“Pet peeve: reporters or hosts doing an interview who, instead of listening to the current answer being given by their guest, are busy reading their cards to prepare for the next question”
I love FriendFeed since I get to vicariously hear about Chrome, here... - Mona N.
I just don't get it. Why are people freaking out about the unification of search and URLs? Hasn't Firefox done this forever? And Opera, too? The first thing I do in any fresh install of Firefox or Opera is get rid of the extraneous search bar. - Akiva Moskovitz
Akiva for some reason I never did that. This is the first browser that forced the issue. - Robert Scoble
OK, I'd like Gmail Redesigned skin back, and also Remeber The Milk Gmail plug in.. I make real use of RTM, and it's good to have it in the mail. Beats MS Bloatware anytime, and it's in the cloud too :0 - Ian May
But, Akiva, this is GOOGLE doing it. Now stop resisting, you know that "resistance is futile". (where have I heard that before...?) ;-) - Sprague D
my firefox only has one box for searching and urls. when i want to do a search i type "g" first if it's on google, or "a" if it's on amazon, etc. - Ranjit Mathoda
Robert, interesting! I just assume that all geeks look for customization options within 10 minutes of installing an app. Perhaps that's one reason why I am very reluctant to embrace Apple: they don't allow me to customize. - Akiva Moskovitz
browsing from chrome now... it's amazing. - Brandon
apart for some of the UI which is innovative, chrome best part resides in its core (multi threading, multi process) and the V8 javascript VM. The webkit rendering engine is already used by safari. We can only hope that potential rendering bugs will be solved quickly. And as they are using the same engine on Android they will certainly provide some simple way to sync everything between a desktop and a mobile platform (history, bookmarks...). - Olivier
Hmm, Chrome almost runs a little too fast on bomomo.com :) - Philipp Lenssen
Is it just me, or does the "Show best of: day - week" placing look a little messed up. - Michael Forian
I think it has to do with the size of the screen? I have a 19" monitor and when my chrome is maximized (or wide enough at any rate) the "show best of" is in the far right column. as you reduce the width of the screen, the "show best of" can move into the text box area. - Justin Long
Akiva, IE since at least IE4 or 5, you can search in your toolbar. - faboo mama
Sigh, just went to FF in Safari (all webkit, right? w3c standards, right?) well FF renders fine on safari, but as evidenced above chrome doesn't get it quite right... which puts me back in my, sigh, another browser to support and billions more (aggregate) out the window to support it frame of mind, i think that will be close to 10 configurations my company's QA team now has to support testing for... though a browsing dream this is my development/testing nightmare - James Ostheimer
I only use firefix's "awesome bar." love it. Can't wait to try google. - Andrew Warner
FF is working fine in google chrome for me. Dont know how come you guys r having a problem :S N as for the cool bar of firefox i dont think it searches google does it?? not sure but i think it only searches through ur history and bookmarks to see if u want to go to one of those sites. Also did u send a report to google about the bug so they can fix it? I was having problems with facebook and chrome. The comment button of the news feed and the share button on the posted items page ain't working when i click. - Eldon
No issues here with friendfeed using Chrome either... - Dukeswharf via twhirl
I don't get application icons. What so great about them? I can make Gmail look like a separate application, but isn't it more convenient to have it just in one tab inside browser?.Now, when I want to look at something in the Internet while reading gmail, I would need to start another browser. Or I am just missing something obvious... - Peter
@Peter, for something like Google Documents which can even work offline thanks to gears, application icons make sense. - Rahul Das
@Rahul : application icons are just a shortcut to chrome without location bar & buttons. and they are like .url file which are native on windows or shortcuts to a website in Program group. So what is the point with app icons ? Gears ? they built it for other browsers too - Olivier
I think the app icons are a nice touch because they pick up what the site is in a pictorial way. I don't have to pause to read anything, I can just point and click on my desktop. - Justin Long
I don't see this here,maybe they had fixed that already - Steve
greeaat news for all involved. congrsts. - Alex Gawley
Congrats Ben! I could see that coming at some point - Dobromir Hadzhiev
Congratulations! I knew it was coming when I noticed you'd been making changes and even had a FF email address... and there was no denial: http://beta.friendfeed.com/e/5... - Tony Ruscoe
