i kinda agree with ulanoff here:
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2329246,00.asp

personally i find it hard to believe it's based on webkit.. it'd have been much easier to build on gecko but if it's true, they must have went through hell fixing webkit's numerous bugs... anyway we have to try before we "buy"

Well, I look at it this way. If I don't trust Google for my searches, then I am surely not going to trust them for my browser.

Sure, JamesD, but you still use it for searches

We can't live without google searches at this point.

Read my post. Google IS NOT my default search engine.

Soooorry , you don't say that, you only say you don't trust Google for your searches. For me that doesn't mean you are not using it.

I don't trust it but I use it :/

for many years i preferred altavista, even after the yahoo acquisition but it's not as good as it used to and finally i had to make the switch to google.. though i noticed when it comes to software search, google is a bit too commercialised and will always display the most popular software when it comes to certain categories and after some pages, the results become useless.. that's when i still go to altavista or yahoo.. if you're looking for those unknown little applications on personal sites; google isn't the one to use.

for the best free software results i go there:
http://www.biglobe.ne.jp/
http://www.vector.co.jp/

and for every day search(politics, news, reviews etc) i now use the google minus google service which is great as it strips off all google-related bollocks:
http://www.startupbin.com

generally speaking, i find using several engines will yield better results in most cases.

Yes, that it is.

I use Google, Yahoo and Ask

When Google frustrate me, I switch to the others and, usually, is enough.

The hard-on people have for this is phenomenal.

I don't want to be like the others. I am sticking with K-Meleon.

Why not just use this?

https://ssl.scroogle.org/

I downloaded, installed and ran Google Chrome today.
What I like: Chrome renders fast.
Can bookmark ssl.scroogle.org for quick access for secure searching.

What I don't like: No way to turn off JavaScript, that I can tell ( bad for secure surfing ).
Have to go to IE > Internet Options > Tools > Connections to add a proxy. I don't think 'piggybacking' on IE is such a good idea.
CCleaner doesn't support Chrome. Maybe an update will be coming soon.
A size of 46.57 MB on my hard drive.

Yeah, Google Chrome is a Beta. So is Google Mail ( gmail ), but a lot of people use it.

I wanted to try a browser based on an engine I had not used before. I've used IE's Trident engine, K-Meleon, Firefox, and Seamonkey's Gecko engine and Opera's Merlin and Presto engines but no webkit engine.

Gmail has been available since 2004 and is still in beta stage, so it will be interesting to see if this browser is any different. What surprises me most is how much praise this is already getting and seeing users replacing Firefox with it.

I was hoping browsers like K-Meleon would become more popular in the future, but as of now it looks like it will be a battle between Firefox and Chrome. I would be curious to see how much of an impact this will make on IE, as Firefox and others have proven that users will make the jump to something new.

Personally, I will continue to use K-Meleon and hope others do too.

bill, if you'd really like to test a webkit browser, try arora:
http://code.google.com/p/arora/

personally i think google's chrome is a fiasco.. you can tell a lot about a product from its' beta version.

here's what i had to deal with during my very brief encounter:

the very first thing it does is adding an 'update' entry to startup in the registry.. with no options to remove it.. you have to remove it manually and when you fireup chrome it's there again, now that's very stupid.. if you must check for updates; first make sure the user has a say in it.. second; it doesn't need to be in startup..the program can check for updates everytime it is launched.
i did a registry restore after to remove all kinds of registry crap it added and it wouldn't run any more..no matter what i did, i registered its libraries but it wouldn't run.. so i just deleted it and forgot about it.

another annoyance with the setup is it doesn't give the user an option to where to install and perhaps that's a minor flaw but i don't install into c and i should have the right to choose the installation path instead of the user/google folder.

when it comes to interface, chrome lost it with me.. i'm very shallow when it comes to programs, if it doesn't append to windows own api using my own theme and colours..it goes right to the bin. i don't see that big difference or improvement with tabs pointing upwards, personally i like my tabs at the bottom anyways.. and it doesn't really matter if it's more 'ergonomic' to fitt's law if people aren't used to it.(for years now, windows users have been accustomed to a bottom taskbar, even though it's completely impractical and defies nature just because bill gates wanted a different-looking desktop from mac os)

i'm very sceptical about the javascript virtual machine.. javascript has always been simple, no matter how much you build on it, it doesnt need to be that complicated to require a virtual machine. and as far little as i've tested, i've noticed that some webkit bugs haven't been fixed or resolved properly.. utf-8 codes are still messed-up for example.

