6 ms·

Google Chrome 3.0

49 points by nreece 17y ago

ScottWhigham 17y ago
"You shouldn't read too much into Google Chrome's version numbers. Just because you can now install Google Chrome 3.0, it doesn't mean that Google wants to appear more mature than it already is." * cough(bullshit)
- buugs 17y ago
  Really they have caught up to firefox without implementing new features.
- andreyf 17y ago
  The lady doth protest too much. Can't really blame, them, though. They're aiming for the corporate market, and there, the people deciding between Chrome 2.0 and IE 8.0 really don't care for the difference between Java and JavaScript. Well, maybe not the people deciding, but certainly the people they have to explain those decisions to.
- smokinn 17y ago
  Well, if you compare Chrome 3.0 vs Firefox 3.0 (or 3.5), what features does Chrome not have? As far as I can tell it's only missing Firefox's extensions so if you can live without Adblock, Firebug, etc you can trade the extensions for Chrome's outright speed.
  - pohl 17y ago
    It's worth noting that WebKit's "Web Inspector" is present in Chrome, which is roughly equivalent to Firebug...so you're not really having to live without that, even.
adnymarc 17y ago
And still no full release version for Mac / Linux. I find this particularly interesting considering the Google "Operating System" is going to be a custom interface on top of a Linux kernel.
- dagw 17y ago
  I've been using the Linux version for several month now and honestly cannot tell the difference between it and the windows version. Just as stable, just as fast, and flash works without any problems. I'm guessing there is a good reason why they're not comfortable releasing it yet, but as an end user I haven't run across that reason.
  - mattyb 17y ago
    I'm running Chromium on Ubuntu x86_64, and I've yet to get Flash to work with anything other than YouTube.
    - jamesbritt 17y ago
      How did you do that? I have zero flash. (I'm on x86_32 though).
      - tl 17y ago
        I have --enable-plugins turned on atm and I don't see any difference between chromium's flash and firefox's, except that when the plugin crashes on chromium, I reload the page instead of the entire browser.
      - mattyb 17y ago
        It depends on whether you're using the chromium-daily PPA or you used Google's deb (the former looks for Firefox's libflashplayer.so, the latter needs you to install it). If you're using the chromium-daily PPA (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa), Chromium will look in a bunch of folders[1] for plugins, including ~/.mozilla/plugins. I suggest you get the tarball from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and put its libflashplayer.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins. Chromium will look here for it upon startup and you're set. If you installed using Google's deb (http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel), it doesn't yet search the Mozilla plugin dirs, and thus you need to make an /opt/google/chrome/plugins dir and put the libflashplayer.so in there and it'll work. Edit: if you're using Google's deb, you have to run google-chrome with the --enable-plugins switch. The deb adds their repo to sources.list.d, but I have no idea when they'll enable plugins by default in their repo. I'd ride the chromium-daily channel, since lots of shit is broken anyway. [1]: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/7a70e5fcbac786a9 http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/th...
javery 17y ago
Will browser companies skip version 6? In the same way hotels skip the 13th floor?
- adnymarc 17y ago
  Hopefully browser companies will be more rigorous about migrating their users to newer versions so that we avoid the issues IE6 has presented by still having a large install base even after two subsequent versions have been released.
brown9-2 17y ago
I like Chrome, and the new version does a feel a tad quicker, but goddammit already how much longer until extensions are in the official releases?
- tumult 17y ago
  They were recently enabled by default in the Chromium builds. Lots of features are still missing (all of the interface/toolbar stuff only works in Windows right now, for example, and installed extensions are purged with every restart of the browser on OS X/Linux). The extension API is lightweight and fantastic though, so I'm with you in hoping that they get make it into Chrome sooner rather than later.
jdbeast00 17y ago
hopefully the back button will work more consistently now
cmalabs 17y ago
"Chrome includes video codecs that allow you to embed videos without using slow and unreliable plug-ins like Adobe Flash." Compared to quicktime/media player and the slew of plugins from the previous generation, flash is much much more reliable.
- dchest 17y ago
  Compared to QuickTime _on Windows_. On Mac it's not so slow and doesn't load CPU that much (compared to Flash/Mac).
  - nestlequ1k 17y ago
    Bullshit. Load a hour long quicktime video from blip tv using safari. It will hang your browser every time. This is on a latest gen Macbook Pro
- acdha 17y ago
