Agriya

Chrome is Finally Here for the Mac OS, and for Linux. Even if in Beta
Google’s Chrome has delivered what has been promised for months – versions that will run on the Linux and Mac OS. From the looks of it, the Beta Chrome on the Mac is going to be a serious hit, even if it is a few features short. One of the reasons Chrome comes a little lighter than usual is that Google really wanted to not have Mac users enter the new year still waiting, and preparing all the features for Snow Leopard would have taken longer. To begin with one of the most anticipated features on Chrome – the inbuilt App Mode, will be unavailable. Fluid, for example, a program that works on WebKit browsers, will be able to work on Chrome with no modifications; but this will only happen, once the App Mode is enabled.

Google Gears and the bookmark synchronizing feature Sync for Mac, are all features that will have to wait a while too. And Oh!, extensions are not fully supported yet either. But let’s look as the cup half-full now. The Bookmark Manager, a feature that everyone missed when Chrome first came to the Mac last month, has just been enabled – on version 4.0.295.0.Google calls it “rudimentary” at this stage, but it seems quite okay. Recognition of input from multi-touch screens and the Mighty Mouse, that was missing a month ago, is back with a bang. Hold down Command, and swipe on the trackpad with three fingers, and you have a new tab. Do the same and swipe left, and you should have a copy of your last tab, and so on.

The entire Chrome experience is so sharp, fast and fuss-free that they can’t stop pointing it out. But Chrome’s speed is impressive only when you compare it with Firefox; compared to Safari, Chrome can seem just a touch slower. Installing updates is pain-free and invisible too. The address bar on Chrome Google calls an Omnibox (perhaps a play on Omnibus). It is an address bar and a Google search box all in one. If you want to change your default search engine, there is no need to go to preferences either. Users begin to type in the name of the alternate search engine and press the tab button, and auto-complete will do the rest for you. Perhaps Chrome doesn’t have Safari’s glossy and colorful user interface; but it could do some things better for you. If you would give it a chance.

Google certainly believes that a rising tide lifts all boats up -Google follows an explicit policy of transparency and open industry standards to this end. However, Google’s upstanding principles may be getting it in trouble. Users who browse through Google’s own browser, Chrome, will soon be able to turn off ads: the very source that keeps the entire company afloat. This might seem like professional suicide – or it might seem like Google is showing remarkable restraint, and is sharing its good fortune around. Take for example, the new Extensions scheme in Chrome – their version of Firefox’s Add-ons. Firefox has ad-blocking add-ons, that are widely popular – like Add block Plus. This plug-in,blocks Google-supplied AdSense ads. Independent programmers have been working together on a rudimentary ad-blocker for Chrome too. And Chrome doesn’t seem to be trying remove it from its add-ons page.

The Google browser has nearly fifty million users; and that is only a fraction of all Google users on the Internet the world over. Google loses only a small portion of its potential Chrome advertising income, if people download an ad-blocking application. Firefox today has 7 million installations of its ad blocking software. It is not really that likely that ad-blocking will get so popular, that the Internet ad-serving industry should just go bankrupt. Google’s sentiment is that to live in fear of being shut out of its market, is kind of a primitive; to embrace the whole dynamic of the market, is more appropriate of a responsible Internet citizen. Perhaps this will foster creativity, and make people put up more creative, and watchable advertising.

When Google’s Chrome first came around, Firefox’s fans looked at this new open source attempt with suspicion. Certainly it was anti-Microsoft, and compared to the bloated ponderousness of Firefox, it was sharp, light on its feet and stable. A little on the defensive, they claimed that it was no surprise that Chrome was this fast: it had no add-ons the way Firefox did, to weigh it down. Well, Google has made its source code open for programmers to design extensions and add-ons for, and there are dozens of Chrome extensions available now on third-party sites: and surprise, Chrome does not slow down under the weight of these, and manages extensions which much better ease-of-use than does Firefox. For instance, you don’t need to restart your browser after you import an extension. So what kind of extensions are they that Chrome has, and do they rival Firefox’s considerable range?
Certainly there are not as many extensions available on Chrome yet; but the ones that are available, are pretty good. Here are examples of a few good ones:
Let’s say you are visiting the website of a bank or something, and there is a message at the bottom of the page that claims that the page will only display properly on Internet explorer 6 or better. We have two choices here: you could fire up Internet explorer, copy and paste the web address over there and start all over again. Or else, you could add the IE tab extension to Chrome, and Internet Explorer opens inside it. It is even ready for Windows 7.
Bubble-Translate uses the Google translate, and performs in-line translations from any supported language to yours. You install it, and an icon shows up in the address bar. Anytime you need anything translated on a webpage, all you need to do is highlight it and click the icon. The translation shows up in a tool tip.
Fittr sounds like it was named by the same person who thought of Flickr; Fittr adds features to Flickr; it gives you convenient shortcuts to use on Flickr and has better Autocomplete; and it gives you ready access to EXIF properties. Perhaps the best addition is the way it gives you the URL to any picture, that you can copy and send to someone.
The one thing that Chrome is missing is finally here; this should probably push it over 20% in market share line now.

Google is pulling the plug on Gears, its plug-in for all browsers, in favor of HTML 5, the web standard of the future. Adoption of HTML 5 by all should ensure that Internet works uniformly across all browsers, across all platforms. On the other hand, Microsoft has its Silverlight plug-in on the brain. The new Bing Maps that was announced earlier this week for example, needs Silverlight, and so will Internet Explorer 9, when it comes out. This completely fouls up Google’s plans for a plug-in free future. Having disparate standards on the Internet makes it very difficult for web developers to design pages that behave as expected across platforms. Browser designers use an application called Acid3, put out by the Web Standards Project to check a web browser for compatibility with web standards, not least relating to the Document Object Model and JavaScript. All the major browsers pass it with flying colors; Internet Explorer, with its proprietary standards and plug-in happy architecture, barely gets 20% in the test. Microsoft argues that their choices are not about maintaining proprietary competition, but about using the latest and the best technology out there. Using AJAX as other web browsers do, would simply be using old technology they complain.

