Baohx » Web

Google Chrome OS Thoughts

baohx — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 17:45:21 +0000

Neat idea. A lot of people are paranoid about this, thinking that Google will own all your data. I’m pretty sure this is not the case. There will be a user partition on your computer (this is even stated in one of the videos). Local storage is part of what allows newer web applications to be fast but still secure your data from floating around in the cloud. Local storage is NOT going away. What they ARE trying to do is allow a quick and easy way to get to any web- or webservice-based applications without all that mucking about with a bloated OS. They’re going for what is essentially a very fast boot-to-browser OS with a few minimal extras.

For computers like netbooks or MIDs where the hardware is not meant for burly games or photoshop or big developer IDEs (or Windows, for that matter) this idea is pretty good… as long as all I want to do is web-browse, run web-based apps, listen to music, watch videos, or chat. That’s all I do on my netbook anyway, so it sounds like win to me. Alternately, as long as you can still boot to it from a normal bios, you could probably dual-boot to another OS.

Chrome OS is beta at this time, mainly for developers to poke at. It should be released some time late next year.

Chromium OS is available at: http://www.chromium.org/chromium-os

Google Wave Invites

baohx — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 14:49:54 +0000

Anyone need google wave invites?

Boredom killer (music maker)

baohx — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 15:32:35 +0000

Strange little music matrix thing. Link is to one I did in about a minute or so.

http://inudge.net/index.en.html#/8oui

IE6 is dead (In Norway)

baohx — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 16:21:21 +0000

http://www.cjohansen.no/en/browsers/norway_tells_ie6_users_to_shape_up

Burn the witch!

Now if we could only get them off of IE completely so I don’t have to waste extra hours on code breakage.

Ubiquity

baohx — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:38:54 +0000

Been playing with the ubiquity extension for firefox for a few days now and I have to say that it’s pretty sweet. Check it out for yourself. Ubiquity demo, Ubiquity Download

Google’s Chrome Browser

baohx — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 01:21:59 +0000

For those who haven’t heard yet, Google has released their new browser “Chrome”.
For some info (in comic book form no less): http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/.

It’s using the webkit engine under the hood, and a javascript engine called V8 which is supposed to be a ton faster since it’s supposed to interpret javascript directly into machine language. I’ve been playing with it for an hour now and have not seen any issues. Another big difference from current browsers is that each tab of the browser is a completely separate process. In other words, if you close that tab, that memory is completely reclaimed…so no more browser instance eating up 200M of memory even though you currently only have a tab with the google search page on it. The javascript engine is supposed to be much better about memory leaks as well.

I’ll be testing it out on some web applications at work tomorrow.

Here are a few speed tests I ran it through so far:
http://andrew.hedges.name/experiments/speed_test/index3.html (chrome: 0.16s, firefox: 1.05s)

Some speed tests by someone else: http://www.emadibrahim.com/2008/09/02/google-chrome-javascript-speed-test/

http://mootools.net/slickspeed/ The jquery section of these tests completed twice as fast in Chrome as they did in FF3.

FF lovers, don’t despair though. I hear FF3.1 will have some impressive speed improvements. If anyone’s running ff3.1 beta, I’d like to hear some comparisons.

Chrome is available at www.google.com/chrome.