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If you are a Google Chrome fan owning a Mac, you probably want to go here and sign-up for the Google Chrome for Mac news update, and get instant notification once the Mac browser version is out (in Beta ofcourse :)

In their words “Google Chrome for Mac is in development and a team of engineers is working hard to bring it to you as soon as possible.” I am really glad to hear about this, but I hope it’s not the reason PC Chrome is not getting good enough attention.

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If you’ve been using Google Chrome recently, and for Windows users I don’t see a reason why you shouldn’t minimally at least, you may have noticed the problem when you try to save an image with a different than current image name. Problem is, if you rename the image to say “Mars” and click save, it will get saved as the image name, concatenated to the file extension without the dot separator, e.g. “Marsjpg”, which ofcourse would forbid you from automatic Image opening with default Image Browser.

Now this is a known bug that’s been reported since Sept 4th, and it’s still marked as Uncofirmed. I’m not sure why such a simple obvious bug is taking so long. Perhaps Google was depending too much on open source developers help, not sure. But 1 month is long enough to confirm an obvious issue. Those delays would make people lose faith in Chrome, and stop taking time reporting future problems.

Since the bug seems to take long to fix, the quick and simple work around for you and me is to write the full image name with extension, “Mars.jpg”

I can just imagine the developer working late at night to finish the Save Image As feature, and he goes something like return file_name && file_extension, forgetting the dot separator. Perhaps a refreshing Pepsi would do. Works for me :).

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One would thing I’m juts saying this out of faboyism, but I woke up today (without washing my face) for my routine email and sites check up. I started Firefox, and suddenly I had this strange feeling the browser is not fast enough, and I could be using some better. Immediately, I closed Firefox, launched Google Chrome, kept using it for the rest of the day. You won’t find a match anytime soon when it comes to speed. Occassionaly, the CPU was running intesively, but that’s only occasionally, and for what in return? 

Using Google Chrome makes me feel like I just upgraded my DSL connection. Doing my regular heavy day use on various sites, I can’t recall any issue so far regarding site support. Also, as I imported the Firefox bookmark, I realized Google Chrome takes an extra mile in identifying your Bookmark Keywords.

As you can see, it identified the letters “ut” which I bookmarked previously as YouTube Search, and once I write anything after ut, like “monkey island”, it signals we are searching this specific site. Cool hah!

Some Mac users are holding up until the Mac version comes. I tell you, you gotta give this a try.

Further review of Google Chrome here.

UPDATE: As I finished writing this article, I came across few things:

1. An old version of WebKit used in Google Chrome has been found vulnerable already that would, with little social engineering, allow malwares to be downloaded onto user’s desktop, and get executed without user permission. Demonstration of this hack has been made public. When I read about how each tab is a process, and how it can talk deeper to the OS than regular browsers, I freaked yesterday for a moment. But then I thought the Google Chrome sandbox is safe enough to forget about it. Below is a snapshot of how with Google Chrome, a website can ask for permission to create desktop icon for Remember The Milk (which brilliantly uses Google Gears by the way).



 

I don’t think creating desktop icons is possible with other browsers. Is it?

2. Google Chrome work with Flash but not JAVA! :(. This is one thing that would make me open another browser. But then again, I’m not thinking about abandoning Firefox. I would miss all the great extensions it has. No one can compensate it! I had to open it today to use the color picker ;)

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I was really shocked when I read the news today. A Google browser? Where did that come from? When I first started reading, I was surely thinking this is another Lively bubble that will burst tomorrow by morning.  When I started going through the Google Chrome Book however, thigns started to look a bit different. A bit more innovative.

• New process per tab: One tab (site) cannot hang the whole browser, and a crash won’t kill all other tabs. I.e, multithreaded.
• Process per tab means also I can kill the tab I want. No mass punishment.
• Automated Site Support Testing: Using what Google already has of site index, running automated testing, on most popular sites first and then down to others, gives the Chrome browser an upper hand.
• V8 Generates Machine code: Unlike regular browsers which interprets code over and over, V8 generates machine code from the javascript code. This results in much faster performance.
• Better garbage collection: With such implementation, unused memory blocks can be easily reclaimed by the system, unlike regular browsers.
• Most Visited and most recently bookmarked default homepage, allowing you easy browse to your most probably target page.

