Mailbag: Chrome First Impressions, More

Chrome is nice...but no dice. After succumbing to the overwhelming buzz about the browser, I was one of the first in this part of the world to get my copy. My immediate impression (from using the browser and reading the comic) is that the Google Chrome team designed the browser for the pages, not for the humans browsing.

Reload All Tabs (or Refresh All, in IE talk) is missing. Imagine your Internet connection going off briefly, and you have like 19 tabs open (after all, memory usage isn't an issue). You will have to refresh each page one at a time. Also, when Flash crashed in one of my tabs, it crashed in all tabs. Where is the isolation? "Evil:%" as a link on mouse-over or typed in the "omnibar" crashes Chrome completely, warranting a restart. Also, it had a problem handling a certain malicious site I came across.
-Anonymous

I love Chrome. Yes, it is sparse, but it doesn't have the excess baggage and Band-Aids of 10 years of kludges. Its approach to security, processes and even compilation of JavaScript are all innovative and it shows. It seems rather solid for a beta (a shame it used the unpatched version of WebKit as the MS press hounds are HOWLING about insecurity already).

I imagine that what Google did with Chrome is very similar to what MS needs to do with Midori: start from scratch based on today's paradigms.
-Rob

I have tried Chrome briefly. One of my home pages is a Microsoft personalized Live page. I could log into my Live account but the personalized pages would not display -- it always went to the Live search screen no matter what I did. I also could not figure out how to get the bookmarks listing to always be open on the left side of the program as in IE and Firefox. When you have a wide screen, there's plenty of room to have that open and still have horizontal space for page display. It did seem faster than IE but about the same as Firefox.

Biggest concern is what Chrome is doing under the covers to track activity and report back to Google. Call me paranoid but...
-Jim

I gave Chrome a whirl and I've been kind of puzzled by the number of people that say it is so much faster than other browsers. I did a side-by side comparison on three of our own sites that are kind of slow and I did not see any appreciable difference in performance between Firefox 3, IE 7 and Chrome. I did like the sparse layout so that more of the page shows in the browser, but it wasn't as big a difference as I thought it would be. Overall, it is a nice browser but as someone who works at a Web design firm, my main reaction is, "Great, another browser to test against." Oh well, more work for us.
-Cameron

I tried Chrome on Vista Business and got an execution error. It loaded the interface but I could not load any pages.
-David

I thought I had a solution in Chrome only to be disappointed once again. I have two Gmail accounts. Firefox only allows me to have one opened at a time (I open them both, but when I access one account, the other one automatically gets signed out). I thought for sure Chrome was the answer -- especially after reading the introductory comic strip about different access for each tab and how crashing one would not crash any others. I -- foolishly, it appears -- concluded that since the tabs were not synched together in any way, I could open both Gmail accounts and access them without fearing one would get logged out.

Not so. In Chrome, the same symptom appears when I open both accounts; accessing one for action signs out the other. Perhaps only one may run from any single machine? Not the case. I open one in Firefox and the other in Chrome and both may be accessed in turn without knocking the other offline. My conclusion: Chrome is smoke and mirrors. Great concept, poor execution. Perhaps I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand how it works. If all the tabs in Chrome work independently of each other, how would it know to sign one Gmail account offline when the other is accessed without knowing that I'm opening both accounts from the same machine in two different browsers? My head hurts.
-Earl

Posted by Doug Barney on September 08, 20080 comments

Browser Market Getting Fun

Even before Google made its Chrome play, the competition was already heated. Recently, management consultancy Janco Associates claimed that IE had only a 58 percent market share. Oddly, it gave Google Desktop a 4 percent share, even though that isn't even a browser.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 04, 20080 comments

Mailbag: More Thoughts on Vista, Mac and IE

For my corporation, I feel it's an unnecessary migration to go from XP to Vista. The migration plus the learning curve for users is not necessary since there is little that is tangible lost for us by staying on XP, a now stable and well-known platform with huge user acceptance. It's a big decision for a company to commit the resources to migrate. In this vein, management must see a business-need incentive to approve the leap.
-Brian

Posted by Doug Barney on September 04, 20080 comments

Chrome Might Get You Home

Posted by Doug Barney on September 04, 20080 comments

TNT Software Blasts Out Upgrade

The company actually changed its plans midstream, according to VP of Sales and Marketing Brent Skadsen.

"Our plan was to rush out an interim build of ELM to support the adoption of Windows Server 2008 and Vista. Originally, the scope was to efficiently monitor systems running these new operating systems," he said. "Then, it expanded to run on the platform. As the project developed, it became clear, supporting Windows Server 2008 required monitoring 64-bit systems and adding a mechanism to manage the higher event log frequency. In addition to boosting the performance and scalability, filtering features were designed to reduce the event noise." More

Posted by Doug Barney on September 04, 20080 comments

PC Fashion Plate

Redmond also wants PCs to be cool. The Vista Aero interface is definitely slick, and Microsoft wants hot-looking machines to go along with its hot software. So who better to design these things than today's top fashion designers?

Posted by Doug Barney on September 03, 20080 comments

Mailbag: All Eyes on IE, More

The beta 2 of IE 8 is a significant improvement over IE 7, although still quite buggy on some sites because of the changes to comply with W3C standards. I'm just wondering if sites will be willing to change for IE 8 to W3C or mark as compatible with older versions of IE.

