Google is launching their own open source browser tomorrow

hingehead wrote:

The history stuff isn't so amazing if you're used to using google desktop search. How blase I get. Bring back Mosaic!!!!

I used to be big on desktop search, but once I stopped using it for email (just using gmail through apps for your domain) I found I never used it anymore and have since stopped keeping it running.

I'm not that interested in actually searching for what I'd seen over much time, but sometimes it's useful as an autocomplete. I don't see myself using the history search for anything other than the last few minutes in my session (e.g. what page was I just on when I saw _____).

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@Nick Ashley,

[rant]I keep opening in a new window because of where Firefox has their open in new tab context menu and the muscle memory I've built for it.[/rant]

The inspect element is a nice touch out of box! Not enough yet but I'm sure they'll have an active plug in community since they've open sourced the browser code.

Other random observations:

The spell check seems more accurate than firefox's.
The search bar also does autocomplete search off their search engine results, and if you type in keywords it will suggest some sites to you that you haven't ever visited.

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i've been using IE for like 12 years.
i doubt i'll ever switch.
not that i think it's so great -- it's more of a comfort thing...

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@Region Philbis,

I hear ya. When I switched from IE to Firefox as my default browser I missed the little click sound IE plays when you click a link. Now after being used to more silent browsing it sounds horribly intrusive. Habit is pretty powerful.

In any case, I can't use Google Chrome as my default until the plugins catch up. I need some of those development add ons for Firefox to do my daily work. But it's hands down the best browser UI from a usability perspective IMO.

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@Robert Gentel,

I have just downloaded it and am playing...cool mis-spelling alert.

I may make fewer typos when using this.

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@dlowan,

Firefox has had that for a while now as well.

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Something simple that really would enhance the use of this for web apps would be a minimize to system tray option.

For example, I like that you can break our your tabs easily to a new window. I still don't like having my email view (in webmail) work like any other browser tab in the rest of my workflow. But what I'd want to do is be able to break out gmail, and then minimize it to tray (and eventually have notifications built in to change color if the page found something) so I can leave it running without using desktop real estate just like a desktop mail reader could.

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I've just found that

Code:<table border="1">

doesn't render the table with a border in Chrome (works in FF and IE). Wish I had Opera....

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@hingehead,

Using what doctype declaration?

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@hingehead,

I now do have opera and renders there too. Now to find a Mac with Safari....

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@Robert Gentel,

Code:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

Html generated by Oracle's CMS (formerly Stellent)

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Have you seen the download manager? I'm so used to Firefox's separate window I wasn't even sure it was working - but it's a neat little box bottom left and you can see all downloads in another tab triggered bottom right.

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@hingehead,

Renders correct for me chrome, as well as safari.

I viewed the following document:

Code:



<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"

    "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

<html>

<body>

<table border="1">

<tr><td>test</td><td>2</td<td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td>test</td><td>2</td<td>3</td></tr>

<tr><td>test</td><td>2</td<td>3</td></tr>

</table>

</body>

</html>

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@Robert Gentel,

It does allow you to create a desktop or quick launch icon to a website. When doing this, it has even less chrome then the normal version. It also uses the sites favicon as the icon.

Making a minimize to tray would be an easy feature, and pretty cool. However having it notify on update would be a whole other beast. I can't think of a way to do it without requiring some specific code from the website itself. The only way without changing the site I can think of would be to change color on any DOM change. However this would have problems with pages with javascript clocks.

Actually, the more I think of it, I think this would be the perfect piece of functionality for a plugin. Then you could customize when the color changed for each site (such as when an ajax request returns a certain result, or certain DOM element changes, when a javascript function executes, etc).

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@Nick Ashley,

Nick Ashley wrote:

It does allow you to create a desktop or quick launch icon to a website. When doing this, it has even less chrome then the normal version. It also uses the sites favicon as the icon.

Yeah, I made one for our email but it's of limited use to me if I can't minimize it and get notifications.

Quote:

Making a minimize to tray would be an easy feature, and pretty cool. However having it notify on update would be a whole other beast. I can't think of a way to do it without requiring some specific code from the website itself.

I know, initially the only thing I think it could do that could work broadly is to notify on page refresh, and let javascript make rpc calls in the background and then refresh the page if there's something new to trigger the notification. It doesn't seem like it would be useful without a specific api for notifications that the sites could use.

Quote:

The only way without changing the site I can think of would be to change color on any DOM change. However this would have problems with pages with javascript clocks.

Well they could get more specific on the dom change but I agree about the basic problem in doing it this way.

Quote:

Actually, the more I think of it, I think this would be the perfect piece of functionality for a plugin. Then you could customize when the color changed for each site (such as when an ajax request returns a certain result, or certain DOM element changes, when a javascript function executes, etc).

Alternately, it could be an open notification standard, with support for messaging that the site itself could manipulate through js. In any case, when something like that finally happens, I think the webtop people have been talking about for so long will finally come to life.

You haven't happened to find my search bookmark functionality have you? Without that I can't see myself even using it for more than testing.

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@Robert Gentel,

Robert Gentel wrote:

You haven't happened to find my search bookmark functionality have you? Without that I can't see myself even using it for more than testing.

It has an interesting way of handling that functionality. All you have to do is use the normal sites search once. For example, go to amazon.com. Then, search for something (anything).

Now, open a new tab, and start to type amazon. As soon as amazon.com is highlighted in the dropdown box, hit tab. Now it will say "Search amazon.com:". You can now type whatever you want, and hit enter to search on that site.

Its cool that it makes this functionality automatically for any site you search on. No word yet on how it works if a site has different types of search, however. (I wouldn't know how to search within a certain category on amazon, for example).

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@Nick Ashley,

Interesting. It's not as quick as what I'm used to, and I'd love to be able to customize it some more (e.g. to make special searches that pass in more parameters) but it's a decent start.

But what triggers it seems a bit more complex than that. I tested it on msn without having searched and it created that functionality just from having it in the history.

Then I tried the same for ajooja.com and that search wasn't recognized till I actually ran one of the searches.

Either way, I want to be able to customize it directly and build my own GET and POST requests and there must be a way to do that somewhere.

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@Robert Gentel,

The only disadvantage for me seems to be that I have to scroll down all my (couple of hundred) bookmarks ... Google obviously thinks, they could be rebound easily by just searching for them (which it does - but since I'm used to do differently ...)

And surprisingly, Chrome seems to find even the obscurest plugins I've ever used, no need at all to re-download them ...

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@Nick Ashley,

I found a JS benchmarking tool that Google has provided:

http://code.google.com/apis/v8/run.html

I haven't played with it but someone else already did:

http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/bto/20080902/chrome_subbenchmark_png.PNG

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@Robert Gentel,

Of course Mozilla's tests show differently...

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/tm-v8-sunspider-totals.png

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roadmap/archives/2008/09/tracemonkey_update.html

1 Reply

Google is launching their own open source browser tomorrow

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