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It's interesting how they address (my) main issue with Safari as the main underlying feature of Chrome. The way Safari chews up more and more ram until you close it. I wonder if Apple will adopt the same approach.

It would be cool for Safari to adopt that approach, but we'll have to see how responsive Chrome is to opening and closing tabs. Also, each process will have its own overhead, so if you have 20 tabs open, it's possible that it'll consume more memory than Safari with the same 20 tabs.

Safari has improved greatly over the past couple of years in this respect. It no longer needs a restart every day. I quite often have it running for a week or more without a problem, and as a web developer, I have lots of tabs open at once.
 
I hope this turns out well, since Firefox is a little like riding a mammoth, and Safari is probably the slowest piece of software I've used recently.

It hangs and freezes all the time. Scroll down a site, beach ball. Click a link, beach ball. Hold your mouse over a bookmark in the bookmark bar, beach ball. Enter an address in the address bar, beach ball. Enter information in a text field on a web page, beach ball. Download a file, beach ball.

Granted, the beach ball will only last a couple of seconds and then Safari will unfreeze, but when this happens like a million times a minute, no matter what you're doing, it's ridiculous.

Only happens in Safari, no other application.


Sounds like my 3G iPhone with 2.0, 2.01 & 2.02. Except you didn't add the big crash, reset and restore to the end of your sentence.
 
I think Apple is a very serious contender. And thanks to iphone/ipod i believe this ones already in the bag.

I mean as a general application platform vendor. Apple really only targets OS X (desktop and mobile). There is Safari for Windows. But they haven't done anything with it to make me think they are trying to do anything besides enhance Safari compatibility. Google seems to want to become the platform--for everything. Apple, on the other hand, is much more focused and seems to support development platforms only as much as they need to to sell their end-to-end systems.
 
Hmmmm... so we really want this type of thing to be open source, from a standpoint of security. Just asking...

Absolutely, that way we can make sure it is secure. Security by obscurity, is not a valid security model. Unless you believe in M$.

Only software that uses demonstrated and published secure algorithms is really secure. It places reliance on the strengths on your keys and algorithms, which is according to industry wisdom, where it should be.
 
It's almost like there are two Googles at work, one of them smart and one of them not-so-smart, and this one seems to be coming from the latter. If you look at Google's track record, they do great things when they strike out on their own with something novel and reasonably original (search, online liner ads, maps, etc.) but fail horribly when doing any kind of me-too product (video being the immediate example that comes to mind, but I know there are others.)

I don't wish Google any bad luck in their endeavors but I wouldn't bet my money on Chrome's success.
 
Can Chrome attract much of a share of the web browser market? Some people are willing to try new things, but many more people are fairly set in their web ways. It'll take both features and publicity to attract them to a new web browser.
 
It's interesting that Google would want to do this...
But if anybody knows how to make programs relating to the internet... it's Google.

I'll check it out when the Mac version is released.
 
Can't wait! Too bad I can't download it on my cruddy iBook, but I can download it on my PC. Let's hope it's good. Hopefully the PPC and Intel Mac version will be separate to minimize file size.
 
I think Apple is a very serious contender. And thanks to iphone/ipod i believe this ones already in the bag.

Don't think so. Apple surely is very serious contender in mobile web browsing.. already nr. 1.. but Safari on Windows seems not very popular yet.

I hope this turns out well, since Firefox is a little like riding a mammoth, and Safari is probably the slowest piece of software I've used recently.

It hangs and freezes all the time. Scroll down a site, beach ball. Click a link, beach ball. Hold your mouse over a bookmark in the bookmark bar, beach ball. Enter an address in the address bar, beach ball. Enter information in a text field on a web page, beach ball. Download a file, beach ball.

Granted, the beach ball will only last a couple of seconds and then Safari will unfreeze, but when this happens like a million times a minute, no matter what you're doing, it's ridiculous.

Only happens in Safari, no other application.