the only thing that i find promising is the separate process tab rendering.. not that it's that big of a deal, i've never had a 'bad' tab crash k-meleon.. and if i'm not wrong, in pre 1.5 kmeleons.. tabs(layers) technically used separate processes. anyways, it does offer stability and it should be(and probably will) implemented into other browsers.


i don't believe that many firefox/mozilla users will actually convert to chrome.. it's just the hype of a new browser..especially from a search giant like google; when it wares off and when users eventually confront the shortcomings they will go back to their tried and true browsers. the users who will probably stick to chrome are those who use web-applications based on google's widgets(gears).. so it might end into the flock category for social-network sites. as for ie users, i find it very unlikely that chrome will lure anyone from that side.

it's very sad how much time and development google put into this.. to end with this rather mediocre product.

On, http://www.leader.ru/secure/who.html\ , COLLECTED INFORMATION > Browser says Chrome is Netscape vs. 5.0.

Thanks for that review disrupted. I'm not able to download it now :/

Anyway I'm with you about the javascript after read their introduction comic but I still have to test.

john, i figured a way to manipulate some of the setup quirks(mainly the update startup thing) i don't know why they just don't give a proper link to download the full program instead of this stupid setup.

anyway, download their setup and as soon as it finishes downloading it will pop a dialog : chrome is ready to install blah blah..

at this point, exit the program
now, if you have erunt for restoring the registry.. best, just do a registry restore with it.. if not, no biggie.. if you have regcleaner, just open it and you'll find 2 new 'google' entries.. remove the update one


after that, fire msconfig and untick the google update entry from the startup list(that won't remove it from the registry though..but can be easily done later)

now go to this folder:
c:\documents and settings or users[username]\local settings\application data\google

inside that google folder, there will be some other folders.. in one of those folders(i don't remember which) you'll find a 7z compressed archive called chrome (21.8mb).. that's the main thing and what the setup has downloaded before extracting to the other folders.. copy that folder anywhere you like and now look for a folder called plugins cause that contains the gears and is not included in chrome.7z (i made the mistake of deleting everything and now i don't have gears but i don't really care about it now)

now extract the chrome.7z any location you like(that's where you will manually install chrome)

after extraction, you'll see a chrome-bin folder, inside it you'll find a folder with the version number 0.2.149.27 wwhere all the necessary files are inside, however the chrome.exe isn't inside that folder, it's right inside chrome-bin( that's why i couldn't make it run even when i tried to register dlls) just move chrome.exe inside 0.2.149.27 folder.. and then move the plugins/gears folder inside 0.2.149.27 too.

now go back to the c:\users or documents\username\application data\google and delete all the files and folders related to chrome..(not googletalk or anything else unrelated to chrome) and most importantly you must delete the update folder with the update.exe

now you can fireup chrome.exe from where you've manually installed it and it won't try to addupdate.exe to startup because the file that actually does that is gone..

you can check in chrome's about.. you'll notice the update server isn't running:


i tried fiddling with the gui.. but you can't actually remove the ;chrome; because both the tabbar and the statusbar are integrated inside the titlebar(complete no respect of windows api) it becomes very obvious when you rollup the titlebar


in a desperate attempt to change certain elements in a file called default.dll which contains the themes.. the gui got fucked


i was just trying to change the pride march blue into dark grey to make it look somewhat better but there's no point anyway..cause like i said i'm shallow and since api is not respected; this chrome isn't for keeps (i don't care if it's fast(it really is) or if it fixes me tea in the morning)

now i'm off to really test out the js vm(v8) and process handling.. which are the only things worthwhile before chrome meets its final demise on my pc.

after some good testing but not completely thorough.. here's my take:

browser startup from cold is exactly the same as kmeleon.. from warm, chrome starts faster than anything i've seen before..faster than ie..it's an instant run (note: my windows unloads dlls), ironically, it has a very odd 1 second delay at exit.. can't fathom why.

v8 javascript actually works very good but it's yet to stand the test of time because naturally i haven't been able to test out every aspect of it. but so far so good.

