Since the release of Google Chrome on September 2, I have been using it as my day-to-day browser. Spending up to 80% of my computer time in a browser means that this was decision which affected a huge portion of my online experience.

I can say that I put Chrome through its paces, on a wide-variety of sites, from the simple to the extremely content-rich. From the mainstream, to the questionable.

This morning I migrated back to Firefox, albeit the latest Minefield/Firefox 3.1alpha.

The reasons listed below are mine. Switching back is a personal decision and everyone is likely to have their own reasons to do it, or to stay.

Advertising

I mentioned a few times during my initial use of Chrome that I was having to become used to the re-appearance of advertising in my browsing experience [here and here]. From their early release as extensions to Firefox, I have used AdBlock and AdBlock Plus to remove the annoyance and distraction of online ads from my browsing experience.

When I moved to Chrome, I had to accept that I would see ads. I mean, we were dealing with a browser distributed by one of the largest online advertising agencies. It could only be expected that they were not going to allow people to block ads out of the gate, if ever.

As the week progressed, I realized that I was finding the ads to be a distraction from my browsing experience. Ads impede my ability to find the information I need quickly.

Older Machines

My primary machine for online experiences at home is a Latitude D610. This is a 3-4 year-old laptop, with a single core. It is still far more computing power than most people actually need to enjoy the Web.

While cruising with Chrome, I found that Flash locked up the entire machine on a very regular basis. Made it unsuable. This doesn’t happen on my much more powerful Latitude D630, provided by my work. However, as I have a personal laptop, I am not going to use my work computer for my personal stuff, especially at home.

I cannot have a browser that locks up a machine when I simply close a tab. It appears that the vaunted QA division at Google overlooked the fact that people don’t all run the latest and greatest machines in the real world.

Auto-Complete

I am completely reliant on form auto-completes. Firefox has been doing this for me for a long time, and it is very handy to simply start typing and have Firefox say “Hey! This form element is called email. Here are some of the other things you have put into form elements called email.”

If you can build something as complex as the OmniBox, surely you can add form auto-completes.

The OmniBox

I hate it. I really do. I like having my search and addresses separate. I also like an address bar that remembers complete URLs (including those pesky parameters!), rather than simply the top-level domain name.

It is a cool idea, but it needs some refining, and some customer-satisfaction focus groups.

I Don’t Use Desktop-replacing Web Applications

I do almost all of my real work in desktop-installed Web applications. I have not made the migration to Web applications. I may in the future. But until then, I do not need a completely clean browsing experience. I mentioned that the battle between Chrome and Firefox will come down to the Container v. the Desktop - a web application container, or a desktop-replacing Web experience application.

In the last 48 hours, I have fallen back into the Web-desktop camp.

Summary

In the future, I will continue to use Chrome to see how newer builds advance, and how it evolves as more people begin dictating the features that should be available to it.

For my personal use, Chrome takes away too much from, and injects too much noise into, my daily Web experience to continue to use as the default browser. To quote more than a few skeptics of Chrome when it was relased - “It’s just another browser”.

Tags: Adblock, Adblock Plus, auto-complete, autocomplete, browser, browser wars, Chrome, conatiner, desktop, Google, Google Chrome, latitude d610, omnibox, wars, web app, web-based application

The last two days of using Chrome have had me thinking about the purpose of the Web browser in today’s world. I’ve talked about how Chrome and Firefox have changed how we see browsers, treating them as interactive windows into our daily life, rather than the uncontrolled end of an information firehose.

These applications, that on the surface seem to serve the same purpose, have taken very different paths to this point. Much has been made about Firefox growing out of the ashes of Netscape, while Chrome is the Web re-imagined.

It’s not just that.

Firefox, through the use of extensions and helper applications, has grown to become a Desktop replacement. Back when Windows for Workgroups was the primary end-user OS (and it wasn’t even an OS), Norton Desktop arrived to provide all of the tools that didn’t ship with the OS. It extended and improved on what was there, and made WFW a better place.

