… let the real work begin. Congratulations to President-Elect Barack Obama.
Things I Learned:
- They borrowed some UI concepts from Opera and IE (controls and address bar inside the tabs, speed dial, paste-and-go) but I think they’ve done some things better. For instance: the default home page requires zero user interaction, the status bar is only present when you hover over a link, tab cycling makes sense and requires zero thought.
- They really didn’t want to introduce another rendering engine for developers – so Google is simply using WebKit, it won’t be a fork
- No tie-ins to Google Services installed by default
- They’ve been working on it for two years
- V8 will eventually make its way into Android
- They haven’t made very many contributions to Webkit, but are fully committed to doing so. Their plan is to build Chrome off the WebKit tip
- Extensibility – though they obviously support traditional browser plugins and they have plans for a richer extension API – it won’t be in the Beta.
- UA String is: “Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″ =>Google, please work to shorten the UA string, not lengthen it (is there really any valid reason for “Safari/…” to be there?)
- The browser is fast. Transition is seemless. I like that the default home page requires no user interaction to generate. Ctrl+L, Ctrl+K, Alt+D, Ctrl+T all work as I expected.
- They are using an older version of WebKit (older than Safari 3.1 it looks like) as there are two SVG-related rendering problems with my site that I thought were long gone
- They have a sense of humour (open up the Chrome Task manager and see the link at the bottom)
Further Exploration:
- I’m curious how browsers like IE and Chrome are ensuring that access to the browser cache is shared efficiently across all processes?
- I’d like to learn more about the ‘cross-platform’ graphics library that they are using, does it support hardware acceleration?
- Are other browser vendors worried that the editor of the HTML5 spec is now an employee of a browser vendor?
- What are Google Chrome’s plans for feeds? At the moment, there isn’t even any auto-discovery
How do you take notes? Here’s my list of techniques in order of preference using a heuristic which is some function of efficiency, persistence, and privacy:
- Full-finger-typing on a regular-size keyboard
- Writing with a pen/pencil on paper
- Thumb-typing on a small QWERTY keyboard
- Stylus recognition on a touchscreen
- Voice notes
- Scoring the flesh of my forearm in Morse Code with a rusty Bowie knife
- Typing with one thumb on my phone’s number keypad
Which one do you use? Guess which one I use…
Rob is heading to the Chicago ‘burbs this weekend. Since we are not often released from captivity, this is a good chance for us to head downtown for some beverages and food. If anyone else is interested in an impromptu web-geek meet-up in the Chicago area, let me know. I’m thinking of Elephant & Castle, Saturday night around 6pm for dinner. Not sure where we’ll go from there yet. Suggestions?
While I was posting posting my own fail story, a bunch of Twitter residents decided to start riffing on the phrase ‘EPIC FAIL’ (maybe as a result of this article?). I’m not sure who started it, but I thought I’d paste in the relevant tweets from the people I follow:
- Kurafire: EPIC HAIL
- Molly: EPIC SAIL
- Kurafire: EPIC FLAIL
- Kurafire: EPIC INHALE
- Kurafire: EPIC WHALE (also cwilso)
- Molly: EPIC SALE
- Eric Meyer: OPEC FAIL
- Eric Meyer: E-PIC FAIL
- Chris Wilson: EPIC MAIL
- Chris Wilson: EPIC KALE
- Me: EPIC GALE
- Me: EPIC STALE