chrome's weak point is definitely when it comes to plugins.. it saw all firehog's installed plugins just like safari and opera etc. but it just couldn't see java jre.. i even moved the plugins to its own plugins folder.. but that made it crash on java aplet sites. quicktime plugins didn't crash but did nothing..it's like they weren't there and flash acted different, on sites with simple flash.. everything went fine, with more complicated flash.. especially with actionscript, things got messy.. it'd popup a message about a slow flash blah blah.. and eventually crash anyways



beatnik, crescendo and older plugins worked fairly ok..but some midi sites would make a tab "stall".. the only plugin that worked smoothly throughout all embedded tests was the wmp plugin with absolutely no problems.

the taskmanager(tabs separate process) is quite nice with a high memory toll.. opening 4 tabs will bloat into 40-60 mb ram usage(depending on the page content) and this browser is not shy of using all your ram either.. a hefty price for the sake of "stability".

the weird statusbar keeps popping and vanishing according to the site's connection negotiation.. supposedly a cool feature ..i found it very annoying.

tabs are completely manipulatable, you can detach them.. move them around in a very eye-pleasing yet very distracting way


i can already tell, mac users will simply go nuts with it.. all this eye-candy is very apt with mac osx and chrome should feel right at home on apple machines.. now i'm thinking this browser could be more of a threat to mac-safari than any other browser.



maybe i will keep this browser for when i feel like visiting garfield or tintin sites.. but other than that i just can't take it seriously.

conclusion: a very promising webkit experiment handicapped by a bubble-gum gui.

I uninstalled Chrome and answered the 'why did you uninstall Chrome?' survey from Google that appears after uninstallation. There are many reasons for Chrome uninstallation listed on the survey. Maybe people should uninstall, answer the survey ( to let Google know what's wrong ) and reinstall if you like Chrome that much.

...providing under-employed Google workers something to tinker with. Seriously, does the World need another browser? Let's do the roll-call just for Windows: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera, Seamonkey, Flock, K-Meleon (Yay!!!)

I envision the Google campus. They've hired a whack of new college grads and they don't have anything really substantial for them to do. How do they keep them occupied and still keep them excited about being part of "The Big G". How about giving them a little extra credit project to create yet another browser! Genius!

It reminds me of a story I once heard during Nortel's heyday before the big tech crash (I live in Ottawa, Canada, home of Nortel's previously massive R&D facilities. I even did a student intern job there for a few months). The story was that tonnes of the new grads hired by Nortel had absolutely nothing to do. They spent their days playing Minesweeper and Solitaire. The only reason they were hired was to prevent any other companies from taking advantage of their talent. And then the tech crash. Coincidence?

I'm not saying that Google is persuing this same hiring strategy. I'm just saying that a browser seems like a fun little project that would keep new hires occupied and maintaing their Golly Gee Whiz attitude about working on the Google campus.

Meanwhile, K-Meleon is the only browser I ever seem to need - except for IE once in a while for Microsoft services that won't run on other browsers like Microsoft Update or OneCare Safety Scanner. I quickly surveyed the Chrome website, and I saw nothing that gave me any reason to bother downloading it. I have enough pointless crap cluttering up my hard drive. I still have the scars from my silly adventure with Safari for Windows (I installed and uninstalled in the span of about 3 hours). I don't need yet another browser.

To which I can hear the rebuttal, "yeah, but people come out with new flavours of Linux all the time. Do you really need yet another Linux distro?"

But that's different, since so many open-source projects come out from people who just enjoy tinkering with software for the fun of it, not multi-billion dollar corporations. If Joe Shmuck from Podunk released his own browser and it was something half-way decent I'd say good for Joe Shmuck. I might download it and see what it could do. When Google releases "yet another browser" on the other hand I expect a genius piece of software that replaces half the software on my computer, loves me tenderly in the evening, and makes me breakfast in the morning, all while whistling the Star-Spangled Banner. There's gotta be a REALLY GOOD REASON for the browser, other than just spreading the Google brand to more places.

What's next, Google Cola? Google Airlines?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 09/03/2008 12:06PM by roystonlodge.

