When Google first announced the release of it’s new “Chrome” browser the geek that lives inside me stood up and started banging on the inside of my skull with a large sledge hammer until I started to pay attention and the first thing I thought was that I just had to test this thing out. I loved the idea that Google would actually come out with their own browser—it was bound to shake things up and so far, it seems to have done just that.
Article after article began showing just hours after the initial announcement. It wasn’t even available for download yet and it was a couple of hours before anyone even found a single screenshot of the actual browser itself. So I’ve decided to leave out all the stuff from this post that’s already been published in hundred or so sites already and concentrate on my own experience with Chrome so far. If you want to do some boning up on all the info that’s gone before just search for the term “Google Chrome” or “Chrome browser”—use Google search to do this. 
So yes, I downloaded it and yes, I’m testing it but I waited until I was able to read not only those many articles I mentioned above but the comments as well and I can assure everyone that the preconceived notions and conspiracy theories are flying left and right in good style. To assuage some of your fears though I recommend you read two recent posts by Matt Cutts and though Matt does work for Google he’s one of the members of the team that works on Google’s search engine, not a member of the Chrome team and he had reservations as well until he found the answers to his many questions.
His first post; Google does not want rights to things you do using Chrome, covers the bugaboo of the wording of section 11 of the usual EULA that is provided with Chrome (as like other applications) that initially stated that basically Google owns everything you may publish while using the Chrome browser. This turned out to be a mistake.
You see, Google uses the same basic EULA statement for all their applications and services and modifies various sections of the EULA for each individual application or service as needed and in this case modifying the wording of section 11 fell through the cracks before the beta was released…oops.
Matt’s second post; Answers to common Google Chrome objections, covers many of the initial objections, misconceptions, preconceptions and just plain "tin foil hat" paranoia that’s been brought up since the initial announcement. I’ve verified that these conspiracy/”there’s got to be a catch”/”Google’s mining everything you do in Chrome” pronouncements as pretty much plain bunk and I’m satisfied that Chrome is actually (gasp!) safe to use or at least as safe as any major browser is these days and no, Google isn’t mining your usage unless you checked that little checkbox upon install that states "Send usage statistics to Google etc, etc…" then of course they are. You said they could.
So here’s some of what I’ve encountered while using this new browser, listed in no particular order. This post isn’t meant to be all inclusive since there hasn’t been near enough time to test every little thing but enough to form a fair initial impression.
Have you seen Jeff Chandler’s post at Weblog Tools Collections ? The one called Stop Blaming The WordPress Team and the comments thereof?
Oh my goodness, what a fine, unique and wonderful thread they have going there which is something that tends to be rather rare. The arguments are so well stated and personal jabs are at a minimum as compared to other such other “high energy” conversations I’ve seen over the years and absolutely entertaining as well (yes, I’m being serious, not sarcastic 
).
The premise:
Jeff takes on the age old problem of people who think WordPress is to blame any time an upgrade breaks one of their plugins, causes massive problems when upgrading from an ancient version of WordPress to the latest version when they didn’t bother to keep their install up to date in the first place (a very bad practice) and, of course, the old saw of too frequent a release schedule which has been heard almost since the very first new version of WordPress was put on the streets regardless of the frequency of any past release schedule.
The commenters range from those who believe that WP site owners (the self hosted type) have total responsibility for their site (yes, they do) including having to learn PHP, CSS, all FTP protocols and commands, Cron jobs and plowing through the code of every plugin they want to install looking for malicious code or any mistakes before installing etc, etc, (no, they don’t actually and deep breath) to those who believe that the WordPress developers are the ones responsible for “ease of use” in administering a WP powered site, making the Codex easier for the beginner to use, making sure that all plugins are compatible with the next version etc, etc, ad infinitum.
The post gets right down to the point or points as the case may be and his take on subject is as close to the mark as you could get in my opinion but I doubt Jeff expected the near 200 comments (currently) that followed and more are still coming in.
If anyone wants a (almost) real time, up close view of the most classic WordPress argument being batted around in a surprisingly amicable manner and for what may be a fine learning experience for those newer WordPress bloggers as well, I strongly suggest you check this out for yourselves.
