Published by panesofglass on 22nd September 2009
Chrome Frame is all about improving the web, not hurting it, functioning as a back-stop against browsers that just aren’t keeping up.
- Alex Russel
In case you’ve missed it, Google has released a plugin for IE that will render as in Chrome (WebKit). All you need is a simple meta tag:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1"/>
This thing is hot. The Google Group is abuzz. I had to switch to daily digest after receiving 40 emails over a span of about four hours. Looks as though more than just Google is ready for IE to catch up.
I am really excited about this myself, but keep in mind this is still very early. Google’s own sites don’t appear to have the tag yet, but I expect they will soon.
What tickle’s my mind most, however, is what Google is really about to unleash. We know about Wave. What else is out there? I have been touting the benefits of SVG as a platform, and this and Google’s other recent release of svgweb sure seem to put a lot of emphasis on SVG as the potential graphics platform of choice. Could it be Google is going to go head-to-head with Flash and Silverlight with more open standards? Please let it be true!
[Update: Check out this HTML5 introductory video from Google.]
Published by panesofglass on 25th July 2009
Firefox 3.5 was recently released, and I’m now looking for a new browser. While the plugins are great and seem irreplaceable, the startup time has become atrocious and the memory usage is pretty bad. Most importantly, I haven’t been able to login to http://github.com/ using FF 3.5 at all, and I’m on there quite a bit these days. Not a winning combination.
First I tried Opera. It’s neat, but it’s just too different from what I’m used to, and so many of the extra features just don’t appeal to me. It did seem fast and everything, just not my cup of tea.
So then I tried out Safari. I like Safari 4 quite a lot. Two small quirks: you can’t opt to open to the last browser session automatically—a feature I fell in love with in FF—and the memory usage is worse than FF. It’s almost as bad as Visual Studio. (Both were running near or in the 300k mark.)
Enter Google Chrome. I tried it a few months back but wasn’t very impressed; at least not impressed enough to give up Firefox. With Firefox misbehaving so badly, though, I really feel I have no choice but to give Chrome a second look. And wow! Memory usage is very low, generally in the 30k range. It’s fast. Really fast. Firefox 3.5 says it’s fast, but I don’t think it has anything on Chrome.
So right now, I’m using Chrome. I like it. It continues to grow on me. But I’m curious, have any of you had this experience? What are your thoughts? What are you using?
