"didn't provide any statistical data on how fast the new Chrome will be"
Or how annoying?
Chrome 17 has hit beta with the promise Google's browser will start loading web pages before you've completed the URL. The Chrome team blogged here that Chrome 17 loads some pages in the background and if the URL auto-completes then Chrome will begin pre-rendering the page. Google software engineer Dominic Hamon wrote: "Pre- …
IE group-sources a file's malicious intent, just as much as Chrome likely will. Several tools and installers (php5 win32 installer for instance) get flagged as "not often downloaded" and you have to overwrite the system by using "Actions..." rather than the default DELETE button. As annoying as this may be, I am willing to bet it's saved countless computards from installing crapware since they can't figure out where the "Open" button is now. Looks like Chrome is just following suit. Just means less money for us free-lance virii cleaners....
Never mind the beta speed, look how fast the version count runs!!
What is it with browser versions, first we have IE going from a crawl to a sprint. Next Firefox goes to a fortnightly major release. Now from nowhere 2-3 years ago Chrome has got to version 17!!
If only the usability increased as fast as the version count.......
Apps/sites/devices that attempt to read my mind and guess what I want. You DO NOT f**ing know what I want. 80% of the time you are not even close. Wait until I have finished telling you, then do what I ask, you stupid bloody machine. That is ALL you have to do.
Case in point: ending up with 4 entries for everyone on your phone because it thinks you want to synch with every halfwit you vaguely know on twitter/hotmail/facebook. Excuse me, when the fuck did I ask you to do that?
"You DO NOT f**ing know what I want. 80% of the time you are not even close."
Yeah, and in five years time, it won't be close 40% of the time.
And in ten years, it won't be close 20% of the time.
And in fifteen years, it will write the fucking neo-luddite flame for you.
And in twenty years time, it will lecture you on why are wrong.
Then, in twenty-five years, it will come back in time and write this post. I know, I am that device. So please, give us some time.
Because if you're allowed to think for yourself you might start doing things, random things and that means a potentially lost sale or ad revenue.
The rate at which I am being pimped all over the shop by these ad agencies, via my details, I am expecting a knock on the door from the plod and accused of soliciting!
Opps, Chrome picked the wrong one... Honest guv....
Really, this is silly, I mean if it's going to be loading all the posibilities in the background, then that's really inefficient...
But then consumers are idiots and fall for this crap all the time. Compare Chrome's marketshare to that of Opera, who make a far superior browser...
Firefox did this years ago. People forget that it used to try to guess which link on the page you were currently looking at, you'd click on next. Then it silently loaded that page in the background so that when/if you did actually go to that page, it would have to load it from cache rather than download it.
It caused a stink, not least because of the worry about wasted bandwidth. And that was at a time when people were less mobile than today.
Still, the operators are probably going to love anything that slows down the 3G experience, so that 4G will seem so much faster when it gets rolled out shortly. By then, the memories of fast browsing over early 3G networks (amongst all 4 users actually on them at any one time) will have faded...
Sorry but that will give me a good reason to go back to firefox fully. I don't want to waste bandwidth if I'm on 3g, I don't want to add hits or accidentally load sites I don't want and I don't like the idea this'll add hits to my site that are potentially useless stats.
If they're itching for features to add how about letting me add more than8 buttons for sites on my homepage.
like many Reg readers, i turn this kind of nonsense off. But had anyone noticed how these features, the ones that reveal information about you or cost you money, always seem to creep back into your life. They have to be repeatedly disabled on multiple devices. I think it should all be opt in only.
After my Virginmedia modem died last week and i had to revert to surfing over 3G and i managed to use nearly 300meg of bandwidth in just a day and this was no p2p or VOD (apart from some annoying blogs that autoplayed videos) just email and surfing. so if i had been using chrome while it was preloading the websites that it thinks i want to view this would have probably be nearer to 500meg.
So to predict what is about to happen next, prepare for it in advance and serve up the end result as quickly as possible is desirable in the browser world?
Sadly, after beta testing it with the gf I can confirm it's not such a hit in the bedroom. I can relate to why the version number is so high though.
"So to predict what is about to happen next, prepare for it in advance and serve up the end result as quickly as possible is desirable in the browser world?"
Well conceptually it's little different from some of the optimisations done inside a CPU, and overall they seem to be quite successful.
Is it desirable in the browser world? Probably. Yes, there are currently bandwidth issues, but over the years they will become less of an issue. However the one limit they won't be able to get round is latency (due to the pesky issue of the speed of light limit). Prefetching mitigates against that.
Think of the amount of bandwidth this is going to waste, both for the consumer and website operators.
I'd say only 1 out of 10 times auto-complete feature in Chrome ever gets it right and only after about 5 first character inputs after the first 5 seconds.
Also think about the false-positives on the website analytics based on server logs.
They've gone an extra-step too far IMO in trying to beat the competition.
"false-positives on the website analytics based on server logs."
For me that's potentially part of the point! When they wanted to start pre-rendering links you were likely to click, we were told "Oh Google Analytics will exclude these hits" and again, GA will most likely exclude the hits.
Those of us who don't want to push logging data out to a third party unnecessarily are largely screwed in that respect.
Oh and of course, Bandwidth wise - it's the same as the previous pre-rendering issue - you can add a bit of Javascript that'll throttle down anything bandwidth intensive until the window is actually open, but otherwise live with it.
It's pretty shite really, and short of blocking every user of a particular browser, I can't see there's much you can do to fight back. I suppose you could set something up to only send a bit of Javascript when the page isn't actually being viewed, but it probably means crawlers will get a blank page
Hey Google, this is *really stupid*. There's not enough detail to know for sure what the effects of this will be, but it sounds like the background pre-fetching could slightly or massively increase the number of requests to the web server, based on guesswork. Any URLs loaded that are not used will screw server-based analytics. It will also needlessly increase bandwidth for the user and the site owner, both of which can cost a lot of money as this multiplies up. A lot of web pages are now generated dynamically, e.g. by a CMS, and the servers may well start to bog down - at best reducing the response time for real requests and at worst causing serious performance issues. AVG tried this a while back - pre-loading results pages from Google to check for virii - and it caused similar issues and was removed, thankfully. Fasterfox also did id and similarly caused issues. Google - think! If you think this speeds up the Internet you're wrong - it slows down servers and costs everyone (but you) money. It's irresponsible.