HTML 5 would be truly cross-browser if adopted; it won’t even need Adobe Flash to play video. Certainly, Silverlight is more advanced; the trick that Bing Maps achieves with its seamless movement between map view and street-level view certainly is breathtaking. But getting people to install a plug-in is quite a headache for web developers. The effects achievable by plug-ins while very impressive, most often will not work at all because lots of people out there don’t even know how to install one. There is a video out on YouTube where a journalist goes about asking people in New York what browser they use; most of them reply “Yahoo” or “Google”. How do you get people like this to install a plug-in? The answer is, you don’t. You use an HTML 5 browser that does everything straight out of the box.

Google has gone public with its plans for Google Public DNS, a service that will let people take on Google as their DNS provider, for reasons of what is claimed to be a better, faster and more reliable Internet experience. And Google gets a lot more data to sift through for its search research, though Google denies this. How does all of this work though? Basically, DNS is like a telephone exchange for all of the Internet. A user-friendly web address like in Google.com, is really a disguise for the user unfriendly numeric IP address underneath. The DNS service is what does the translating from the memorable website name, to the unmemorable number. Usually, it is a server, a free service like OpenDNS, that performs the service.

To implement Google’s public DNS, you can find the relevant instructions on their DNS page. But there are a few points one would do well to keep in consideration. If you use a router for your connection you need to change the DNS entry over there, and not on the PC as you normally would. That will ensure that all the computers that connect to the Internet through the router will automatically stand reconfigured. Google’s Public DNS does not play nice with Internet Protocol Version 6; and it can disable Outlook. It would be best to do your test run, on a noncritical network.

So what is it like to actually use it? When you type in a URL the wrong way, on a normal DNS server, usually, you are just redirected to some landing page full of one-liner advertisements that the ISP likes to give you. One of the benefits to using Google Public DNS is that this never happens. You only get an error message. But to make this happen, you need to have configured the DNS on the router, not the PC. Using Google Public DNS isn’t that faster, in no way that would make a difference. You could save a second in the time it takes to load a page if you’re lucky, but that is all.

What does Google gain from all of this? It could be that Google wishes to be alerted to which websites in the world are hot at the moment, in real time. Right now, unless people are searching through Google, they would have no way of knowing. If people are using Google’s public DNS, everything would get routed through Google, and they would know. Researching search is their business.

Google has demonstrated a new concept version of Gmail that they advertise to be HTML 5 enabled. The World Wide Web’s always been written in HTML. HTML while satisfactory, has had issues in an obscure area known as the Web Applications; this is something HTML 5 tries to fix. This is no ordinary upgrade on Gmail or some app in being given off-line abilities though. To begin with, the database definition on HTML 5 allows any web function to locally create and utilize a database; and App Cache allows local caching of its executable state: both spelling improved speed in addition to off-line ability. HTML 5 is able to work on any standard compatible device; with its geolocation ability that allows the browser to reliably estimate where the device is located, it makes for a handy portable device too. And better standardization allows webpages designed on HTML 5 to appear in the exact same way on all HTML 5 compatible devices – computers, mobiles, anything.

Google used to have Gears, for its off-line ability. But HTML 5 is so promising that Google plans to phase out Gears now, and web developers are being encouraged to follow suit too. A part of Google’s reason for this current migration comes from the Chrome browser. While to support Gears the PC has the Chrome browser that is on version 3 yet, the Mac, will never have it. And it isn’t as simple as just designing a Gears version for Snow Leopard either – there are insurmountable technical hurdles, apparently. But all the functionality that Gears would bring, HTML 5 would do better, with an open standard to be supported on all browser platforms to boot. Support for Gears while it continues, is expected to not run forever: Google is asking developers to quickly make the shift to HTML 5.

Mozilla has issued a couple of major updates in quick succession; the first one, an incremental update, came in the last week of October, and it was called version 3.5.4. This one was only a bug fix update, aimed at smoothing the user experience, and not a feature update. Some of those bug fixes would only be of interest to anyone who was technically inclined; bugs that deal with arcane things like download filename spoofing, memory safety flaws in media libraries, cross-origin data theft with document.getSelection(), and heap buffer overflow, have been addressed. And there are a few serious security problems sorted out as well, like the ability of outside agents to run arbitrary code and install viruses on your computer, or the hanging pointer vulnerability issue.

But perhaps of real interest to mainstream users is the most recent update, still in Beta, the update release 3.6. This is quite a major update with lots of interesting new features for the power user. With Google’s Chrome snapping at Firefox’s heels, it is clear that Firefox is trying to address some of Chrome’s main competitive advantages: its overall speed, especially at startup. Version 3.6 does away with a few other recognized problems, such as JavaScript performance. For new users, Firefox introduces built-in support for the browsers seem system, Personas, the ability to view fullscreen movies with no add-ons, a scanning feature that will look through all the plug-ins installed on Firefox and check for updates for them to automatically, support for CSS, HTML 5 and other under the hood features. To bloggers, the new drag-and-drop feature can be particularly useful too. Firefox’s main advantage today is its vast installed base against Google’s Chrome’s. That browser may have a tiny installed base today but is expected to grow soon, especially with the release of Google’s Chrome operating system for netbooks. Competition always works in the consumer’s favour.