“Today, I’m happy to announce that Google Chrome for Mac is being promoted out of beta to our stable channel. We believe that it provides not only the stability, performance and polish that every Mac user expects, but also a seamless native Mac application experience that Mac users will feel instantly at home with.” Update: The Linux version is out too.
I initially switched to Chrome because of the constant crashes in Safari. These crashes were however due to that miserable pile of sh!t called Flash. Then I got Click to Flash, and ALL the crashes magically disappeared.
Chrome is pretty good, but the absolute number one cause of instability in Safari is Flash, and with it blocked, there is not a huge amount differentiating Safari and Chrome.
I eventually ended up switching back to Safari simply because Safari uses less memory (my MacBook only has 1G and I’m too cheap to buy more:) ).
Edited 2010-05-25 18:00 UTC
Crashes caused by Flash should at least not happen with Safari on Snow Leopard as Apple banished the plug-in into its own process.
In my experience, it still brought Safari down way too frequently, even it it’s own process.
Then, as mtzmtulivu already mentioned, Safari’s plug-in handling must be really poor as both Chrome and Firefox (starting with 3.6.4) are built to isolate plug-in crashes from the browser.
Flash crashes shouldn’t happen that often in Safari. I watched a kid the other day surf Flash heavy Nick.com for hours without a single crash.
Try reinstalling Flash and then repair the disk permissions.
It takes two to tangle. Flash has its issues and most people will not defend it but putting the blame sorely on flash for safari crashes is being disingenuous.
A poor plugin handling mechanism is what crashes safari.
Who will you blame if you visit a website with buggy implementation of standards and your browser crashes because it fails to account for those buggy behaviors? Both will be at fault so i guess most people will blame the most who they like the least but any fair person should atleast mention the shared responsibility for the crash.
http://blog.chromium.org/2010/05/google-chrome-for-linux-goes-stabl…
It is quite nice except for one thing … it supports only ad-hiding, not actual ad-blocking.
In my country, it needs to be the other way around. Every ISP in my country has download caps, and browser downloading of ads eats into that cap. The major point in ad-blocking is to avoid downloading the ad content in the first place (content that you weren’t going to look at anyway). This not only saves your Internet download cap, but as an added bonus pages also load a lot faster.
Google Chrome doesn’t support this. On Chrome, “Ad-blockers” really aren’t, they are “Ad-hiders” instead. This is apparently due to the inherent design of Chrome.
I can’t think of who might benefit from the seemingly pointless exercise of downloading ads to the user’s browsers only for them to be hidden from view, thus costing the user both in browser speed and in download cap costs … the ONLY party who might possibly benefit was a party who got paid per the number of ads served …
Hmmmmm.
Roll on, Firefox 3.7.
http://www.downloadsquad.com/2010/05/11/firefox-3-7-will-become-4-0…
http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/05/10/firefox-4-vision-fast-power…
Correction, Firefox 4.0.
Edited 2010-05-26 11:47 UTC
That’s something that always bothered me about Chrome adblockers as well. You can see the ads loading and then go away real quick. My DSL connection is not capped so the bandwidth factor is not exactly important, but it is annoying nonetheless.
And neither Chrome’s Ad-Thwart nor AdBlock Plus seem to work as well as AdBlock Plus work on Firefox. They always let a few ads show up on certain pages. It was so annoying that I decided to go back to Privoxy when using Chrome. While not as flexible as these browser extentions, Privoxy works well and stays out of your way.
I tried Chrome with Privoxy … it still loaded ads. I suppose this was because privoxy was not set up correctly, but I’m afraid I lost patience with it.
I found a semi-stable build of Firefox 3.7 for Ubuntu/Kubuntu in a ppa:
https://launchpad.net/~silverwave/+archive/one-daily-a-month-1
To install (from the ppa repository), copy and paste these three lines (one line at a time) into a terminal (I used konsole):
It offers: “One daily a month from ubuntu-mozilla-daily.” It can be installed along with existing (default version) of firefox 3.6. Run the minefield testing version via the command firefox-3.7 .
