Open Sauce Software
Tasty titbits from people using Linux and other open source software in business.
Monday 8 September 2008, 2:28 PM
My Chrome honeymoon is over...
Chrome looked good, but after a few days, the missing features, and poor performance meant I've relegated it to an optional browser.
Despite the promise that tabs would run independently, I found that all my tabs seized up when one went Sad (maybe it was just a temporary halt, but it was bad enough).
Chrome may be optimised for Java and AJAX, but it's pants at Flash, and that means a lot of the links I click on seize up or give poor performance. This includes Google's own YouTube, and news pages with Flash adverts on them, that Chrome doesn't allow me to block easily.
Plug-ins are out of control. PDFs in the browser kill Chrome - that's no surprise; they kill Firefox too, on my PC. But in Firefox I can set a default to download the PDFs, and open them in FoxIt. In Chrome I have to spot PDF links and download them manuarlly.
Searching for Images and News, and searching within a given site, are much more fiddly in the Chrome Omnibox than in a Google Toolbar like the one on Firefox.
Chrome looked good, but it turns out, it's a major drag on actually working.
I'll give it another look if it changes, but for now, it's off my Start menu.
PreviousComments on this post
Peter,
Very interesting news. With all the flap and publicity around Chrome, it is sometimes easy to forget that this is still a beta release. We can hope that a lot of these issues will be resolved in the final release, or perhaps even in the next beta, if there is one.
Although they were not the primary reason that I gave up on Chrome (the constant fiddling around on the internet, even when Chrome itself wasn't running was my reason), I certainly did see the two big problems that you mention as well:
- Flash. Not long ago you could have ignored this, or just decided to live with it, but there are a LOT of web pages with embedded flash video these days, so this one turns out to be a royal pain.
- PDF. I'm not surprised that Chrome has trouble with it; I learned long ago to turn off the browser built-in PDF viewer and force it to download and display the PDF file in whatever my PDF viewer of choice happens to be. I'm VERY surprised that there isn't a way to do that in Chrome.
Thanks for sticking with it longer than I did, and passing along what you learned.
jw 8/9/2008
Agreed. I'm so surprised I can't turn off Chrome's PDF viewer, that I keep going back into Under The Hood, looking for a button or a page I missed. I keep expecting someone to tell me some obvious tweak I didn't see, but nothing so far.
I agree with you Peter on making Chrome an optional browser though am suss about what it may DO in the background! Why keep it at all is the obvious question? Having to navigate another environment or use it to store and access sites and info one can already get to through their 'main' browser is just a waste of time & space.
Good point. It feels like I should keep Chrome on my radar, but I'm paying more attention to the privacy concerns, especially now the German data protection authority has issued a warning about it.
However, Rupert made a good point elsewhere. If Chrome really does evil anti-privacy things (and I'd say monitoring what other apps are doing while I'm not using it would be in that category) then the code is open source, so people can see what it is doing (as long as people bother to look).
Well, yes and no... and it depends on how technically savvy one is, and how hard you want to look, doesn't it? I mean, yes, since it is open source one can analyze the released source code and determine what it is and is not doing - but there aren't a lot of people who are going to have the ability and interest in doing that, so the rest of the users will be depending on a relative few to "sound the alarm" if something is amiss.
Perhaps more importantly, and certainly more paranoid, how sure can we be that the binaries being distributed by Google are in fact compiled from exactly the open source they are distributed? Of course, this is true of all Open Source software in general, but once you become suspicious of motives, the suspicion and paranoia can expand very rapidly.
One interesting alternative comes to mind - perhaps someone would take the Chrome source code, strip out the sections that report back to Google, and distribute it as "Brass"? That would not be all so much different from Firefox/IceWeasel, would it?
From J.A. Watson...."and it depends on how technically savvy one is...."
There it is in black & white!...'Depends on how technically savvy one is.'
The G absolutely, positively, without a doubt, knows just how savvy most computer users' are and has realised that, quite frankly, most know jack! The G is 'checking' out what people have, what they most often navigate to, which apps they choose, how long they spend at a particular destination etc etc etc. Why else would they be developing practically every kind of conceivable application, widget, gadget, device, model, system and product one could possible think of?
And while we're on the subject, can someone please explain the following: Try attaching a zip file to a gmail and send to a contact. What do you get?
For SECURITY reasons this file cannot be sent!
Why? It's still a file. If the recipient doesn't want to open it, then it's up to them.
Beyond that....well....I need not go there.
I will however suggest that if anyone has the patience and the time and the ability, then they should take up J.A.'s proposition: perhaps someone would take the Chrome source code, strip out the sections that report back to Google, and distribute it as "Brass".
Doesanyonereallyknowwhatthehellisgoingon?
TFD
PS. Don't stop now. Stay on top of the G.
If anyone does make a Brass browser, I'll witness you thought of the name!
Thanks PJ!
Google Chrome first look - A worthwhile analysis
'From a risk assessment perspective, I can tell you that my threat-modeling spider sense went off from the moment of the download, was piercing my ears during the install, and became overstimulating during runtime. If security is the goal of this product, I’m afraid that Google has definitely failed.'
http://www.tssci-security.com/archives/2008/09/02/google-chrome-first-look/#comment-13751