Tags: plugin compatibility, responsibilities, upgrading wordpress, WordPress
Mark Jaquith, one of the WordPress core developers just printed a list of government agencies that make use of WordPress in some way shape or form and of course I just had to reprint the list here (forgive me, Mark. I just couldn’t help it). He got the list from WordCamp San Francisco, 2008.
- Air Force
- Army
- Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
- Coast Guard
- Defense Intelligence Agency
- Department of Energy
- Department of Homeland Security
- Department of State
- Department of Treasury
- Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA)
- Marine Corps
- Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)
- National Geospatial Intelligence Agency
- National Reconnaissance Agency
- National Security Agency (NSA)
- Navy
Adds a whole new meaning to the phrase, “Good enough for government work” now doesn’t it?
Thanks, Mark!
When it comes to fast browsers, Firefox 3.0.* tops them all but hold up…it has competition coming and that competition comes in the form of none other than Firefox 3.1, due near the end of the year.
When the folks at Mozilla first started work on Firefox 3.0 and began releasing the nightly builds thereof I took an immediate interest in testing this new version as it was being built so I could have first hand knowledge as to where Mozilla was headed with this frisky little browser of theirs. The results of the Firefox development team’s effort, if I may be so bold to say, are pretty decent. Firefox 3, currently at 3.0.1, has gained well deserved credit for being the fastest, safest web browser out of those currently available. For the majority of users, it’s overall speed and behavior is excellent. Of course there’s always quirks to be found but that can be easily said about any browser. And so when work began on next version of Firefox, I had no choice but to call up the Firefox Profile Manager and make a new home for the Firefox 3.1 nightly builds to live.
Now I’m using these nightly builds for testing purposes, my daily perusing of the news, online emails and every badly coded and over-bloated site I can possibly find just to see how she fairs. Since the nightly builds are still only pre-Alpha 2, it’s not time yet to provide any real performance details but one thing does stand out—it’s already faster than current version of Firefox.
I first noticed this while viewing Google News’ main page in that the images almost instantly appeared during the page load or at least it seemed that way. So just out of curiosity I ran the same SunSpider Java Script Benchmark tests that Percy Cabello of Mozilla Links had run on the Firefox 3.0 beta’s back in march of this year. Here’s the results graph from his second round of tests he published on March 16th post (results are measured in milliseconds and “WebKit” referred to the latest build of Safari for Windows):
Why is this important? Percy explains in an earlier post that included his first round of tests:
As you may know, JavaScript is progressively becoming more important as we, users come to expect web applications to behave more like their desktop equivalents. For web developers, the top tool for doing this is JavaScript, the language used to program the different web page elements and in some cases, query the server for small pieces of data.
For Firefox, it is even more critical since the whole interface (extensions included) runs on JavaScript: open a context menu, a menu, a tab or a window, and there’s JavaScript at work all around connecting the underlying pieces.
This was a huge jump from Firefox 2 which came in at over 19,000ms in the first round of tests. The second round of Percy’s tests showed over a 3 times improvement in speed for that beta build of FX3 over it’s predecessor. And now it’s well into August already and I just had to run these same tests on the current development builds of Firefox 3.1 and these were the results:
Note: This is just a poor-boys test, nothing official here and not nearly as pretty as Percy’s.
Tests were run 3 times. Took best times out of three.
Okay, so it’s not the same type of huge difference and that stands to reason since 3.1 is just continuing on with what 3.0 started. However, considering the developers are still working on a Firefox 3,1 alpha 2 release, I was surprised to see that there indeed was a speed increase even if it was a slight one. When multiplied over all the Java scripts that Firefox has to handle even that small increase you see in the chart can be definitely noticeable. By the way, Opera 9.5 (final) shows nearly a 1900ms improvement over the previous beta version so those folks haven’t been slacking either and when the Internet Explorer development team delivers IE 8.0 beta 2 later this month, I’ll run another set of tests and include those as well as updated results for the latest FX3.1 builds.
Good to see the folks at Mozilla still working hard to improve my favorite browser.
