Spontaneous Monotony

EDIT: There is a very serious problem with the Google Chrome EULA. I would strongly suggest not using it until Google fixes this. EULA problems fixed. Just the technical (see below) and privacy problems to go then.

EDIT 2: It gets better. Chrome is based on an out-of-date version of WebKit that has a serious security flaw. Did Google suddenly decide to take advice on product launches from Microsoft or Apple’s MobileMe team?

Well this is a tad later than planned as I had been under the impression that Chrome was scheduled for 1800 GMT. Apparently not, but it’s now out anyway - you can get it from the official Chrome site - assuming you’re on Windows of course. First impressions? The layout is brilliant, it clears everything that you don’t use for normal web browsing out of your way.

I’m not sure I love the idea of having no separate search box - you just start typing in the address bar and ’search using YourDefaultSearchEngine’ is the default if you don’t enter a URL - but it might turn out to be brilliant if I spend enough time using Chrome to get used to it. As far as the actual browsing itself goes, I have to say that it doesn’t actually seem that fast compared to Opera or even Firefox. Given that I had similar concerns with WebKit’s other outing on Windows this isn’t overly surprising. Of course, this is an early beta but given Google’s blatant abuse of the term when it comes to Gmail et al I’m not giving them the benefit of that particular cop-out.

The setup was similarly uncluttered - it detected that Firefox was my default browser, and then imported (after I had given it explicit permission) all of my bookmarks (EDIT: Although Firefox’s brilliant ‘keyword shortcut’ bookmarks don’t work properly as Chrome replaces any space with a +), saved passwords, history and so on. No more annoying “which of these browsers do you use” tickbox dialogs, no more having to manually reenter passwords because the damn thing can’t transfer them for you. In fact, if I was to draw up a list of “things to nick from gBrowser” for the Firefox devs (Chrome uses code from WebKit and Firefox and is therefore under an open source licence itself) this brilliant importer would be top of the list. It even had my bookmarks toolbar sitting there waiting for me when I opened it.

What is glaring by its absence, of course, is extensibility. There’s no obvious sign of a Firefox-like friendliness to user addons. So no using CustomizeGoogle to protect your privacy from click-tracking. No installing Adblock Plus to get rid of that annoying visual and textual eye-spam. Of course the fact that Google is the biggest online ad company there is has nothing to do with this decision - the Google Chrome devs honestly believe that not including an Opera-style ad blocker built in, or allowing for extensions to fill the gap, makes for the best user experience. It’s the one big, glaring dollar-shaped hole in what is otherwise a very user-friendly browser.

Chrome has certainly given a sufficient sense of “ooh, shiney!” (not least in the ‘New Tab’ default page that beats Opera’s speed dial with a big knobbly stick) to justify the sudden hype that seemed to have exploded over the interwebs in the time I spent sleeping last night. I’ll certainly be playing with it extensively over the next few days to see what it’s like. However it’ll have to provide some startling performance or usability advantage over Firefox to make me switch permanently. Why? It’s Windows-only. I’m not a foaming at the mouth FSF type, but I do use Linux on my EeePC and being able to use the same browser (and the same user interface) across all the computers I use is a big deal.

If you use Windows exclusively, and you don’t mind having to view every online ad a website might want to eyespam you with, then Google Chrome will be an astonishingly good browser for you. If you’re cross-platform, or value the ability to block ads and stop click-tracking, then for the moment it’s just a very drool-worthy concept car.

I posted the other day about the surprisingly poor quality of the new version of Safari. People elsewhere assumed that the widespread reports of problems were simply minor bugs, or people who didn’t know how to install it properly, and other such defences usually reserved for the few Microsoft fanboys out there.

Now it’s official. Wired has done a benchmark of various tasks (such things as loading the Gmail inbox page) and Safari came dead last. Yep, worse than IE. Not only that, their review uncovered the sort of crashes and stalls that Apple-zealots have been trying to pretend don’t exist. It’s just lucky for Apple that they weren’t planning to make any money out of Safari for Windows - it’s turning out to be their worst product release since the puck mouse.

EDIT: It’s full of security flaws too! The reputation of Apple’s software division is going up in smoke by the hour.

You might remember that a while back I mentioned a new Windows browser based on Safari’s WebKit rendering engine. That didn’t amount to much, but not wanting to be outdone, Apple have released Safari itself for Windows, and it is even worse!.

Most of the Apple software which is available for Windows is actually pretty good. It might lock out features that every other competitor provides for free (Quicktime), or refuse to work with any player other than Apple’s own (iTunes), but what it does do, it generally does well and with a nice user interface.

Safari blows this reputation out of the water. Its page loading is, according to Apple’s publicity pages, the dog’s dangles:

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2.

Whoever wrote that should be careful he doesn’t put his nose near anyone’s eye. Safari is the most pig-slow piece of garbage that I have ever encountered. I’m not talking about complicated sites using lots of Flash or Javascript (I haven’t bothered to install the former, since I won’t be using Safari in its current state), I’m talking about relatively straightforward text-plus-pictures sites like BBC News. That, of course, assumes that it bothers to load the page at all. Often, during the ~5 second page loading time (by which point in any other browser I’ve reached the page and probably clicked a link to another one) the ‘progress bar’ will simply stop for no apparent reason. Sites that are working fine (as attested by IE7, Firefox 2, and Opera whatevernumber) simply fail to load. At all.

This could be down to individual connection foibles - I’m running NOD32’s Imon, and a router with its own firewall in addition to my software firewall. That wouldn’t be a particularly promising start (given that other browsers work in this setup) but it would at least be sort-of excusable for a Beta release. Unfortunately, from the comments at ‘Two a Day’, it seems that I am not alone:

Mac user at home, WinXP at work. Installed the beta at work and crashed when I tried to access Yahoo mail. Seems awfully counter productive to release a beta this unstable to the Windows people.

I never thought I’d say this, but I think that IE6 has finally lost its long-treasured crown of ‘worst Windows web browser ever’. Who would have thought that Apple, king of user-friendliness, could release such utter crap?