Monthly Archives: September 2008

Google Chrome does NOT stand up to its hype

For one of the first times, google has done something I do not appreciate. Chrome is a tad beautiful, a tad fast, and nothing else. Google very proudly claims its new browser to be very strongly equipped, but none of it was something you could like. From the very start, google only provides a 475 kB downloader on their site. After you execute that, it takes some 15 minutes downloading stuff you don’t know what, or how much. After that, it starts installing simultaneouly, and I didn’t even notice if it gives you the option of installing in some other drive. After that installation, which relievingly is pretty fast, google chrome starts up with its milky sheen, and a dumb looking window asking you to configure the browser as you want. And guess what! The default selected search engine is WINDOWS LIVE!!! I was appalled! Then opened up the browser. The look was fine, but it opened up the Google site of chrome, which talked about its many amazing features.

  • It began with the feature which is one of the most exciting, at least to Slashdot viewers, as you can see from the comments on their posts about chrome : the tabs above the address bar (??!!??). What the heck is new in that, man! Its been there in Opera since three versions.
  • Then, we move onto the quickly accessible, recently viewed sites. Again a copy from Opera’s Speed dial.
  • Then, the easily movable and drag-out-to-create-a-new-window tabs which is too explicit a copy from Safari.
  • Then Incognito mode, copy from Safari’s private browsing and as it has been compared, to IE8’s inPrivate browsing.
  • There’s also the highly fabled about, each tab running as a different application or process preventing entire crash of the browser, which is taken from IE8, still in beta, and pretty shabbily done.

A feature, they haven’t actually called a feature, is the way selection of a text-box makes it get a golden glow on it. That too (OMG!!) is a copy of safari which gives all buttons and text-boxes a blue border glow.The only new thing must be the absence of a menu bar. There are just 2 good looking buttons, one spanner, and one New-page-type icon which hide all the rest of the stuff – which also is pretty similar to IE8 (just see the levels Google has fallen down to, to copy!). The only thing that might be new is the 1/2 a curve thing which rotates to show loading of a tab, and that’s the only thing which looks downright cheap.

All in all, switching to safari from fx was a much better experience than even trying Google Chrome (and I am still in search of the colour chrome in the entire browser, perhaps they didn’t put it to make it look even similar to safari…). I wouldn’t give it more than a two-and-a-half stars out of five and due to the hype it followed, not even coming close to matching it, I’d drop that rating down to one-and-a-half stars.

Google Chrome

Google will be finally launching the beta version of it’s open source browser built using the WebKit rendring engine , named “Chrome“.

In Chrome, each tab will have an individual process, and each will have it’s own browser controls and address bar. So if one tab dies only one process will die , thus adding stability. It also has a process manager which allows the user to see how much memory and CPU each tab is taking up, as well as kill off unresponsive tabs.

Having used components from from Apple’s WebKit and Mozilla Firefox among others, Google has made it’s browser open source.

The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it.

The beta release date is scheduled for September 2nd.

For more details visit the official blog.

Here’s an official comic book by Scott McCloud explaining it’s features.

Matrix-Ecomm 2008 – Overall Winners

Exunclan bagged the Overall Trophy in Matrix-Ecomm 2008 held at the Mount St. Mary’s School on 28th and 29th august. The results are as follows:-

1.Quiz – 1st Position

  • Kartikeya Asthana
  • Kritika Bajaj
2.Toon Making – 1st Position
  • Shubham Goel
  • Rishabh Marya
3.Gaming – 2nd Position
  • Aviral Goyal
  • Arjun Kumar

4.Roborage – Best Functional Design

  • Anuj Bhardwaj
  • Ankush Gupta

-Congrats to All