Chrome 10: Google whips out its Crankshaft Google has released a new incarnation of its Chrome browser, adding the revamped Crankshaft JavaScript engine the company unveiled late last year. This is Chrome 10, if you're keeping track of version numbers. Google wishes you didn't. When releasing a new browser, Mountain View doesn't mention version numbers, preferring to …
I had chrome running - selected the "wrench" menu and found an option that said I needed to reboot to install an update it had downloaded. Allowed it to reboot to install this update.
Then, "wrench" > "About Google Chrome"
The about screen appears, then after a short while with "Checking for updates" a green tick and the words "Google Chrome is up to date (8.0.552.215)"
I later discovered that although Chrome thought it was up to date, re-downloading the whole thing from Google did get me version 10.0.648.127. Silly me, I thought Chrome knew how to update itself, but it looks like I have to do it manually.
Mozilla makes much more use of the UI libraries than Chrome. Chrome bypasses all of that renders as much as it can internally and slaps a huge blob onto the screen.
This, depending on the system, results in different performance profiles. Chrome performance on an Xterm or thin client is horrid compared to Mozilla. Dumb graphics card with high throughput to the framebuffer - places reverse, Chrome confidently outperforms it. That performance advantage however is shortlived as it is impossible to take advantage of graphics hardware if you do all rendering in software. If Mozilla sorts its rendering using OpenGL that would give it significant speed advantage vs Chrome on "smart" graphics cards. This will be an advantage which Chrome will find difficult to match.
Dunno about Opera and IE. I do not use either nowdays. Konqueror which used to be faster than any of these 5 years back is now distinctly the odd man out. The mismanagement of the qt libraries development by Nokia has clearly taken its toll which is a pity. It used to be a nice browser and it pioneered a lot of ideas we now see in all others.
to open Chrome .. Firefox has been good but I have Chrome to check website compatibility, open that more than IE8 ..
.. once started up .. all 3 of these browsers are fast enough for me .. the trouble now in speed is sites pulling ads from the various ad servers .. some with crap response time or pulling video from amazon's overworked bandwidth .. then there are the Winblows .asp servers that are crap speed compared to most *nix / Apache set ups
Since more and more people started browsing on smaller and less powerful machines.
Makes no odds to my quadcore desktop with it's stack of fast ram and shedload of cpu grunt, but on my little single-core atom-powered system, browser (and indeed all software) speed is important. Chrome is much more responsive than Firefox on my netbook, especially when running script-heavy things like Google Docs.
Well, both Google Docs and Google Chrome are GOOG products. It looks like they are creating issues with one product to solve them with other one. I would better avoid using these *broken* services instead of changing the web browser myself. There is no company on earth that would make me use its browser because of no mattter what reason. It is the user's decision which browser to use and not corporations' choice. That's why I'm sticking with Opera browser under Mac OS :-)
GDocs is a pretty good basic word processor, extremely useful if you move between computers/operating systems a lot and/or share files between many people. I do both. GDocs is definitely faster on a small machine than OpenOffice. Gdocs, Calender et al work fine in all browsers I've tried it in, but works best in Chrome. I chose it as an example because it's relevant to the way *I* use my machine, not as a reason for you to use Chrome.
I use Chrome because in all aspects it's faster, more stable, lighter on memory and it's bookmark/password sync is far better than Firefox's on my little linux runnin' netbook. Also I like it's economical use of vertical space and UI. I use Firefox on my big heffin' desktop machine. Can't stand Opera, I personally find it ugly and unwieldy. Other people's mileage may, of course, vary. Isn't it nice that we have the choice though. :)
Sometimes a firewall gets in the way. Sometimes it's an overly efficient security tool. If you want to get the current version and no other method works then try the following link. You have to close Chrome, run the link, wait for a minute (there's no progress indication on this installer) and you're good to go. No need to worry about firewalls etc.
http://dl.google.com/chrome/install/648.127/chrome_installer.exe
Note: This is an official google build, not a 3rd party hack, so it's safe. If you want a previous version you can also look up the last two digits of the version and substitute them in the link. Very useful if new stuff doesn't work.
Yes, IE is rather nice when you want to print something. I usually simply highlight the relevant part of the page, right-click -> Print Preview. In the preview window, I select "As selected on the screen" and it displays my selection only. Can change the header(s) and footer(s) to be page nums, address, date, etc.
On the downside, anyone notice that if you run IE for extended periods (continually opening/closing tabs & new windows, but never actually fully closing out about 8 tabs/windows) that right-click -> "Open in new tab" does nothing? Just opens a new tab, but does not actually load anything, nor populate an address in the address bar. Close tab and try again, and it may (usually, but not always) work. Only real qualm I have with it at the moment. Oh, and IE8's crap javascript performance (just try reorganizing a 200+ netflix queue and you'll see what I mean). Should be remedied in IE9 though.
- Sent from my Firefox.
...and this is the only really glaring malfunction in Google Chrome.
Can't I have a "render to postscript" option instead? Render to non-copyrighted PDF? anything? Why lord, oh why. Sometimes you must have a copy of stuff, even an electronic one. A save-to-PDF option would pitch in like a glove.
And btw, Google Chrome was the only browser that was able to function in timely manner on a vintage laptop with only 488MB of declared RAM. Ouch. Yes, only 2 minutes to open, instead of 7 of others.
... can be easily done with Chrome by using a pseudo-printer driver (I'm using PrimoPDF). That doesn't solve my problem though, because IE (and FireFox when it's in a good mood) allows to see the printout and ADJUST it before printing, e.g. see if it fits into a certain number of pages and scale if necessary, move margins around, add/remove headers and footers. Not so easy to do with a PDF.
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