Monday, March 30, 2009

Google Chrome - no shine !

After insistent pestering by google fanboy friends of mine (yeah, you !), I gave google chrome a whirl for a few months now. After todays crash of about 3 days of browsing state I am finally uninstalling it. Thought I will publish my observations till date (and no, it is not colored by current angry state of mind - this was written a while back :-) )

Some observations :

  • Unstable. Inspite of the supposed claims of stability due to process isolation, etc - I find it crashing way more frequently than firefox ever did (unless you count some of the FF2/early FF3 releases). These fall into two categories:
  1. A single window crash - fairly common, once every couple of days.
  2. The entire browser crashes - couple of times a week.

Which brings us to :
  • Very poor session recovery.
This is absolutely critical requirement - and chrome does a poor job at it - since a couple of years now (more ?) firefox does a pretty good job of session recovery/save-restore from my experience.
In Google chrome, there is no checkpointing of the state possible - so that it can be restored to after browser restarts (from what I saw), neither does it handle crashes gracefully - so having it working for long is not likely.

I have observed restore working in chrome only a very few times (so I know it exists !) - out of the very many crashes I have suffered, restarts I have made.


  • Cool looks are fine, functionality is more important.
"Coolness" is fine - but when you get down to it, a stable and dependable environment which can be customized to your needs is way more important for daily usage. Even simple things like ad-block is not possible in chrome (and you end up with quite a lot of junk getting transferred which you dont need to begin with). Dont get me started about how much I miss grease monkey !
Another example of functionality I miss is the search bar on the top right corner in firefox, where we can add (multiple) search engines : even IE has copied this off late ... unfortunately, nothing of that sort for Chrome.
It does try to pull something similar in the new tab page, but that just doesn't come anywhere close.

Similarly, the "most visited pages" that they copied from Opera (unacknowledged ?) does not seem to make much sense ... looks more like, the pages I had/used to visit initially got ranked way high and they just sit there off late.

  • Pretty bad debugger/page inspection
I dont do much of javascript/xhtml debugging, but when I do need to look at the source/traffic firebug is streets ahead of what chrome comes with.



The good parts of chrome :
  • Fast startup time. It might be useful to casual users who want to lookup something fast.
Startup is pretty fast - particularly since firefox has progressively become slower over time (is it just me ?).
Note that prefetching in OS'es means that subsequent launches of a program would typically be fast so this is usually relevant for first launch - subsequent launches tend to be pretty fast uniformly across browsers.

  • Fast javascript engine.
I have seen others vouch for this, but this is not something I get to 'see'/notice - I dont do javascript games, and I am sure a milliseconds slower response time to a infrequent user interface action would not be noticable by me :-)

posted by Mridul at 12:11 PM 3 comments

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

You just mentioned what I am observing for past few months. For me chrome crashes very frequently. Once it even crashed when I was doing a Credit Card transaction :(
Man thats too scary, luckily, I entered wrong CVV number so nothing happened. Only thing I have seen good about chrome is it's startup time.

Aparup

3/31/2009 05:07:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

hmmm I havent seen chrome crash on me much. But I dont really keep my browser open for very long. What I love about chrome is the amazing startup speed. It easily beats Firefox (which is my other browser). The sad thing I guess is many of our office pages dont work on chrome, this sucks.
-- param

4/23/2009 12:59:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Hi Mridul,

I am sorry to be a pest. Is there any possibility that we could have a chat about the chess engine?

Regards,
Daniel Shroff

4/23/2009 08:13:00 PM  

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Monday, March 23, 2009

Go blue !!

Waiting for this order to arrive from amazon :-)

---
Delivery estimate: March 25, 2009 - March 27, 2009
    Shipping estimate: March 23, 2009
  • 1 of: Kung Fu Panda (+BD Live) [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: Dark City (Director's Cut) [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: The Girl Who Leapt Through Time
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: Avatar - The Last Airbender: The Complete Book 3 Collection
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: Chocolate [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: Terminator 2: Judgment Day [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: The Terminator [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: House of Flying Daggers [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
  • 1 of: Paprika [Blu-ray]
    Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC

posted by Mridul at 7:37 PM 6 comments

6 Comments:

Blogger Me said...

rich guy :P

3/24/2009 04:46:00 AM  
Blogger aaditya sood said...

