Chrome 10 Browser Now Available

[amirm]

My favorite browser has been updated to version 10: http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2381661,00.asp

As usual, the install process is exceptionally painless and extremely fast. No setup wizards to run and answer questions you may not understand. They claim speed ups in the way it runs scrips (the programming engine in web pages). I don't know that I needed the extra speed but the new sandbox for Flash is extremely welcome as that can be one buggy piece of software and have its own vulnerabilities.

This is the a good video which explains the above feature:

 

[es347]

Amir,

I run mozilla. Is chrome better...faster, more secure? If one switches to chrome, is there a way to save favorites?

thx.

 

[Steve Williams]

I agree with Amir re Chrome being the best browser. It is what I use as well

 

[amirm]

Amir,

I run mozilla. Is chrome better...faster, more secure? If one switches to chrome, is there a way to save favorites?

thx.

Answering the second part, at least with IE, Chrome is marvelous in the way it attempts to save all of your settings including favorites. I imagine it does the same for other browsers. Indeed that is another brilliant thing Google has done with Chrome in making migration so easy.

I have only compared Chrome to IE and other than a minor exception, I find chrome to be superior to IE in every possible way. Reading online, people tend to like Firefox in the way it manages pop ups and such. Other than that, I have not heard anyone say another browser is superior to Chrome.

Chrome is also very non-invasive. Try installing and use it a bit and see what you think. If you don't like it, you can always go back with no harm done.

I am a damn critical person but I just can't find faults with this browser . Yes it has crashed a couple of times but that is remarkable for a new browser living in a world where every web page is designed to primarily work with IE and such.

 

[Steve Williams]

I have never had mine crash

The only glitch I have found with it is sending mail via comcast. You have to double click the reply button to send an email. A single click on reply does not allow me to reply

 

[garylkoh]

I'm a nut - I run Chrome, Firefox, IE and Opera. My main browser is Chrome, and I agree with Amir and Steve that Chrome is the best. I maintain IE because some banking sites do not support Chrome. It took UPS and FedEx the longest time to work well with Chrome, but they do now. I like Opera as it's light and fast and I use it on an old Pentium machine that I use as a music server when I need to go online to search and download stuff.

 

[Jay_S]

Still waiting for print preview! They've postponed this once again until the next version. On the other hand, that probably means only a few more weeks.

 

[Scott Borduin]

Another Chrome user here. I use them all (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera) sometimes because of software and web development, but I switched from Firefox about 18 months ago and never looked back. The interface is simple and clean, it's very fast, the sandboxing model makes it both more stable and more secure, it supports advanced Web standards like HTML5 and CSS3 very well, there are plenty of useful extensions available, and the pace of updates and improvements is significantly faster than anything else. Oh, and the bookmark sync feature is extremely useful for keeping your bookmarks up to date across all your desktops and laptops.

 

[ack]

I find chrome yet more proof that that company is being run by kids... no qa, no product management. the install process croaked asking me to close firefox in order to import things, and so I did... then nothing but a blank DOS window. Windows 7. I had installed the first chrome release years ago and it lasted 15 mins. Let's see how long this will last - it's at least now up...

 

[amirm]

FYI, Chrome is the forth popular browser on our site, behind IE, Firefox, and Safari. Its share though is twice as much as it was last year, eating shares way from IE (which is 3X more popular right now).

 

[ack]

Don't give much credence to my comments... I never had much respect for google ever since I had a phone screen a decade ago, where I was told it would last 45 mins, yet since it was going so well we reached the 90 min mark - all the while putting up with an argumentative j_rk - at which point I told the engineer that, in order to answer his last question, I would have to think about it and I didn't feel like. I haven't laughed so much in my life at the sound of his voice after this... Cracks me till this day and as I write this I got an email the next day from HR that my resume is being included in the leaders list they maintain or whatever, never to be heard from again... Still laughing.

 

[amirm]

I find chrome yet more proof that that company is being run by kids... no qa, no product management. the install process croaked asking me to close firefox in order to import things, and so I did... then nothing but a blank DOS window. Windows 7. I had installed the first chrome release years ago and it lasted 15 mins. Let's see how long this will last - it's at least now up...

There is no doubt that Google is a newbie to software development. The qualify of the first Android OS was exceptionally poor on my phone. So many things would crash. But in a couple of releases they made most things right.

