Google Chrome

[Mac the Knife]

Not impressed by Chrome - and I don't like the "opt-out" of data collection.

Opera is superb and just gets better. Fast, secure, cool and has an ace email client built in. Only browser to pass ACID II for conformity to WWW standards.

Oh and it's completely cross platform too.



But I still like FF for the zillion add-ins.

Mac

[frostbite]

Also an Opera fan. I like FF, especially for the add-ons but I find most of my browsing is with Opera for preference.

[Keef]

I tried Chrome, and the computer started doing strange things,and trying to connect to strange sites that I hadn't asked for. ZoneAlarm blocked it. I removed Chrome.

Firefox doesn't do that.

I bought Opera for the XDA (there's no free version of that edition), and it was such a load of rubbish that I've not tried it on the desktop. It would freeze for 20 seconds or so, locking the device up, then resume as if nothing had happened. It did that far too often to be useable. Others had the same problem.

[GrumpyOldFart]

IE7 and IE7Pro - no ads, no problems. Some very useful features, too.

Tried two or three iterations of FF at different times, more disadvantages than advantages (and, no, I don't work for MS).

[call100]

What would you describe as a disadvantage in FF???

[Mac the Knife]

"What would you describe as a disadvantage in FF???"

Presumably the fact that it can have trouble correctly displaying sites coded exclusively for Microsoft's bastardised proprietary non-standard HTML coding.

[Keef]

That's the only one I've ever had, too.

I have to keep IE on this machine so that I can do "online banking" with one particular savings bank. Any other site that "requires IE" just doesn't get my business.

[Gertrude the Wombat]

Presumably the fact that it can have trouble correctly displaying sites coded exclusively for Microsoft's bastardised proprietary non-standard HTML coding.

Yes indeed, it needs its own different bastardised proprietary non-standard [] coding.

I left out HTML in the above sentence because that's not really where I've run into problems - it's much more of an issue with JS and CSS.

Wittering on about how many standards it obeys doesn't hack it I'm afraid ... the browser is actually a very crude and immature platform for developing applications (as opposed to web sites), and large numbers of blindingly obvious things that you're bound to want to do have no standard way of doing them, so you have no choice but to find out which non-standard trick works for each browser - for a practical application you cannot code to the standards because the standards simply have nothing to say about lots of features that you actually need.

So, code exclusively for IE and you get a much better experience ... so long as you are using IE. Code exclusively for Firefox and it won't work on IE. Carefully code to make sure that what you're doing works fine on both IE and FF ... and it doesn't work on Opera.

By the way you can't actually tell just from looking at the code whether someone has put in a terrible hack for one browser or another. For example here is one of my scenarios:

(1) I start out by trying to write standard code, and only deviate from that when the standard code doesn't work.

(2) For this particular feature the standard code worked on IE but not on FF.

(3) So I fiddled around and found a non-standard bodge that worked on FF.

(4) But this didn't work on IE ... however I was then able to work around IE's correct handling of this wrong code by putting an IE-specific section of code in.

So anyone reading the code would discover some horrible IE specific kludge code, but it would not be obvious (unless they troubled to read the comments) that I'd put it there to work around a failure of FF to implement the standards.

===========

Here's a good Firefox nasty. Have a form on your web page, with a button on it, and no action assigned to either the form or the button ('cos you haven't written that bit yet). Clicking on the button should do nothing, yes? That's indeed what happens in IE. But in Firefox it doesn't quite do nothing - it crashes out any pending AJAX calls with obscure and undocumented error messages, which if you search for lead you straight into the Firefox bug database, with no sign that anyone is remotely interested in fixing it.

Workaround? Remove the form. So now you have a disembodied free button that is illegally, according to the standards, not in any form. This will fail all the validation tests recommended by the "everything must be standard" weenies, but it works on all the browsers I've tried.

[GrumpyOldFart]

So, here we are, six months later, and Google appears to have released Chrome into the wild. Is anyone using it and, if so, what are the pros and cons?