An article on the emergence of Chrome: http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-10/mf_chrome

How come that chrome is that fast?

hey roy, your nortel story made me laugh my socks off!.. i totally agree with you.. the more you use chrome, the more it becomes obvious; it's just a non-serious experiment programmed by people who never actually wrote anything but web applications.. i mean never really wrote a full program for a specific platform. it reminds me of some of those optimistic projects by MIT students.. very interesting experiments but not serious enough for an actual end-user to use every day.. that's exactly what chrome is, good thing is they made it opensource so if anything worthwhile can be used in real programs.. mozilla, opera or even ie can benefit from it.

panzer, the browser fast startup is probably related to independence from libraries and plugins at launch, since every tab uses own process, there's no point to load all necessary plugins or dlls at launch.. and just call them out when a tab/page requires them.

the page rendering is supposedly faster for 2 reasons, first is webkit which is a much simpler(in codes) engine compared to trident and gecko which should make pages load quicker and be more responsive, the other reason is because javscript has its own virtual machine and according to chrome's people.. page containning several different elements.. javascript..html..php.. flash etc will load all those elements simultaneously, unlike trident or gecko which wait till javascript is loaded first before continuing with the rest of the code..or vice versa. however i didn't really see any difference in page rendering in comparison with other engines or with webkit browsers.. ofcourse this depends on the pages themselves.. so only a prolonged test with many websites can prove this.

terry, thanks a lot for the link..off to read it now

I feel so alone not wanting to use this at all. Hopefully before next week the worldwide orgasms over this will have stopped.

When will KMeleon have this and is this possible to achieve in Kmeleon:

ability to kill individual tabs within Chrome could spell the end of the hair-tearing frustration of a single rogue web page bringing the entire browser crashing down.

Not only that but the way the browser will run every tab in an isolated "sandbox" can help provide better protection from malicious sites.

Ovum's Mitchell said: "Each tab is attached to a separate process and can be managed separately.

"It is a bit like what Window NT offered in terms of stability. Most of the current generation of browsers would crash if there was a badly behaved tab but Chrome can quit the tab and it will still work."

I might try it if it's ever as portable as K-Meleon.

Unfortunately for those of us with proprietary systems (Gateway) that can't run at least service pack 2, we're out of luck. Chrome won't run or even install unless you're running at least service pack 2. Oh well. <sigh> I haven't got -any- complaints about the other three browsers that I -do- use (K-Meleon, FireFox, and Opera) other than the inability for KM and Opera to run the handy extensions that make FF so handy at times. KM is still the one I choose over all others so far.

paul, if you'd really like to test out google's chrome; i've uploaded this file there:
(bandwidth problems)

this is a kgb compressed folder and requires the kgb archiver, which can be downloaded there:
http://kgbarchiver.net/

it's a highly compressed file and takes about 10 minutes to decompress, the folder contains only the essential chrome files and binary, this file also eliminates the startup-update annoyance.

extract it anywhere you like and run chrome.exe . i believe it should run on xp without the servicepacks, i think it should also run on windows 2000. it might give a message about not all features will be supported etc. but hopefully it will run on your machine without problems.

i'll be testin it out on windows 98 aswell, with xeno's 9x kernel http://x86.neostrada.pl/KernelEx/ .. not that i care too much about running chrome on 98, just trying to prove something



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 10/02/2008 11:00AM by disrupted.

Believe it or not, Chrome is being compared to K-Meleon in a Mozillazine Tech thread over at Mozillazine.org.

found the thread:
http://forums.mozillazine.org/viewtopic.php?f=37&t=829675&st=0&sk=t&sd=a&start=75

this orizgng guy doesn't know much.. chrome's ui makes it a heavy load on the cpu albeit being fast, anyone can test it with a cpu monitoring program.. it's almost like i'm a rendering a small video or animation on premiere or finalcut.

so yes, it does appear fast without respecting the api but the question is; how does it function on average and slow cpus?.. and how will your computer cope with chrome if you try to use other applications when it's running. on my relatively fast cpu 2.66, when i opened an image editing program to edit the snapshots, chrome started to cough.

in my very, very humble opinion.. a developer that tries to break away from the api and over-rides it with themes just for the sake to make teenagers drool in awe at rainbow colours; is commiting his/her first and biggest mistake. it seems that some programmers cannot see the line between desktop applications and games..

Quote
disrupted
paul, if you'd really like to test out google's chrome; i've uploaded this file there:
<----- snipped ----->

I -greatly- appreciate the offer but I think I'll decline for the moment. I think I'd be wise to finish up my hotrod "project" system that I'm building that's completely generic with namebrand components before I use anything untried. As the saying goes, "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." and my preferred browsers perform quite nicely.

Any chance you could post a 7z version (I am having a hard time decompressing the kgb archive).
And thanks for your many other recent contributions to all kmeleon users.
soccerfan