  If you want the lowest common quality video, yes. Flash video performance and quality are noticeably lower, though, so it really doesn't scale well beyond YouTube-level video. In practice, widely deployed beat better quality handily.
_ck_ 17y ago
You know what's still missing and I'm surprised... there's no way to see raw headers sent/received in the dev tools!
- brodie 17y ago
  Is the Resources panel not adequate? Granted, it does format the headers, but it does show the HTTP method, the request headers, and the response headers for the page and each resource.
  - _ck_ 17y ago
    D'oh! You are absolutely right. Somehow I've missed that little sub-menu all this time.
c00p3r 17y ago
It is time for next-gen "no flash" browser games and "no java" web-apps.
- sp332 17y ago
  Hell yeah! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825830 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825830
heycarsten 17y ago
I realize there is probably no place for it in marketing banter, but it bothers me that they don't give the WebKit project any visible credit.
- amackera 17y ago
  That would steal focus away from Google's promotion of their secret magic sauce that they sprinkle on everything to make it better.
  - cdibona 17y ago
    Well, the sauce is nice, but more realistically, why should every story about chrome mention webkit? How could we (google) police that? We mention webkit all the time and , more importantly, try to get our fixes and patches upstream.
    - amackera 17y ago
      I just searched the Chrome blog for "webkit" and here's the results: http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=uds&start=0&hl=en&q=webkit+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgoogleblog.blogspot.com%2F http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=... In general I think Google is very good about promoting Open Source awareness, my post was my attempt at humour :D.
    - thwarted 17y ago
      The Webkit user agent string already mentions like 5 other browsers/render brands, I think that may be considered enough mentioning.
- psadauskas 17y ago
  I feel the same about Safari and Webkit towards KHTML.
  - gecko 17y ago
    Back when Safari first came out, there was a lot of credit given to KHTML, and Apple quickly had public-facing Subversion repositories available with full product history so that KHTML could adopt any changes they wanted. Since then, WebKit and KHTML have gone radically different directions, to the point that I'm not honestly sure the latter exists anymore. Apple, I thought, did the right thing by providing a full hat-tip to KHTML at the time of the fork. I also think their attitude towards KHTML since then has been completely fair.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
truebosko 17y ago
Awesome! Extensions being enabled by default in the dev channel is great news. I've been semi-following the documentation for it all and it's been improving at a nice steady pace (just like the browser :-)) Also, as mentioned from others it runs just fine on Linux for several months now so go ahead and try it! You'll realize quickly how you don't need all those Firefox extensions.
- AndrewDucker 17y ago
  Not all of them. But if you think I'm surfing without AdBlock then you have another think coming...
  - truebosko 17y ago
    You can get Adsweep for Chrome which works pretty well. http://www.adsweep.org/ http://www.adsweep.org/ It's discontinued, but it works.
netsp 17y ago
Does anyone find that chrome is just unnecessary? It seems like google got to the game just when all the other browsers hot a point when they are all good. Not long ago, FF seemed like a real edge. Now I just use it cuz I'm used to it and it has extensions that I am used to. Safari is also good and even the new IE is good. I wouldn't mind using either of them or using chrome. The pace of improvement seems to be strong and even. I have no beef with an extra competitor, but I am surprised to say I have a browser and its good.
- RyanMcGreal 17y ago
  I think we can fairly credit Chrome with dramatically raising the bar for javascript performance across the competing browser engines. The V8 virtual machine for Chrome compiles JS to machine code rather than interpreting it or running in bytecode. Mozilla has since responded with the TraceMonkey optimization for its javascript engine; WebKit developed SquirrelFish Extreme; and so on.
  - netsp 17y ago
    SUre. extra competition. An extra place for innovation to happen. All good. But it doesn't seem to amount to using the browser does it?
fjabre 17y ago
Chrome + Firefox = one browser to rule them all.!
- fjabre 17y ago
  lol. To guys with 'good' karma: not LTR fans I take it? It's worth noting that together these browsers will take significant market share from IE and Safari, especially when Chrome is released for mac later this year. Even more interesting is FF strong ties and history with Google.
seshagiric 17y ago
I don't know if anyone noticed, the page has an ad link for IE 8.0 at the very top before the article begins. That looked funny.
thejay 17y ago
still waiting to try the official mac version...