Here is a snapshot of the “About Minefield” dialog box from my desktop:
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/KDE4_desktop/minefield.png
Here is this browser running acid3 test:
http://ourlan.homelinux.net/qdig/KDE4_desktop/minefield_3.7a5pre_ac…
Fast, seems pretty stable (for an alpha 5 build), 97/100 on acid3 testing.
Why exactly would I need hard-to-configure Privoxy or download-cap-wasting Chrome, if I can run Firefox 3.7 alpha5 under Kubuntu 10.4?
Edited 2010-05-26 14:39 UTC
I agree with you as far as Privoxy configuration is concerned. Sometimes I just leave some things as they are because it is too troublesome to setup them the way that I want and hence the “not as flexible as browser extensions” bit earlier.
But Kubuntu? I’d never use that POS! Ever! I’d rather be using Ubuntu instead and that is saying something given that I hate GNOME… ^_^
I stopped using Chrome and went back to Firefox (Iceweasel, actually) for the time being. I already was a little concerned with the fact that the little bastard could be calling the mother ship all the time and the ad block thing just sweetened the deal.
I might try Chromium if/when Firefox start to piss me off and the ad blocking extensions begin to work as they should on that side of the fence, though.
Have you actually tried Kubuntu 10.4 (Lucid)? It is a vast improvement over the previous few iterations of Kubuntu. Chalk and cheese.
Firefox (and OpenOffice) integration into KDE on Kubuntu is pretty good. It uses the KDE file dialog boxs, and Kubuntu itself has a means to set the GTK and KDE themes to the same theme (Qtcurve works best for this) so the look and feel is the same.
Good performance, stable, good system configuration controls (especially printers/multifunction), configurability and flexibility of Plasma, good GTK+ application integration, KDE SC applications such as digikam, Amarok, Krita, Karbon, Gwenview, et al, and I have had no trouble whatsoever getting it to realise that I do not live in America, and so “realise” is not spelled with a z.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macquarie_Dictionary#Spelling
Edited 2010-05-26 23:27 UTC
I’ve been using Chrome the majority of the time for about a week since one of my most-used web sites upgraded and became a lot less usable with Firefox.
I’m still not sure about trusting Google, but I don’t like Apple’s approach to security, so it’s either Chrome or Opera and Chrome falls to hand better than Opera, for whatever reason. Besides, a thriving extension library is useful and Chrome has that.
Hopefully, we’ll see a stable version for Linux/*BSD soon (like in the post above this).
Edited 2010-05-25 18:18 UTC
Stable releases are available for all 3 supported platforms: http://chrome.blogspot.com/2010/05/new-chrome-stable-release-welcom…
As already stated by others, the Linux version is out of beta now as well, and there is no officially supported version of Chrome (beta or otherwise) for any of the BSDs.
Last I checked there were a small number of people porting Chromium to FreeBSD and OpenBSD, but it seemed to be slow going.
Edited 2010-05-25 21:59 UTC
Yes, and I already changed my post over 3 hours before you told me this, but thanks.
i’m wondering, which website is less useable is Firefox and in what way?
In my experience Firefox has been rendering approx everything you throw at it (except ActiveX;p) while webkit has troubles with a few “for IE” websites.
That makes me feel sad.
What architecture were you looking for?
A search for “chromium arm” on google gave this…
http://armin762.wordpress.com/2010/01/07/google-chromechromium-on-a…
Try looking for chromium instead of chrome.
There’s no Chrome for PowerPC. Firefox and Opera have universal versions.
What’s bad is that the JavaScript engine is the only thing holding it back.
I suppose someone could graft WebKit’s JavaScript engine onto Chrome to create a PowerPC version, but would it be worth the trouble?
This may be a dumb question but … how secure is this Chrome browser?
My intuition sniffs that sooner or later we will have a browser that is a more secure browser just as OpenBSD relates to mainstream operating systems.
We access banking and shopping via browsers.
Give it a couple of years and then tell me I’m wrong!
First of all I have to state I am a big fan of Chrome, and I use it as my primary browser.