[call100]

Not using it because of the privacy issues around the browser and google in general....However, I do use (occasionally) SRWareiron.....It's a more secure version of chrome...Follow the link and read about it....there is a link there to download it if required
SRWare Iron - Gladiator Security Forum

[worrab]

...and then there's Safari for Windows v4 - fast and very pretty.

[Capt Snooze]

Re: IE for bank sites (using FF)

re: Keef's post.............................
User Agent Switcher addon works for the couple of banking sites that I need.(saved me installing IE4Linux on my Ubuntu machine)


Find at: http://chrispederick.com/work/user-agent-switcher/

[Jofm5]

IE 8 and why it is what it is.....

Microsoft has traditionally been lambasted and quite rightly so for ignoring the W3C recommendations on HTML browsing for a number of reasons - the main reason cited by Microsoft is that during the early years the browsers were taking each their own independent direction before the W3C was formed and Microsoft has been more interested in backwards compatibility because they have a huge user base (mainly corporate) that they dont wish to alienate.

There is often a misconception that the W3C is the specification to adhere to - this is incorrect, the consortium makes recommoendations not specifications for standardisation. Just liks TCP, POP3 etc are RFC's (Requests for comments) - they are not specifications at all - they are ideas that are principally agreed upon.

So to get W3C compliance, you can adhere to the recommendations they make and build upon them yourself as most browsers have done to get their own specifics. This has not worked out well.

So whilst people shout about compliance there is not really such a thing - the adoption of the recommendations is optional to create compatibility and I believe Microsoft has been quite bold in IE8 in moving towards the recommendations sacrificing their compatibility with their legacy products - hence the requirement for the legacy mode.

So whilst everyone is anit MS cause its MS they have indeed taken a step in the right direction and are just getting lambasted cause legacy sites dont work.

Run a website through the W3C validator and if it passes it will work both on IE8 and any other W3C browser that adeheres to the recommendations.

The bigger problem is extensions to x/html such as DHTML because there are not any W3C standards on handling events or what they say they are called, how to trap them and how to program for them.

You may stand up and say hey what about AJAX yep thats a cool technology but its not ratified or recommended by the W3C - (go check on w3c.org) - the problem is there are so many recommendations but no standards coming out of w3c.

How we are ever going to progress is only ever going to be someone grabbing the bull buy the horns and saying this is how we do it - Each browser vendor does something different at the moment and the software developers are only going to worry about the mainstream. This will be where apple and google will lose out with their browsers, If they cannot get the compatibility with legacy applications on the corporate desktop they will be discarded regardless of how quick and pretty they are...

[green granite]

The following quotes are taken from a photographic forum and makes me even more suspicious of chrome, and also their new operating system.

Google Chrome Users Not Welcome
Just noticed this - can someone tell me what this is about. I use Chrome - but happy to use IE8 when visiting here.

Just don't understand the issue and obvioulsy I need to.

It's about copyright. The Chrome licence states that Google gains rights over anything viewed using their browser, including your/our photos posted on here.

Google seem to think by you using Chrome they have the right not only to your pictures and net content, but by browsing ours they have a right by proxy.

More and more sites are banning people using chrome for that very reason.

[frostbite]

Perhaps Google are entering into competition with M$ to see who can become the most dictatorial and disliked provider?

[vkw91]

That's old news.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Google tweaks Chrome licence text

They have reviewed the Terms of Use since. Basically from what I heard, the particular extracts where suppose to refer to another one of their products.

Hope this helps.

V

[Capetonian]

"Google gains rights over anything viewed using their browser ...."

So if I scope out a pretty girl in the street, I gain rights over her?

[vkw91]

Well, ummm in theory if it was the law, then yes.

Google chrome acts as the eyes to the internet, so really your eyes would own her, but there again you own of your eyes.

Thank god its not the law though eh! haha

[frostbite]

This doesn't build confidence

Google fixes severe Chrome vulnerabilities - ZDNet.co.uk

[Atlas Shrugged]

One is always suspicious of new browsers claiming to be better than this or that or do things I really don't have the need for or even want.

Been using Firefox since day one without incident and nothing I've read or heard so far will convinced me to change to something else. Why would I want to anyway - it does everything I need and a lot of other stuff I don't need or even understand.

If it ain't broke, don't try to fix it.