49 points by nreece 17y ago

"You shouldn't read too much into Google Chrome's version numbers. Just because you can now install Google Chrome 3.0, it doesn't mean that Google wants to appear more mature than it already is." * cough(bullshit)

buugs 17y ago
Really they have caught up to firefox without implementing new features.
andreyf 17y ago
The lady doth protest too much. Can't really blame, them, though. They're aiming for the corporate market, and there, the people deciding between Chrome 2.0 and IE 8.0 really don't care for the difference between Java and JavaScript. Well, maybe not the people deciding, but certainly the people they have to explain those decisions to.
smokinn 17y ago
Well, if you compare Chrome 3.0 vs Firefox 3.0 (or 3.5), what features does Chrome not have? As far as I can tell it's only missing Firefox's extensions so if you can live without Adblock, Firebug, etc you can trade the extensions for Chrome's outright speed.
- pohl 17y ago
  It's worth noting that WebKit's "Web Inspector" is present in Chrome, which is roughly equivalent to Firebug...so you're not really having to live without that, even.

adnymarc 17y ago

And still no full release version for Mac / Linux. I find this particularly interesting considering the Google "Operating System" is going to be a custom interface on top of a Linux kernel.

dagw 17y ago
I've been using the Linux version for several month now and honestly cannot tell the difference between it and the windows version. Just as stable, just as fast, and flash works without any problems. I'm guessing there is a good reason why they're not comfortable releasing it yet, but as an end user I haven't run across that reason.
- mattyb 17y ago
  I'm running Chromium on Ubuntu x86_64, and I've yet to get Flash to work with anything other than YouTube.
  - jamesbritt 17y ago
    How did you do that? I have zero flash. (I'm on x86_32 though).
    - tl 17y ago
      I have --enable-plugins turned on atm and I don't see any difference between chromium's flash and firefox's, except that when the plugin crashes on chromium, I reload the page instead of the entire browser.
    - mattyb 17y ago
      It depends on whether you're using the chromium-daily PPA or you used Google's deb (the former looks for Firefox's libflashplayer.so, the latter needs you to install it). If you're using the chromium-daily PPA (https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa https://launchpad.net/~chromium-daily/+archive/ppa), Chromium will look in a bunch of folders[1] for plugins, including ~/.mozilla/plugins. I suggest you get the tarball from http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ http://get.adobe.com/flashplayer/ and put its libflashplayer.so in ~/.mozilla/plugins. Chromium will look here for it upon startup and you're set. If you installed using Google's deb (http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel), it doesn't yet search the Mozilla plugin dirs, and thus you need to make an /opt/google/chrome/plugins dir and put the libflashplayer.so in there and it'll work. Edit: if you're using Google's deb, you have to run google-chrome with the --enable-plugins switch. The deb adds their repo to sources.list.d, but I have no idea when they'll enable plugins by default in their repo. I'd ride the chromium-daily channel, since lots of shit is broken anyway. [1]: http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/thread/7a70e5fcbac786a9 http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev/browse_thread/th...

javery 17y ago

Will browser companies skip version 6? In the same way hotels skip the 13th floor?

adnymarc 17y ago
Hopefully browser companies will be more rigorous about migrating their users to newer versions so that we avoid the issues IE6 has presented by still having a large install base even after two subsequent versions have been released.

brown9-2 17y ago

I like Chrome, and the new version does a feel a tad quicker, but goddammit already how much longer until extensions are in the official releases?

tumult 17y ago
They were recently enabled by default in the Chromium builds. Lots of features are still missing (all of the interface/toolbar stuff only works in Windows right now, for example, and installed extensions are purged with every restart of the browser on OS X/Linux). The extension API is lightweight and fantastic though, so I'm with you in hoping that they get make it into Chrome sooner rather than later.

jdbeast00 17y ago

hopefully the back button will work more consistently now

cmalabs 17y ago

"Chrome includes video codecs that allow you to embed videos without using slow and unreliable plug-ins like Adobe Flash." Compared to quicktime/media player and the slew of plugins from the previous generation, flash is much much more reliable.

dchest 17y ago
Compared to QuickTime _on Windows_. On Mac it's not so slow and doesn't load CPU that much (compared to Flash/Mac).
- nestlequ1k 17y ago
  Bullshit. Load a hour long quicktime video from blip tv using safari. It will hang your browser every time. This is on a latest gen Macbook Pro
acdha 17y ago
If you want the lowest common quality video, yes. Flash video performance and quality are noticeably lower, though, so it really doesn't scale well beyond YouTube-level video. In practice, widely deployed beat better quality handily.