This is recognition for his great work! Congrats! - Winston Teo
"Brian Rakowski walks to the whiteboard in a small conference room in Building 41 on Google's Mountain View campus. A lanky, gregarious man in his twenties, Rakowski is the product manager of a top-secret project that's been under way for more than two years." - Bret Taylor via Bookmarklet
Congrats on the great article, Brian. - Bret Taylor
@john: alleyinsider is the last source i will trust as to whether it is going or not going to happen. But, really, as @slippy says, choice FTW! The rest will just pan out. - Ashwin Bharambe
That picture is great. It looks like a band photo. - Andrew Burd
Internets are the new rock'n'roll, Andrew, didn't you hear? - Slippy Lane
The photographer, Joe Pugliese, has a great website: http://www.joepug.com/ In fact it's so great I haven't got round to reading the Wired article yet - Adewale Oshineye
Enjoyable read except for this completely bizarre paragraph -- "Not long after that, Brin and Page came by to check in on the furtive beginnings of their browser. "I remember sitting at my desk, which at the time had a stuffed snake running along the back of it," says Pam Greene, an engineer on the team. "Sergey was bouncing on one of those exercise balls, watching Darin give a demo, and petting the snake." - Osi
"The snake, called Mr. Bigglesworth, seemed to purr softly in Sergey's lap, providing a calming influence during the demo. However, when one of the tabs crashed, taking the browser with it, Sergey's voice took a more strident turn. "I have gathered here before me the world's best developers," Sergey began, "and yet each of you has failed to kill Internet Explorer. That makes me angry. And when Sergey gets angry, Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset. And when Mr. Bigglesworth gets upset, people die!" - Karim
Sergey then pressed a nearby console button that retracted Darin's chair into the floor below. A flash of flame could be seen as the screaming developer vanished from the conference room. - Karim
Somebody help me!" Darin pleads. "I'm alive, only very badly burned!" This proves to be very distracting, and after being interrupted several times, Sergey picks up his phone, and reports the situation to a henchman. "I'll go deal with it," he assures Sergey. "If someone opens the retrieval hatch, I can get out," Darin explains. At this point, the hatch opens. Darin is at first grateful, but then a gunshot is heard. - Geoff Longman
After a pause, Sergey is satisfied Darin is dead and attempts to continue explaining his plan, only be interrupted by Darin again, who says indignantly "you shot me! You shot me right in the arm! Why did you-". Darin sentence is cut short by a second gunshot, which proves to be the end for him, as the hatch is heard to close. (http://www.moviedeaths.com/aus...) - Geoff Longman
Google’s Chrome is aimed at Windows, not IE
This is no longer about browser but about the an entire marketplace spread between desktop, mobile and web. With Chrome, Google’s taking a shot at Windows, not paltry Internet Explorer
I’ve covered this in more detail on my blog
http://sachendra.wordpress.com... - Sachendra
The point of Chrome is the same point one would make about the iPhone. Will iPhone outsell Nokia worlwide in total number of phones sold? Not a chance in hell! Has it changed the face of mobile phones forever...absolutely. This is where I think Chrome is a fantastic concept. By open sourcing D8 Google has literally empowered every other browser including Safari and Firefox to be Windows beaters. In actual fact IE may even implemented their own canibalised V8 to canibalise their Microsofts existing fat client business. If you ask me, Google is the master of judo in this case. google 2 MSFT 0 - John Kotsaftis via feedalizr
I haven't been able to find many details about the V8 design, but it's apparently a straight JIT (no interpreter) with inline caching of property accessors. I didn't see anything about HotSpot/TraceMonkey-style optimizing compilation, and it doesn't seem to use any intermediate language. (http://code.google.com/apis/v8...) Is this the future of dynamic language runtimes? Am I a nerd? - Jim Norris
Nice to see Wired putting out a great article in a timely manner for a change - rather than spend page upon page talking about minor internet celebs and how they gatecrashed gawker media parties to build their fame. - Jonathan Beckett
Jim, tracemonkey should still be faster. Paul friendfeeded an article comparing them. I should say that tracemonkey will still be faster eventually, unless V8 adds hotspot-like tracing as well, in which case, my money would ride on V8, since Google probably has half of the hotspot team :) - Sanjeev Singh
“Here's an idea not everyone will like: Firefox and IE should drop their rendering engines and switch to Webkit (used by Safari and Chrome). Then we wouldn't have the added annoyance of targeting three different DOMs.”