Now I need to borrow the DVDs *and* the player from you :D

3/25/2009 11:31:00 PM  
Blogger Mridul said...

@jaya unfair !

@sood the player is the blueray writer on my comp, so cant borrow it :-D

3/26/2009 12:14:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

rich guy indeed

Aparup

3/26/2009 04:18:00 PM  
Blogger Unawoken said...

So, how did you like the movies? Any you recommend? Did you like Paprika? I did

6/11/2009 11:02:00 PM  
Blogger Mridul said...

@vinay
I had already seen paprika, just too bloody brilliant ! The amount of detail is breath-taking.

Still yet to watch all of them - but my general reco would be - if you know a movie has a lot of intricate details (animation, action, does not matter what) - get a blue ray : you appreciate the difference from a dvd only after you see it : breathtaking at times !

6/12/2009 01:38:00 AM  

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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Jon Stewart and Jim Cramer

I regularly watch Daily show online ... but yesterdays episode was something else !
Watch the full interview with Jim Cramer here - it is just too good. I wish there were more interviews of this sort in main stream media. 

IMO there are two kind of journalists - the idiots who know nothing (the usual regulars on tv - about 95% of out there) and the ones who know & understand what the hell is actually happening. We cant expect much from the former other than soundbites after things happen, but when even the latter group (and Jum Cramer is one of them) dont do justice to journalism, then comedians like Jon Stewart seem to be the only way to go !

posted by Mridul at 4:07 AM 4 comments

4 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

3/14/2009 09:15:00 AM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

Stewart is fun and the Daily show is sometimes nice to watch but at the end of the day, it too is part of the controlled dissent system that's the media these days.

It's a popularity contest and an attempt to increase viewership. Not a serious attempt to inform the public about anything. Television has ceased to be that and will almost surely never go back.

3/14/2009 10:17:00 PM  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

While I enjoy watching Cramer every night, one must remember the show is primarily entertainment. The financial networks exist to promote their advertisers financial and investment products. Who would expect them to warn about the credit bubble or coming Washington national debt collapse which will destroy much of the remaining private wealth in America today or what this will do to the dollar, the stock market, bonds, gold or the real estate market?


China is now worried about their dangerous over investment in US Treasury obligations. Washington ’s long-term choice is either repudiation or monetization. For monetization to be effective, the depreciation in the dollar would have to be substantial and this in turn would dramatically raise prices of imports for American consumers which would mean a tremendous drop in foreign imports. Debt monetization would cause more disruption to exporting nations than selective repudiation of Treasury debt.

The Campaign to Cancel the Washington National Debt By 12/22/2013 Constitutional Amendment is starting now in the U.S. See: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=67594690498&ref=ts

Thanks,

Ron with 30 plus years in the investment business and banking industry.

3/14/2009 11:45:00 PM  
Blogger Mridul said...

I think the point of my post, and partly the point of Jon Stewarts attempt (imo) is being missed here in the comments ...

As financial journalists, CNBC the network and its anchors/reporters have a journalistic duty - which is above their responsibilities of making money for their network imo.(perhaps shocking to some ?).
They choose to ignore it ... and therein lies the fault imo. By their silence (whatever be the motive), they were becoming complicit with the fraud being pulled.

This silence could be either due to ignorance and stupidity - in which case, the network is to be avoided; or due to willfully ignoring what was going on (ad-revenue, etc reasons) in which case it is, atleast in my eyes, tantamount to suppressing evidence.



Jon Stewart might have his own reasons for going after CNBC; which are, imo, irrelevant at this point.
The issues he raises are very real and have to be investigated into, and which unfortunately no one in the 'real media' is looking into (iirc).
You could question his methodology, approach, motives, etc ... but we should not forget that he is not a journalist, even if he sometimes pretends to be one :-)
Whether he (mis)uses his show to take pot shots at others is not the point - what he raises is a very valid criticism ... and they are to be asked in current situation.

3/15/2009 11:05:00 PM  

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