Burning Chrome - ggordan
http://techcrunch.com/2011/02/27/burning-chrome/
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pnathan
Well, I've personally been real happy with Chrome. I've got it on
OSX/Windows/Linux.

It's not a weird-ux like IE, it's snappy unlike Firefox, it isn't a memory-hog
like Safari, and it's well-supported (unlike the runner-ups).

It also has an epically nice PDF reader, which could be its own product and
_I_ would be very, very happy.

~~~
Confusion
Not a memory hog?! The smallest tab currently opened takes 18MB; the largest
83MB for a single tab. Each extension takes an additional ~13MB. It's using a
grand total of 725 MB private memory, for 18 tabs.

~~~
borism
well, it doesn't _feel_ like memory hog due to having many processes. when you
close all those tabs the memory is freed.

for some unknown to me reason after having few sites open in Safari and
closing _everything_ , it still takes up 500MB in memory.

in short, you have to restart Safari to free-up memory. with Chrome closing
tabs is sufficient.

~~~
Qz
The sites are still cached in-memory for fast history browsing.

~~~
Joeri
Fast history browsing is useful only when clicking the back button. Caching
the sites after tabs are closed is just a bad design, no excuses.

~~~
Qz
Fast history browsing is plenty useful when undoing a closed tab. Not sure if
Safari does this, but on Firefox if you undo a closed tab, the tab comes back
exactly as it was before, with history intact. I use that feature quite a bit.

~~~
borism
it works like this with Chrome too, but without keeping all the stuff in RAM.

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hasenj
The bit about the Cloud being like electricity is very insightful.

However, if you've lived anywhere outside the US and Europe, you know that
grid electricity is not as available as you're used to. In third world
countries, electricity goes off periodically, specially in places where there
are wars.

When I was young (and living in the middle east) I heard a joke where 3 men:
an American, an Arab, and an African were asked the question: what's your
opinion about electricity going off? The American says: does electricity go
off? The African says: what's electricity? The Arab says: what's an opinion?

I visited Iraq in 2000; practically everyone had an electricity generator at
home. I had to learn how to operate it and refill it with gas.

~~~
nochiel
"The African says: what's electricity?"

That should read "The Africa says, ' _What_ electricity?'"

We certainly know what electricity is; we've heard of it and understand its
usefulness; we even use it almost daily. However, as you aptly noted, its
availability is sufficiently irregular and inconsistent that we expect it to
be off as much as it is on.

~~~
tkahn6
Um, that hyperbole is part of the joke. Americans know that electricity goes
off and Arabs have opinions.

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retlehs
I absolutely love Chrome. I recently ditched Firefox + Firebug for Chrome
[Canary build] + Developer Tools.

It didn't take any time to get adjusted with the new Firebug like CSS editing
and I no longer have to deal with having to regularly restart Firefox once it
becomes sluggish.

Check out "Google Chrome Developer Tools: 12 Tricks to Develop Quicker" by
Paul Irish: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nOEw9iiopwI>

~~~
nkassis
Gotta say, that pause button(last tip) is genius!

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willifred
I love Chrome, but I hate silent updates.

The majority of Chrome users have no idea that their browser is silently
updating itself without their knowledge or consent, and if they did, they
wouldn't have any idea how to shut it off.

I can think of plenty of cases where most users would want to turn it
off—tethered to a slow data network, throttled bandwidth, etc—but the
precedent it sets bothers me more than any hypothetical inconvenience. It's
like I'm suddenly, unknowingly leasing a little space on my machine to Google,
and I'm not always sure what they're installing.

~~~
div
I love the silent updates.

You raise a valid point about not knowing exactly what is being installed, but
the flip side of the coin is that security fixes and new feature support get
adopted much faster.

It's nice knowing that mom's laptop will automatically receive that security
patch.

~~~
willifred
Security and convenience at the expense of control and privacy.

I like knowing what's installed on my computer. I realize that I'm going to
have to go into the future kicking and screaming.

~~~
albertzeyer
You know what's installed on your computer. Chrome updates.

The only thing which you don't really know anymore is when or to what version
it is currently updating. But why would you care anyway about that.

~~~
willifred
Because it's a usurpation of my role as the administrator of my system.
Because it necessitates a level of comfort with a company—whose business model
is based on collecting and selling user data—rooting my system, and trusting
that they're not going to abuse that privilege, or forget my best interest
when acting in their own best interest. I think that's a good enough reason.

~~~
div
That is a good reason.

It's also possible to turn off the autoupdates.

It's debatable what the best default setting would be, and wether or not
average users:

a) know how to disable this b) care to disable it

Like you say, it necessitates a level of comfort with a company. I suppose
most people don't give this a lot of thought, and thus feel pretty comfortable
with any company.

Wether this is "good" or "bad" is a separate discussion imo.

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nhangen
I used to love Chrome, but as of late it's crashing on a daily basis. Perhaps
it is a flash issue, but Safari seems to handle it OK.

~~~
Griever
Dev channel user here. Can't say I experience this at all. However, I have
heard from other users that some extensions can cause the browser to crash.
Not sure which, unfortunately.

~~~
nhangen
That's strange. I thought about that, but the only extension I have is the
Google Blacklist extension.

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djahng
I think what Chrome really needs is the ability to watch HTML5 video in full
screen (not just fill the browser window). At least this is Chrome's
functionality on my Mac. I realize full screen video is not part of the HTML5
spec, it's left to the browser to implement. Safari will do full screen HTML5
video...

~~~
patrickaljord
Just press F11 (on linux) and you'll get full screen.

~~~
mixmastamyk
He means the video full screen, the page being full screen is not so helpful
unless still running at 1024x768.

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alanh
> _Obviously no one will abandon Microsoft products wholesale anytime soon_

Um… not that hard, if you aren’t so cheap as to only run Windows.

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Charuru
_I agree with most of the article. Android and Chrome OS are great products, I
just don't see how Google is going to make money from them._

Not sure about Chrome, but I feel like Android is a defensive measure against
a possible monopoly. If one company controlled mobile then Google might be
locked out of whatever greater potential mobile could reach. So Android
doesn't necessarily have to be financially awesome to be strategically
successful.

~~~
MikeCapone
The influence of Chrome and Android on web development are very probably part
of what Google is aiming for. It's the anti-Facebook/Apple, in a way, which
should help Google Search keep earning enough money to support all the other
peripheral projects.

~~~
rmrm
I read recently that 90% of HTTPS traffic for Google properties <> Chrome is
handled using SPDY. Interesting also that Google continues to put more and
more of their properties on HTTPS.

<https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/spdy-dev/TCOW7Lw2scQ>

I think Chrome is useful for them for just this reason, rather than solely
trying to cajole others, they can just do things. I imagine this will continue
to accrue benefits to them for quite some time.

~~~
MikeCapone
That's actually very cool! I wonder what kind of difference it actually makes
with an application like GMail or Google Search SSL.

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mkramlich
As I read the article, and only a paragraph or two into it, I was reminded
once again why I think Google naming both their browser and their Linux distro
"Chrome" was a bad idea. Feels like an amateur mistake the kind I wouldn't
expect them to make but they did. Yes, technically, one is called ChromeOS,
but obviously many folks are going to drop the -OS part when talking about it,
thus causing confusion.