I'm sure someone will say something about "competition", but since it's open-source, they can continue to compete, just as Google has with their new JS engine, V8. Since everyone would be starting from the same point, they would all have the burden of not breaking compatibility. - Paul Buchheit
Microsoft would embrace and extend, creating WebKit Expression '09, and Firefox would only use WebKit 520 for the next 3 years, complaining that Apple and Google won't slow down their development to accommodate an 18 month development cycle. - Mark Trapp
NO -- webkit is at least poorly studied for security vulnerabilities, I don't want to live with swiss-cheese-alike crap from fruity company JUST because some few entrepreneurs want to make their life easier!!! - silpol
Extending the product is a good thing -- it's how the platform advances. As long as it's all open-source, we all win. - Paul Buchheit
It's not that everybody should like it. It's that they should all do it. - Louis Gray
Actually, that's already been discussed as part of the Gears' strategy... simply make Webkit a plugin for Firefox and IE. It's actually not *that* outlandish. - Chris Messina
Paul, the problem is WebKit is licensed under the LGPL; Microsoft could merely create a plugin to WebKit that did all of its extra features. They really wouldn't receive all that much flak about it, either. - Mark Trapp
@Chris - I recall that being mentioned at google code. I wonder what it would take to make a plugin for IE or firefox to use complete chrome processes as an 'accelerator' - Robin Barooah
Yeah, an IE "plugin" is the way to go. That way users don't even need to change their habits or UI, and it could potentially fall-back to IE for sites that still don't work with webkit. There's just no advantage to having different rendering engines at this point. It's high cost, low benefit. - Paul Buchheit
Didn't Netscape 9 allow users to choose which rendering engine they wanted to use? - Tony Ruscoe
@Tony: Netscape 8 did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...) . You'll need to manually type the closing bracket, it is being excluded as part of the URL and I can't manually fix it. - nadim
for you all dearst proponents of single engine - go read "1984" book... dependence on one engine (or any subsystem, when it comes to that) for whole world is dangerous... and utterly stupid when it is done for sake of small group's convenience :-/ - silpol
@slipol - that would be true if we were talking about one engine developed by one company, but with an open-source project with many developers, I don't see how this could be a problem. Do you think that hundreds (maybe thousands) of developers worldwide will all collude to do something evil? Well, if so, some other people will come along and create a fork. In fact, WebKit was forked off of khtml. Let's not forget to thank the KDE folk for the good engine to begin with. - Robert Felty
Why would the two most popular browsers in the world change? - Globecode
Rob, the problem that silpol is presumably saying exists with a monoculture is that everybody is vulnerable to the same diseases. This has happened in the past where security vulnerabilities in compression and encryption libraries have made huge amounts of unrelated software vulnerable. But Paul has a good point that a dominant platform certainly makes things easier for the developer, which is why there are millions more apps for Windows than any other platform. - Gabe Schaffer
You are making a big discussion out of nothing. The hypotesis that if they all use the same basis, that will have the same DOM, they will be interoperable. That has been proved wrong: all the web browsers out there already have the same working basis (Web Standards) and still they messed things up. What makes you believe that this would be different? - Marcos Marado via fftogo
Marcos, the difference is that they all started from very different places and IE and Firefox both have a lot of historical gunk. Web standards wasn't their working basis, the browser wars of the 90s was. The browsers have been converging for years now, which makes web development a lot better than it used to be, but that only emphasizes the uselessness of having multiple rendering engines. The monoculture argument is of course nonsense. Having three engines isn't going to make the world any safer, especially since they use the same base libraries. - Paul Buchheit
@Paul I can only assume that you proclaim monoculture argument as nonsense only because you've never seen domino effect on large scale, with species of slightly different nature still staying... I've heard same kind of argumentation from Opera people as they were bragging on idea of "one proper engine under one proper standards" only to show them a bunch of weak points in their cardboard architecture, granted I had apropriate tools. But... Whatever. - silpol