Sad. It looks something is wrong with your webkit.. my Safari does no beachballs in this case (867MHz G4).. expect of loading any QuickTime media, > beachball until it loads file header (so when internet connection stops working, Safari stops responding).

Apple's webkit? no.

webkit is open source. Apple just happen to use it too.

WebKit is an opensource project, partly financed and hosted by Apple.
Good to see more usage of webkit, ..that means better development. Google can help a lot in this project.
 
Oh god, please, not another damn browser that websites have to support! There are enough already. I hope it fails.
 
Yay! Give Google an even greater opportunity to know everything you do on the web. Sure, they want to know all your traffic patterns, what you visit, how long you're there and Google Analytics does that for sites it's installed on, but imagine the information power they'll get having analytics in your browser.

They want information on sites that don't have their analytics installed, and this is how they plan to get it.

I'll pass. Safari works great for me.
 
Oh god, please, not another damn browser that websites have to support! There are enough already. I hope it fails.

I like how you're so quick to judge before even trying it out; what if it's absolutely revolutionary? Also, it's based on Webkit do I don't think developers are going to have to do much to make their sites work in Chrome if they already work in Safari.

The comic makes it sound pretty well thought out.

Yay! Give Google an even greater opportunity to know everything you do on the web.

Yes, it's all a dirty conspiracy. Considering it's entirely open source I really doubt that would be the case.
 
Sounds more like an application runtime than a full fledged browser.

Windows-only? FAIL.

*beat xix around the head with a dirty sock*

Why should it even matter. There is a common core, Webkit; the focus by Google is to drop having to hack their services around for every damn web browser under the sun. Come up with one browser that is linked to their website and avoid all the crap of incompatibilities entirely. The fact that there is a common code base means that any changes done to Webkit by Google will find its way back into Safari.
 
Absolutely, that way we can make sure it is secure. Security by obscurity, is not a valid security model. Unless you believe in M$.

Only software that uses demonstrated and published secure algorithms is really secure. It places reliance on the strengths on your keys and algorithms, which is according to industry wisdom, where it should be.

Two points, off topic -- but should be said.

Security through obscurity, is in fact a very valid security model. It is quite effective, however it should only be used in combination with other perimeter defenses and not solely relied upon.

An example, give you local FBI office a call and you will be pleasantly surprised with the lack of information you get. They obscure nearly everything except the actual agents name you are speaking with; no department, no division, etc.

Another example, contact most IT administrators and ask for a current network topology and brand names or models of perimeter devices. Don't be surprised when this isn't provided.

Security through obscurity is a very common practice and is quite widely accepted in the security industry as an additional layer of security, but never the only layer.

Last point; Open source does not equate to secure.

Because an application relies upon closed source, does not make it less secure. Security in an application is based upon architecture, development techniques and experience as well as proper peer review, code auditing, etc.

There are many applications which are extremely secure and are closed source.

Now, back on topic.

I probably won't use Chrome (happy with my current browser), however I do think that as long as the new competition sticks with the current rendering engines, then this can only be good for all of us.
 
The world doesn't need another browser. That said, Google will be contributing to the WebKit project, which is great news.

WebKit will overtake Gecko. It works well on desktop and portable devices, has fantastic javascript performance, and outstanding standards support.

Nevertheless, this fits with Google's open web policy. Hopefully it works.
 
a non-apple company is releasing a beta of a non-apple application -- and this is Page 1 news on macrumors?

while mildly interesting, this should be nowhere near Page 1 news.

This is huge news and has the potential to change a lot of things. This "non-Apple" company has the potential to overtake a massive piece of the browser market, perhaps finally wresting control from IE.

Over time, the web is the direction everything has been going. Apple has been investing significantly in Safari and a establishing themselves to deliver web-apps like MobileMe.

Over time, many apps will be entirely web-based and platform independent.

arn
 
Google is not good at free standing software.

Google IS good at webapps and search engines.

Case in point:
Google Earth- great app, but bloated on Mac
Google App on iPhone- not useful at all.


I don't hold out too much hope on this (or android for that matter).
 
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