Chrome though, has always worked very well for me. I recently installed it on an ancient XP machine that is not very stable. I upgraded IE first and it took forever to install and it was sluggish as hell. Chrome installed quickly and brought new life to the machine.

All of their smart people seem to work in the search group. Everything else is secondary to be sure.

 

[ack]

But how can google software have so many bugs with all these extremely smart people! Sorry, I couldn't help it... So let's turn this into who's got the oldest hardware around... I've got a Linux box on a 10 yr old Pentium 1GHz and - get this - a GeForce2 MX400 graphics card w/ all of 64MB of on-board memory!!! And Firefox works perfectly well... Fun stuff... Anyone have an Apple Lisa?

 

[amirm]

But how can google software have so many bugs with all these extremely smart people! Sorry, I couldn't help it...

No it is a fair question. I believe the ones with quality control work in the search team. That is the engine that makes all the money for the company so it attracts the best people. They push incredible innovation there, with the lowest cost of storage in the industry (Google keeps a cache of the entire Internet!).

So let's turn this into who's got the oldest hardware around... I've got a Linux box on a 10 yr old Pentium 1GHz and - get this - a GeForce2 MX400 graphics card w/ all of 64MB of on-board memory!!! And Firefox works perfectly well... Fun stuff... Anyone have an Apple Lisa?

I make a habit of throwing away old computers. I have however kept one of my old Macs because I did my taxes on it. It is post Lisa. The only time I saw Lisa was at work in our documentation group in 1980s. It was too expensive as a personal computer and got pretty poor reviews.

 

[Steve Williams]

I still have an iMac Blueberry

 

[ack]

Yes, I'll shut up and admit the search engine infrastructure and technology is stupendous, and true innovation is being built there.

 

[vinylphilemag]

But how can google software have so many bugs with all these extremely smart people! Sorry, I couldn't help it... So let's turn this into who's got the oldest hardware around... I've got a Linux box on a 10 yr old Pentium 1GHz and - get this - a GeForce2 MX400 graphics card w/ all of 64MB of on-board memory!!! And Firefox works perfectly well... Fun stuff... Anyone have an Apple Lisa?

Whipper snapper! Not counting my BBC Micro from the early 1980s (4 MHz 6502 CPU and 32 KB of RAM!), the oldest machine I have here is a 1989 Sun 3/80 (running Sun OS 4.1.1_U1) which has a 20 MHz 68030 CPU and (IIRC) is maxed out at 64 MB of RAM. The GX frame buffer it uses has 1 MB of video RAM!

I think a Lisa sold on eBay recently for $15K!

Edit: Like Amir, I try to get rid of my old computers, but there are some that IO just can't part with, for sentimental reasons. The 3/80 was my first real computer; I'm like the bearded guy in this old Dilbert cartoon:

 

[Scott Borduin]

Check out these two articles on the latest pwn2own contest, a contest in which computer security experts win prizes for being the first to hack a particular browser or operating system:

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214022/Google_s_Chrome_untouched_at_Pwn2Own_hack_match

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9214002/Safari_IE_hacked_first_at_Pwn2Own

Once again, the Apple Safari browser was hacked pretty much instantaneously - 5 seconds! Safari is widely noted for being pathetically riddled with security holes. Apple really needs to get their act together on this one, and at minimum they ought not to promote Safari to Windows users. IE is much better than it used to be, but still not as good as Firefox or Chrome. Chrome was not successfully hacked for the third straight year, but nobody tried this year. Whether that is due to superior security or just less attention due to smaller installed base can't be definitively stated, of course.

 

[kach22i]

My wife has an old XP laptop, recently switching to Chrome has made her very happy - very fast.

After reading this thread I'm switching, had been using Firefox.

 

[amirm]

One nasty problem I have found. Chrome now has a built-in PDF reader which I find very buggy. It opens the page and pretends to do searches before the whole file is there. So it will tell you nothing found where in reality it is still loading the file (but no indicator that it is dong so). Its scroll bar is unreliable when scrolling through pdf files. Worst of all, if you open enough tabs and pdfs, it will get totally screwed up, showing corrupt pages and such. So now, I have to manually grab pdf links and open them in Acrobat.

Typical of Google. Reliability is secondary to new features.