After going through the comic book of Chrome, I was thinking this could really be a revolutionary product of 2008 (Yes, could be better than JesusPhone!). Come back at night, I download and install the browser. Pretty small and quick to install, imports all bookmarks and history urls. Programs starts in about 30 MBs of used memory, and this is what I found after quickly testing it against some sites, and comparing it to Firefox:

• Interface is pretty simple, quick to load.
• Usability: No change for Firefox users. IE users… Figure it out!
• Response: For opening and closing tabs it as pretty quick. Doesn’t feel like opening a new process.
• Page load time: Just Amazing. Gmail ofcourse runs like the wind. Yahoo Mail! experience was also superb to all other browsers I used before. The performance is really fast, I would say faster than Safari, though I don’t have benchmarks.
• Most visited pages, and the smart address bar seem pretty helpful and handy.
• Session Maintained: Even though closing a tab kills the process, I revisited Gmail in a new tab and my session is still maintained.
• No Undo Close Tab: Owww :(
• Web site support in general was perfect, except Wordpess as I was writing this post. I noticed I cannot use the mouse drag to resize the image, while I was able to do so in Firefox. Strange!
• # Processes: Unfortunately, after opening three tabs, I ended up with something like 5 processes running.

(DONT COMMENT ON # OF UNREAD EMAILS!)

As you can see, 5 is > 3 tabs, so it does require additional processes as it seems. Also, as more processes are running, you get more CPU processing. I could hear the CPU whining. As I opened Firefox for comparison, the computer started halting for few seconds every now and then. This does not happen that often with Firefox, so I would assume it’s the Chrome processes. I could see some of them taking 10-20% of the CPU usage. Combined together, I would not suggest leaving them on when you want to run a separate intensive application, like a game for example.

• Memory usage: Opening 5 sites (including Gmail and Yahoo Mail) in both Chrome and Firefox, Firefox was taking around 124 MB, while Chrome processes all together were consuming above 250 MB! That’s a lot of memory to take, and over a large number of processes. Ofcourse, unused tabs (processes) may be stored on hard disk until later use, but still, the memory utilization was not the best part for me. Closing any tab however kills the process instantly, thus retrieving back the memory. Unlike Firefox, where the browser after sometime of heavy use would need to be killed to give back some of it’s allocated unused memory.

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Below are some useful links relating to the new Firefox 3 browser that I found interesting, and I think Firefox users should go through, non-Firefox users may want to take a look at, and see what they’ve been missing of their web life.

• Top 10 Features of Firefox 3
• Power User Guide to Firefox 3: Trust me, there is something useful to learn from here about how to make your experience better. If you don’t like something, Firefox is flexible. Don’t complain, fix it.
• Firefox History in Pictures
• Web Browser Speed Testing: Firefox according to this article is the best in memory usage, and not bad in speed as well.
• Tweak Firefox 3 AwesomeBar: The new Firefox smart bar is pretty amazing, and one of the best things in the new release. It searches your site history, bookmarks, and bookmark tags as well.  But it doesn’t stop there. Through customization and plugins, you can actually do more. I will have to give it a better look after I familiarize more with current status of the setup.

Hope you find them useful. Share any others you have here.

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The following is an interesting article from LifeHacker speed testing all major latest browsers, namely Firefox 3 RC 3(Releasse candidate 3), Opera 9.5, Safari 3.1.1 (win), and IE 7.0.6.  All tests have been carried out on Windows Vista OS. So it’s not Safari’s best place, and it definitely is what IE7 can best hope for, unless they admit Win XP is better ;).

What’s interesting is how Opera was the fastest in startup, followed by Firefox 3 and Safari was the last. A batch of 8 tabs opening at same time put Safari in the lead however, neck to neck with Opera, Firefox 2 seconds slower, and IE7 falling behind.  So Safari is best with concurrent tasking, however not very often you would want to do this in real life. Personally, I do it when opening multiple search results at once, but do you?

In terms of Javascript & CSS (important for AJAX), Safari was the best, Opera 2nd, Firefox 3rd and IE7 as always the last. (I didn’t do those test I swear!).

Memory use, what’s all Firefox fans been calling for. Firefox was #1 overall, IE7 only best at startup, when there is nothing more than MSN page probably.

A point to make however is that, Firefox was tested with their latest and greatest so far, while IE8 is still coming back and the older version was put under the test instead.

My opinion:  I am pretty much loving the Firefox 3 speed so far, no issues at all. It does fall behind Safari and Opera, OK! But doesn’t fall that bad to make me switch. Memory use as the benchmarks show are great, actually the best. The security of Firefox compared to Safari, which lacks anti-phishing is so much higher, and it has the richest plugins library amongs all. Firefox 3 has made it for me, more than Firefox 2 did to it’s successor. In the words of today’s generation I tell you “MAHALO!”

Please visit the original link for graphs and more details regarding the test.

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I had 3 downloads so far (Windows @ Home, MacBook Pro, and Linux @ work). Windows went perfect, Linux needed a bit of a small hack to get it replacing the old installation, Mac download broke first time and then went on.

I was thinking of crashing over parents house and doing a by-force upgrade to all their browsers. Unfortunately, things got in the way.

How much did you get? And what’s the favorite feature you found in Firefox 3 so far. I so much like the search of bookmarks and history all together, despite how it could crash on your privacy to some extent by chance. Also, the Firefox remember password now is a bar at the top that doesn’t hold back page loading. MUCH BETTER!

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