The monoculture argument is based entirely on analogy, which makes for nice stories, but is a very weak form of evidence. - Paul Buchheit
Paul, but if they really wanted to interoperate, i.e. If the browser wars were really over, then they would just stop the last few years nonsense and go for standards compliance. Why did Apple fork KHTML? Why does IE insist in not adapting standards? Ultimately what matters for both end users and web developers is that each browser sees the same page in the same way. It's fictitious to say that the way to acomplish this is making them use the same code (why not use your argument for Javascript?): the way to do this is simply to follow the rules - in the web case, standards. - Marcos Marado via fftogo
Why bother with HTML, JS and others such standards then? Let's close up those shops and just standardize everything through Webkit. Which is great, unless if for whatever reason Webkit doesn't work on your device (or until the great Webkit fork). Let's standardize DOM instead, ne? :) - David Lee
Standardization is hard because there's a large amount of pages crafted specifically for quirks particular browsers. Going standard breaks them. - 9000
it sucks that it doesn't work on Windows Mobile yet.... ugh, I'm stuck in the stone age with IE6... - Harold
This conversation is so all over the place, I don't even know where to begin. All I can say is that 1985 wasn't as bad as I would have thought, seeing as it came after 1984. - Chris Messina
What's the point? You're still going to have to support IE6 for a decade anyway, and any new browser has to not break old apps. It's like those people who suggest that MS just replace the Windows kernel with Linux, as if all old apps will suddenly disappear, leaving the slate clean for all the glorious new apps to come. - Gabe Schaffer
that's one idea i love! standardization, baby! - stefan
Until someone decides that engine is crap and writes their own? - Robert Konigsberg
Windows media or Real media? What happend to those lovely embeded players? Google should start streaming this kind of events in YouTube! - Christian Van Der Henst
I can't understand why google does a window resize ¬_¬ - javier aroche
As usual, Chris gets the big picture. - Chris Baskind
Chris is a tech superstar that I listen to deeply. He is excited by Google's moves and lays out the poor execution on the Mozilla side of the fence. - Robert Scoble
What I missed in the Chrome comic was a mention of browser add-ons like Firefox's. Surfing the web without Adblock Plus is hard to imagine. - Ole Begemann
or without the delicious add-ons... or the evernote add-on... but at least bookmarklets are (likely?) to still work. - Justin Long
The comic was aimed squarely at devs. There was little mention of what would make end users choose Chrome over IE. - Paul Grav
Best read so far, been waiting for a commentary like this... - Kevin Cearns
Gee, Ole... why wouldn't Google want you running AdBlock Plus? Can't imagine. ;) (Now, I agree, add-ons are cool, but as a publisher, I'm not going to weep over that one...) Anyway, I wouldn't count Firefox out. Obviously, what Google addresses is the performance/reliability side and building around apps. Both FF and Chrome are built around standards, both closely married to JavaScript for what they do next. I think this could be a great rivalry, frankly. - Peter Kirn via twhirl
They talk explicitly about plugins on pages 29-32 of the comic so you should be able to have your AdBlock. I seriously doubt Google cares that much about AdBlockers -- which makes up an extremely small percent of the overall market, and which is probably made up of people who don't click ads anyway. - Chris Messina
Chris: I suspect by plugins they mean Flash etc. and not Firefox-style extensions. But I hope I'm wrong. - Ole Begemann
Will they, wont they. Time will tell. Who do you want to hate today? - Steve Blamey
Interesting article. More choice = better for the users. But I think that you are over-hyping the death of Firefox. As far I can tell. Firefox 3.0 is much better than Firefox 2.0 and Firefox 3.1 will be better than Firefox 3.0. Multi-process, V8 and native Gears support are definitely a step forward but firefox is part of an ecosystem so I would not count them out (A lot of people said that Safari meant the death of firefox and firefox is doing much better today then back them). I look forward to revisiting this post in 18 months and see how the mozilla team/community proved you wrong! - Edwin Khodabakchian