Firefox serves that purpose in the browser world. With its massive collections of extensions, it adds the ability to customize and modify the Web workspace. These extensions even allow the incoming content to be modified and reformatted in unique ways to suit the preferences of each individual. These features allowed the person using Firefox to feel in control, empowered.

You look at the Firefox installs of the tech elite, and no two installed versions will be configured in the same way. Firefox extends the browser into an aggregator of Web data and information customization.

But it does it at the Desktop.

Chrome is a simple container. There is (currently) no way to customize the look and feel, extend the capabilities, or modify the incoming or outgoing content. It is a simple shell designed to perform two key functions: search for content and interact with Web applications.

There are, of course, the hidden geeky functions that they have built into the app. But those don’t change what it’s core function is: request, receive, and render Web pages as quickly and efficiently as possible. Unlike Firefox’s approach, which places the app being the center of the Web, Chrome places the Web at the center of the Web.

There is no right or wrong approach. As with all things in this complicated world we are in, it depends. It depends on what you are trying to accomplish and how you want to get there.

The conflict that I see appearing over the next few months is not between IE and Firefox and Safari and Opera and Chrome. It is a conflict over what the people want from an application that they use all the time. Do they want a Web desktop or a Web container?

Tags: add-ons, application, browser, Chrome, extension, Firefox, helper applications, IE, Internet Explorer, web, web application, web applications, Web browser, web container, Web data, web desktop, Web workspace, Windows

Since I downloaded and started using Chrome yesterday, I have had to rediscover the world of online advertising. Using Firefox and Adblock Plus for nearly three years has shielded from their existence for the most part.

Stephen Noble, in a post on the Forrester Blog for Interactive Marketing Professionals, seems to discover that Chrome will be a source for injecting greater personalization and targeting into the online advertising market.

This is the key reason Chrome exists, right now.

While their may be discussions about the online platform and hosted applications, there are only a small percentage of Internet users who rely on hosted desktop-like applications, excluding email, in their daily work and life.

However, Google’s biggest money-making ventures are advertising and search. With control of AdSense and DoubleClick, there is no doubt that Google controls a vast majority of the targeted and contextual advertising market, around the world.

One of the greatest threats to this money-making is a lack of control of the platform through which ads are delivered. There is talk of IE8 blocking ads (well, non-Microsoft ads anyway), and one of the more popular extensions for Firefox is Adblock Plus. While Safari doesn’t have this ability natively built in, it can be supported by any number of applications that, in the name of Internet security, filter and block online advertisers using end-user proxies.

This threat to Google’s core revenue source was not ignored in the development of Chrome. One of the options is the use of DNS pre-fetching. Now I haven’t thrown up a packet sniffer, but what’s to prevent a part of the pre-fetching algorithm to go beyond DNS for certain content, and pre-fetch the whole object, so that the ads load really fast, and in that way are seen as less intrusive.

Ok, so I am noted for having a paraoid streak.

However, using the fastest rendering engine and a rocket-ship fast Javascript VM is not only good for the new generation of online Web applications, but plays right into the hands of improved ad-delivery.

So, while Chrome is being hailed as the first Web application environment, it is very much a context Web advertising environment as well.

It’s how it was built.

Tags: Adblock, Adblock Plus, ads, adsense, advertising, advertising environment, Chrome, context Web, contextual advertising, DNS, doubleclick, Firefox, Forrester, Google, hosted desktop-like applications, IE8, Internet Explorer 8, Internet security, Internet users, Javascript, Microsoft, online advertisers using end-user proxies, online advertising, online advertising market, online platform, online Web applications, pre-fetching algorithm, Safari, search ads, Stephen Noble, targeted advertising, targeted and contextual advertising market, Web application environment

Three years ago, in a post on this blog, I stated that I thought that the browser was becoming less important as more data moved into streams of data through RSS and aggregated feeds, as well as a raft of other consumer-oriented Web services.