_ck_ 17y ago

You know what's still missing and I'm surprised... there's no way to see raw headers sent/received in the dev tools!

brodie 17y ago
Is the Resources panel not adequate? Granted, it does format the headers, but it does show the HTTP method, the request headers, and the response headers for the page and each resource.
- _ck_ 17y ago
  D'oh! You are absolutely right. Somehow I've missed that little sub-menu all this time.

c00p3r 17y ago

It is time for next-gen "no flash" browser games and "no java" web-apps.

sp332 17y ago
Hell yeah! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825830 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=825830

heycarsten 17y ago

I realize there is probably no place for it in marketing banter, but it bothers me that they don't give the WebKit project any visible credit.

amackera 17y ago
That would steal focus away from Google's promotion of their secret magic sauce that they sprinkle on everything to make it better.
- cdibona 17y ago
  Well, the sauce is nice, but more realistically, why should every story about chrome mention webkit? How could we (google) police that? We mention webkit all the time and , more importantly, try to get our fixes and patches upstream.
  - amackera 17y ago
    I just searched the Chrome blog for "webkit" and here's the results: http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=uds&start=0&hl=en&q=webkit+site%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fgoogleblog.blogspot.com%2F http://www.google.com/search?oe=utf8&ie=utf8&source=... In general I think Google is very good about promoting Open Source awareness, my post was my attempt at humour :D.
  - thwarted 17y ago
    The Webkit user agent string already mentions like 5 other browsers/render brands, I think that may be considered enough mentioning.
psadauskas 17y ago
I feel the same about Safari and Webkit towards KHTML.
- gecko 17y ago
  Back when Safari first came out, there was a lot of credit given to KHTML, and Apple quickly had public-facing Subversion repositories available with full product history so that KHTML could adopt any changes they wanted. Since then, WebKit and KHTML have gone radically different directions, to the point that I'm not honestly sure the latter exists anymore. Apple, I thought, did the right thing by providing a full hat-tip to KHTML at the time of the fork. I also think their attitude towards KHTML since then has been completely fair.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

truebosko 17y ago

Awesome! Extensions being enabled by default in the dev channel is great news. I've been semi-following the documentation for it all and it's been improving at a nice steady pace (just like the browser :-)) Also, as mentioned from others it runs just fine on Linux for several months now so go ahead and try it! You'll realize quickly how you don't need all those Firefox extensions.

AndrewDucker 17y ago
Not all of them. But if you think I'm surfing without AdBlock then you have another think coming...
- truebosko 17y ago
  You can get Adsweep for Chrome which works pretty well. http://www.adsweep.org/ http://www.adsweep.org/ It's discontinued, but it works.

netsp 17y ago

Does anyone find that chrome is just unnecessary? It seems like google got to the game just when all the other browsers hot a point when they are all good. Not long ago, FF seemed like a real edge. Now I just use it cuz I'm used to it and it has extensions that I am used to. Safari is also good and even the new IE is good. I wouldn't mind using either of them or using chrome. The pace of improvement seems to be strong and even. I have no beef with an extra competitor, but I am surprised to say I have a browser and its good.

RyanMcGreal 17y ago
I think we can fairly credit Chrome with dramatically raising the bar for javascript performance across the competing browser engines. The V8 virtual machine for Chrome compiles JS to machine code rather than interpreting it or running in bytecode. Mozilla has since responded with the TraceMonkey optimization for its javascript engine; WebKit developed SquirrelFish Extreme; and so on.
- netsp 17y ago
  SUre. extra competition. An extra place for innovation to happen. All good. But it doesn't seem to amount to using the browser does it?

fjabre 17y ago

Chrome + Firefox = one browser to rule them all.!

fjabre 17y ago
lol. To guys with 'good' karma: not LTR fans I take it? It's worth noting that together these browsers will take significant market share from IE and Safari, especially when Chrome is released for mac later this year. Even more interesting is FF strong ties and history with Google.

seshagiric 17y ago

I don't know if anyone noticed, the page has an ad link for IE 8.0 at the very top before the article begins. That looked funny.

thejay 17y ago

still waiting to try the official mac version...