The lack of KDE integration makes me sad though. The most painful are “Open File” and “Save File” panels that utilize GNOME’s technology, making it very difficult to access KDE shortcuts and remote drives.
I am not really impressed that they released “the Linux” version without the support for the second most popular desktop environment, although there are tickets for that (e.g.: http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=40060).
Keep up the good work, but pay a bit more attention for KDE users’ needs please.
Chrome has a problem with Font managers, something about it being unable to access fonts that are outside the font directory.
So, when I try to access anything, all I get is gibberish. It is a known issue, from several months, but they haven’t done anything about it.
I’d like to use Chrome, but can’t. Anyone else have this problem?
Just tried the bookmark syncing, and it works awesome, between 2 Macs and a Linux box.
I might just have to switch back to Chrome.
…for many of the same reasons that have already been listed:
1. Ad blocking: As lemur2 said, Chrome seems to merely hide ads, in a rather “tailpipe” fashion, instead of stopping them from loading at all. I also noticed that ABP on Chrome was selective of what it blocked: I could not find means to aggressively block most everything as I typically do. This is Google, and given their ties to advertising, I’m not surprised, but I prefer to retain the choice which online retailers I patronize, and which I don’t, i.e., I’ll take the sales pitch when *I* want to.
2. SearchEngine extension: I liked this about Firefox; that I could do searches specific to websites without having to load the entire site. Always saved me a lot of time regardless of Firefox’s lack of JavaScript speed.
3. WebKit’s problem with integration: not only did I have repeated problems with fonts (seems to be Apple span styles particular to Safari and Chrome), but I had problems with anything designed more with IE in mind. This is true for Konqueror, too.
I use a blog site called VOX that uses the Blogger/Atom API. I’m perfectly well aware of the greater control and inherent features of WordPress, but WordPress doesn’t have the community feel I’ve come to enjoy. VOX users that use browsers with the WebKit layout repeatedly have problems, whether they be on Windows, Mac, or Linux.
4. Chrome on Linux has seemed to have problems with loading CSS in recent builds– often times, I would get frames that weren’t positioned correctly. Maybe this has been fixed, but I haven’t really checked.
I tested both Chromium (back in the early alpha builds, too) and the main Chrome branch. I also tried getting Iron to run but gave up. I freely admit I’m not a programmer/coder/designer (not for lack of trying) and I just don’t feel like doing the whole “roll my own” thing very much, fixing and tweaking to get things the way I want.
My wife adores Chrome and will use it on my machine just as happily as when she’s not on her lappy with Vista, but I’m much more demanding. Firefox gives me the usability I want, even if there are tradeoffs with speed performance. Note also that Linux Mint (my distro of choice) is still back with 3.0.17 (3.5 is forked as “Shiretoko”) and I’m content enough to remain with such conservative choices.
You can do so in Chrome as well. Look for a button called “Manage” or similar right next to the standard search engine in the general preferences. Chrome adds many searches you used there by itself or you can define some yourself. For the predefined ones adjust the shortcut to something manageable (e.g. g for Google search). After that you can enter <shortcut> <search term> into the URL bar and Chrome will use this particular search engine to perform the search.
This also works in Firefox.
Uh, you are missing out big time. Mozilla made some serious optimizations to Firefox in the last two versions across all fields. This is especially noticeable when it comes to the so-called AwesomeBar. It used to block the whole UI while digging through large histories or bookmark lists in earlier versions, but it has become much, much more responsive in 3.6.
My biggest issue with Chromium is that it doesn’t match my system theme. The window controls aren’t in the same place as everything else, so at 4:30 when I’m shutting my computer down to go home from work, there is that extra second of frustration while rapidly shutting everything down. … aside from that, I recommend Chrome to most people for general purpose web browsing…. and Firefox for development (BugZilla, ColorZilla, MeasureIt, Web Developer, DOM Inspector, etc.)
For this reason, I wish development on Arora ( http://code.google.com/p/arora/ ) would progress so I can have a cross-platform, webkit browser that fits with the system theme. Until then, I’ll continue to click on the familiar orange and blue icon that is on all of my Windows/Linux/Apple machines.