This position was based on the assumption that the endpoint, in the form of installed applications, wouldcontinue to serve as the focus for user interactions, that these applications would be the points where data was accumulated and processed by users. This could be best described as the firehose: The end-user desktop would be at the end of a flood of data being pushed to it a never-ending flood.

Firefox and Chrome have changed all of that.

The browser has, instead, become the window through which we view and manipulate our data. It’s now ok, completely acceptable in fact, to use online applications as replacements for installed applications, stripping away a profit engine that has fed so many organizations over the years.

The endpoint has been shown to be the access point to our applications, to our data. Data is not brought and stored locally: It is stored remotely and manipulated like a marionette from afar.

While Chrome and Firefox are not perfect, they serve as powerful reminders of what the Web is, and why the browser exists. The Browser is not the end of a flod of incoming data, it is the window through which we see our online world.

While some complain that there is still an endless stream of data, we control and manipulate it. It doesn’t flood us.

Tags: Chrome, consumer-oriented Web services, control, Firefox, firehose, hosted applications, interactions, online applications, online world, users, web 2.0, web applications, window

Google Chrome is out. And from first impressions, it is stinking fast. However, i do have some gripes.

1. Comes with link underlining enabled. I hate this. It’s the first think I disable in Firefox and any browser that supports disabling underlining
2. Where’s the “get your hands dirty under the hood” option list? I love the Firefox about:config list. Chrome needs this.
3. Ads. I know. There is little chance for built in ad-blocking, but it’s on my wish-list.

Otherwise, it’s good…so far. And the memory usage is, well, definitely less intrusive.

I plan to use this for a while and see what happens. I will likely find something that drives me back to Firefox eventually.

Ok, found a weirdness when you use a <li> tag in the Wordpress editor. It seems that it starts injecting <div> tags to differentiate paragraphs after you close out the list.

Tags: browser, Chrome, Google, Google Chrome, test drive, testing, Web Performance, web usability

As a Web performance consultant, I view the release of Google Chrome with slightly different eyes than many. And one of the items that I look for is how the browser will affect performance, especially perceived performance on the end-user desktop.

One thing I have been able to determine is that the use of WebKit will effectively rule out (to the best of my knowledge) the availability of HTTP Pipelining in the browser.

HTTP Pipelining is the ability, defined in RFC 2616, to request multiple HTTP objects simultaneously across an open TCP connection, and then handle their downloads using the features built into the HTTP/1.1 specifications.

I had an Apple employee in a class I taught a few months back confirm that Safari (which is built on WebKit) cannot use HTTP Pipeling for reason that are known only to the OS and TCP stack developers at Apple.

Now, if the team at Google has found a way to circumvent this problem, I will be impressed.

Tags: Apple, Chrome, Google, Google Chrome, HTTP pipelining, pipelining, Safari, WebKit

That is not a typo. The great man spoke the words today. [here and MSFT Press Release and here and here and here and here
and here and here]

Will it be better…?

The quote:

Building on those advancements, Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP SP2 while maintaining the level of extensibility and compatibility that customers have come to expect. Internet Explorer 7.0 will also provide even stronger defenses against phishing, malicious software and spyware. The beta release is scheduled to be available this summer.

But what will those features be?

• Complete CSS2 support? Hell! CSS1?
• Full HTTP/1.1 compatability?
• Final removal of ActiveX?
• Truly enforce [X]HTML standards for publishing?
• Simple extensibility for any developer?
• Themes/Chrome?
• A matching version for MacOSX?

They know they are in trouble. They are generating buzz. But if they have just patched and incremented MSIE 6.0, without re-engineering the core parser, rendering and networking engines, then it won’t be worth talking about.

Come on Microsoft: Impress me.

Tags: ASP, blog, Chrome, cro, css, customers, design, Firefox, hits, HTML, HTTP, IE, IM, Internet, Internet Explorer, internet explorer 7, it, Mac, maintain, Microsoft, MSIE, networking, Om, PHP, pr, web, window, Windows