Tags: benchmarks, Firefox 3.1, opera 9.5
No, I’m not talking about Windows Live Hotmail (initially and confusingly called Windows Live Mail), I’m talking about the desktop email client that was supposed to take the place of the aging Outlook Express and Vista’s default Windows Mail. I’ve used it myself and now, after no updates or word one for over 9 months as to the status of WLM or even if it’s still being actively developed, I can no longer contain myself. This has to be the worst email program I have ever had the unfortunate and frustrating opportunity to test.
Launched as a final release (version 1.0) back in November of 2007, Windows Live Mail (WLM) hit the streets as a very buggy, crash prone, feature missing, crippled version of Outlook Express 6.0 with a shiny new coat. Oh, it did have some new features after all like a decent Feeds reader, the ability to store images in the “cloud” and only include a thumbnail in your email message. You could do a bit of image editing in the process as well but all of those extra features couldn’t make up for the fact that this “Final” release was of no more higher quality and stability than a late alpha or early beta build.
Adding images for example in Outlook Express and Thunderbird email clients was as simple as inserting an image and hitting the proper alignment button as you would in any modern word processing software. A simple, straight forward task, no limitations and in my case, great for all the tutorial type emails I sent out with the usual images with circles and arrows with descriptions on each one.
Now here comes Windows Live Mail and guess what? You can’t do that any longer. Okay, you can…sort of…but the “Insert Image” button in the toolbar only applies to this new “all images in the cloud and you get everything but the original image in the message…sorry, Bub” scenario. It was kind of a mystery where the “original images” went that I sent to the clouds but they had to go somewhere. But if you wanted to do it the old fashioned way and just insert an image from your computer just like you did in old OE 6.0—forget it.
You had to go to the menu bar and eventually wind up with an “Insert image” submenu and once you managed to get through all that, the image that finally ended up inserted into your message was restricted to a maximum width and height of 400px by 400px with no options to do otherwise except for the new “handles” on the image where you could pull and stretch the image like taffy and absolutely no resizing functions to be found anywhere. Not even the ability to insert the image with it’s original dimensions intact. Unbelievable.
Other “unforgivable” things:
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No more source edit. Why? What possible reason would they have for not including this feature?
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New message counts would often not update for individual Inbox’s, Drafts and Junk folders etc.
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Switching from plain text to rich text format when writing a new message often locked up the program, forcing a restart losing your message (no auto-save apparently).
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Reports of WLM arbitrarily “deleting” all emails from every account.
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Address book when “signed in” was different from the address book when signed out (local) and adding a contact to the “signed in” address book did not update the local address book as well.
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The program often refused to shut down when closed. No, I don’t mean it went to the tray, it just disappeared when closed but remained running nonetheless until you had to kill it with the “Windows Task Manager”. And none of the so called solutions ever had any affect.
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Last but not least…lousy support all around.
So I got curious today as to what ever happened to this rather horrible piece of software. The end result comes down to this:
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Version 1.0 is still available on the Windows Live site.
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The WLM blog’s last post is still sitting at the November, ‘07 version 1.0 announcement. No reply to any of the commenter’s questions. Most comments are spam now.
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The MSDN’s WLM blog’s last post is even earlier at July, ‘07 that states they’re still working hard on the synchronization problems (the majority of the 140 or so comments to this post are spam).
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I could have sworn there used to be a Windows Live Mail category in the MSDN forums (I used to post to it) but it’s not there now.
Looks to me like Windows Live Mail is indeed dead. And not only dead but absolutely no reply to any of the comments on any of the two blogs mentioned above by any of the developers or any announcements made as to the current status of WLM. Poor show all around.
In a way it’s too bad, Outlook Express is definitely way overdue for a replacement and while the idea behind WLM was good, the actual execution was unbelievably poor in almost every aspect. It’s also too bad that it couldn’t live up to the standards of other long standing, high quality “Live” software such as “Windows Live Messenger” and the excellent “Windows Live Writer” for example. The final nail in the WLM’s coffin for me at least is that a very early beta 1 (pre-release) build of Mozilla’s Thunderbird 3.0 email client is 100% more reliable, stable and robust than WLM ever dreamed of being. Go figure.
Oh well, not every effort is a success. Maybe another and more reasonable effort will begin anew, who knows? If anyone has any information that WLM is still being developed, killed or started from scratch, please leave a comment and let us know.
Tags: email clients, Outlook Express, Thunderbird, Windows Live Mail
