http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507 Meeting a need that no one realized they had, Google has <a rel="nofollow" href="http://etech.eweek.com/content/web_technology/google_chrome_makes_a_good_first_impression.html">unleashed a new web browser</a> upon the world: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.google.com/chrome">Chrome.</a>  It offers a clean interface, really fast performance, crash protection, fast performance, an Opera-like "speed dial," and also, did I mention, <b>fast performance.</b> en-us Thu, 4 Sep 2008 03:13:25 EST Fri, 5 Sep 2008 09:37:36 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#20 I have serious about about Chrome.<p> One, privacy.  Even though Google says <a rel="nofollow" href="http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080903-google-on-chrome-eula-controversy-our-bad-well-change-it.html">they'll change the EULA</a> after people Fri, 5 Sep 2008 09:37:36 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#19 <i>Chrome doesn't make you do anything; it just remembers.</i> <p> Which always makes me think of the Volkswagen Beetle that had the license plate: FEATURE. Fri, 5 Sep 2008 01:15:44 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#18 Firefox has the same ability to create a search shortcut by right-clicking a field.  The interface is awful, though; you create something called a "Quick Search," which you have to stick somewhere into your bookmarks hierarchy, even though you'll neve Thu, 4 Sep 2008 22:38:18 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#17 The feature you describe has been in Netscape/Mozilla since 1995. I don't think it's widely used though. Probably about as popular as about:minibuffer. Thu, 4 Sep 2008 21:47:08 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#16 <blockquote>[Chrome] saves copies of the text of every page you visit [and allows you to search it]</blockquote><p> Opera does this as well, without keeping https stuff around.<p> <blockquote>In the location bar, type "news.yahoo.com" (or use autocompletio Thu, 4 Sep 2008 21:28:53 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#15 I'm not impressed either.  The press and the bloggers are uncritically repeating the "8-10x faster" claims from Google's press release, but the benchmarks don't bear it out.  On general purpose benchmarks like SunSpider Chrome is fast, but not cr Thu, 4 Sep 2008 19:07:03 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#14 "It saves copies of the text of every page you visit." <p> This appears to include copies of your bank balances and other information from SSL encrypted pages.  <a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.tgdaily.com/content/view/39176/108/">http://www.tgdaily Thu, 4 Sep 2008 17:02:52 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#13 Make no bones about it, Chrome is meant to enable a platform that will directly compete with with Flash - specifically, note the new "V8" javascript engine, which compiles javascript to native code and has much improved garbage collection.  Google exp Thu, 4 Sep 2008 16:56:57 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#12 JavaScript performance is difficult to measure and compare, but Chrome does <a rel="nofollow" href="http://scriptnode.com/article/google-chrome-benchmarks/">very well</a> in major <a rel="nofollow" href="http://ejohn.org/blog/javascript-performance-rundown Thu, 4 Sep 2008 15:05:05 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#11 Well that would make sense. I downloaded it largely on what was supposed to be its screaming performance on javascript, and I knew that I just wasn't seeing anything any better than Firefox 3. To be fair, it was certainly no worse than FF3 either, but it s Thu, 4 Sep 2008 14:55:42 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#10 Google Chrome has lots of little touches that aren't immediately apparent:<p> <ul> <li> It saves copies of the text of every page you visit.  Later, if you type a word that appeared in that page into your location bar, it will let you find that page. Thu, 4 Sep 2008 14:51:10 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#9 Regarding javascript, I read somewhere (can't recall where at the moment) that they're working on optimizing the scripting performance, but that the beta isn't there yet. Thu, 4 Sep 2008 14:18:57 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#8 I don't know whether to be impressed with Google's speed in fixing the problem, or astounded at how obvious the problem was to begin with. Thu, 4 Sep 2008 13:17:21 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#7 <i>Currently there seems to be quite onerous licensing terms with the use of Chrome - where google lays claim to all content (eg. this post) if it was created via Chrome.</i><p> Those clauses have been terminated:<p> <i>Google representative Rebecca Ward, Thu, 4 Sep 2008 13:08:56 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#6 I've been playing with it for two days now (I'm writing this post with it), and it doesn't thrill me.<p> It does look great. The interface is very clean and minimalist, yet all the features I use regularly are easy to get to. But as someone else has alread Thu, 4 Sep 2008 11:47:35 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#5 Rest assured though that they won't use any of the submitted stuff for evil purposes. Thu, 4 Sep 2008 11:36:06 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#4 I tried to download it and ended up receiving a "Fatal Error Four" message. I guess that's twice as worse as Fatal Error Two. Thu, 4 Sep 2008 09:51:44 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#3 How do you expect Google to deliver the ads you need unless you let them have your data? Thu, 4 Sep 2008 08:21:41 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#2 ...is not javascript, but Flash.  Adobe has only taken pains to make sure Flash runs reasonably well on IE on Windows.  Sure, it runs on other platforms and browsers, but it generally does so quite poorly and it certainly loves to hog resources, Thu, 4 Sep 2008 07:58:12 EST http://www.treesandthings.com/story/2008/9/2/205151/5507#1 Currently there seems to be quite <a rel="nofollow" href="http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?no_d2=1&sid=08/09/03/0247205">onerous licensing terms</a> with the use of Chrome - where google lays claim to all content (eg. this post) if it was created via Thu, 4 Sep 2008 07:01:48 EST string http://www.treesandthings.com/search/