Hmm, well, I didn't claim to foretell the death of Firefox at all. In fact, Firefox will likely continue to gain marketshare and attention (as the web is still expanding). One of my points is that Mozilla missed the opportunity to be the foundation of Chrome -- and will now have to play catch up -- instead of set the agenda for what's next. - Chris Messina
Do you think that was a technical decision or a control decision. From the last couple of interviews I have seen of John Lilly, I think that he has a really clear vision around performance, usability and ecosystem. Performance is coming in 3.1. Usability is driven by some of the concept Labs has been pushing out and ecosystem come from the fact that there are 100s of extensions to firefox and a really vibrant community around firefox. That is a very unique blend. Chrome has made some good progress around performance but there is not much innovation around usability and extensibility. Google has proven with Android acitivities and cross application data sharing that they are capable of innovating...but it will take before those things make it to Chrome so while firefox might have to play catch up in part of the architecture, Chrome will have to play catchup in others. - Edwin Khodabakchian
I am using chrome right now, and I really miss my shareaholic addon as well as my stumbleupon bar. hopefully the developers get crackin for plugins for this browser. - James Campbell
I'm hoping to see some good progress from Mozilla. I do worry a bit about them fish-tailing and not being able to say no to developers (whose needs are often very different from regular folks). We shall see.
@James Campbell:There will be a need for web hooks, no doubt... and places to insert additions or modifications to your browser experience -- I don't really doubt that (some standardization there would be nice too). - Chris Messina
"Heading into a battle with Cisco and others, Google is launching a YouTube-like video service for businesses.
Dubbed Google Video for Business, the service makes it easy for large businesses to tap into everything from camera phones to handheld video cameras and upload video to a corporate network. The videos can be standard YouTube-style quality or higher quality video as well.
" - MG Siegler via Bookmarklet
"We've come a long way since Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer in the Windows operating system and was deemed a monopolist, but that won't stop the big players from playing favorites with their own applications and giving you reasons to stick around." Makes you wonder if the EU comission will be happy about this? - Roberto Bonini
With Android only being only a few weeks away, I do not think this is a coincidence. Both Apple and Opera have linked their mobile and desk based browsers - move over Google are on their way. - jon bradford
“I have a service which is currently not supported by friendfeed so our users subscibe to their feeds as to 'blogs'. Our feeds have a small piece of text for each entry which we'd like to see on friendfeed as a comment (like user description in del.icio.us feeds). Is there any way to achieve the...”
I think it's the industry's best chance to topple IE. - l0ckergn0me
I'd love to take it for a spin. Is there an ETA for the public release yet? - Ray Metzen
I read the comic book twice, and despite my Safari leanings, I think this one has legs. Question is... if iPhone trumps Android, does Google port it to the iPhone? - Louis Gray
That's not the point. I use Firefox, and want to know why Google, which has a good relationship with Mozilla (apparently) chose to go the Not Invented Here route, when there was an established open source platform to work with. The only thing I can think of is that this is to get a good mobile browser since webkit has proven itself on the iphone. - Deepak
Please let Google release it as an app for the iPhone with Gears, Flash and Java enabled. And please let Apple let them do that! - Tony Ruscoe
I'm still curious about the firefox usage aggrigation project mentioned in the first half of the year, had a techcrunch article but has gone strangely quiet ever since. Some are claiming it'll cover only interface stats and others actual traffic data. - alphaxion
first release will be sep-02. it now seems clear that APIs like safebrowsing [http://bit.ly/3QvWL7] and gears [http://bit.ly/4amra2] were all part of a longer-term strategy to change the game for their app set. - MikeAmundsen
Deepak, the most logical explanation seems to be that Google wants to take Chrome in a direction where Mozilla doesn't want to go. What exactly that is remains to be seen when the thing is released... - Ray Metzen
Deepak, it may be that the Webkit codebase is simply easier to work with. I haven't looked at either in years, but Firefox used to be quite a beast. - Paul Buchheit
Sounds great to have new players on the browser field. But how will the support from Google to Mozilla be affected