The feature that was the most impressive was the more secure capability to identify dangerous Web sites such as phishing sites. Checking for dangerous Web sites is a big jump for IE. In the beta 2 release, they stepped up the warning message to be sure it is hard to miss. Yet to be seen is whether the loose coupling helps with performance. The use of Accelerator to invoke a map is a nice feature. The recoverability feature has limited value for my use. The changes further place IE 8 as a browser that is trying to catch up with Firefox along with the many Firefox add-ons, but also likely to keep IE as a highly popular browser that remains as a corporate standard for most Fortune 500 companies.
-Joe

I have not seen any reason to use IE over Firefox. I stopped using IE because it kept crashing (locking up) and I have not had this problem with Firefox. I have not used IE since V7 first came out so this may not be an issue today. However, Firefox seems so much more flexible and extendable that I have never considered going back. And with the new features in Firefox V3, I just love it even more.
-Wayne

Unless Firefox becomes manageable at some point, it'll always be useless in a business. With no ability to remotely install, patch, configure and monitor Firefox, companies that care about security are forced to use IE no matter which browser they prefer. Hopefully, the new version of IE will catch up to Firefox's usability and performance advantages.
-Dave

There's no compelling reason to use IE over Firefox, though there's a compelling reason to use Firefox over IE: The last time Microsoft gained a monopoly in Web browser usage, it let the product stagnate for years, festering into a massive security problem and massively slowing the development of the Web in general.

I'm glad that it has started its photocopiers up again, because Mozilla and Apple need something to compete against. But Microsoft has proven time and again that it doesn't innovate, and as soon as its products are "good enough" that its competitors lose ground, it stops progressing. We need to make sure it continues to have something to copy.
-Anonymous

In my opinion, IE's share of the browser market is a direct result of its bundling with Windows. If users had to download it separately, Firefox (or perhaps some other player by now) would have the commanding lead in browser market share and IE would be an also-ran at best. Security exploits would orient around Firefox or whatever browser that happened to be the most popular.

In the past, I've used every available version of IE, Netscape, Firefox and several of Opera. I've found that each one has had its share of annoying quirks and agreeable features. I like the fact that Firefox doesn't use ActiveX and I also like the fact that IE uses integrated Windows authentication. It all comes down to usefulness. Neither browser is the be-all/end-all platform by which to enjoy the Internet. IE 8 will be no better or worse; it'll just be the next version with its set of features and quirks as the all the previous versions have had.
-Jeff

I think that the big thing missing in IE are plug-ins. Now, I'm not an expert, and I know that some plug-ins for IE exist, but the one I really miss is something like Foxmarks. I have four PCs and at least with Firefox all PCs' bookmarks are constantly in sync.
-Dave

I am happy that Firefox is out there because this forces Microsoft to make IE a better browser. The features in IE 8 will be a direct result of this.

The only other Web browser that could give IE a run for its money would be Apple's Safari. If Apple plays its cards right, it could sneak in Safari on everybody's PC through the use of all the "i" devices it sells.
-Brian

Posted by Doug Barney on September 03, 20080 comments

Mac Clones Coming Back?

There is one feisty clone maker out there: Psystar of Palo Alto. Psystar apparently has some kind of license for the Mac OS which the company thinks gives it the right to make clones. Apple, of course, sued. Unexpectedly (at least to me) Psystar sued back, claiming that Apple has an illegal monopoly over its operating system.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 03, 20080 comments

Defending Mojave

Some critics bashed the whole thing as a set up, arguing that Vista was running on super high-end hardware to make it look good. Microsoft is fighting back, pointing out that Mojave/Vista is running on year-old HP laptops with just a couple gigs of RAM.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 03, 20080 comments

Mailbag: Vista This, Vista That

I read your article in Redmond Report and just wanted to respond. The main driver for our organization wanting to continue to run XP is the stability of the OS, minimal issues, and the cost in time and money to replace old hardware. Today, these older desktop machines run acceptably well with XP, but they would not meet the hardware requirements for the new OS.

Secondly, we have monitored the issues surrounding Vista and believe we would be significantly adding to our work load if we migrated. Most organizations have more work on their to-do list than they have resources to accomplish them, leaving only the most critical and cost-effective projects to be funded. The value is not high enough to make the move at a corporate level.
-Jonathan

Even with all the problems we had with the XP SP3 upgrade, I still like XP a lot more than Vista!
-Tony

I tell all of my customers and clients not to buy anything with Vista on it. If you really need a new system, look online for machines that still ship with XP. Often, these are refurbished machines, so the end user has a tough choice to make: get an antiquated machine with XP or I can de-Vistafy your machine for you. And people are buying it; there is an actual demand for this service. What choice does the user have? Try to work with Vista and pray that any software they buy that isn't explicitly rated for Vista has a 50/50 chance of working, and you all know the penalty for returning opened software.

This Vista debacle is beyond belief. Learning Linux, any distro, is easier than dealing with Vista. The tech support time is so high that it is prohibitive. The only people who have made money on Vista is Microsoft, and while I have nothing against capitalism, this is out and out theft. Vista does not work, and NO amount of patching by Microsoft will ever get it to work with the ease and finesse of XP Pro. This has to be illegal, but who can afford to sue Microsoft?
-Ari

I work for a school district and we have no plans to move to Vista.
-Anonymous

The poor economy has less to do with our reluctance to go to Vista here at the City of Eugene, than the fact that there is no perceived advantage to go to Vista, even with some increase in security. The UAC, with all its prompting, is seen by management as too burdensome for the users. There is great reluctance on the part of upper management to force this on our users. The move to Vista would be costly in having to upgrade many workstations to 1GB or more of memory. Then the departments would see an annoying UAC and no bang for their buck after buying more memory.

The culture here is "everybody a local admin." With IT already seen as a cost center, we really don't want to make the departments pay more money in hardware costs for an annoying OS. There have been suggestions in upper management that if we went to Vista, we are to rip the UAC out of our install set. No increase in security with a hardware cost to the users translates into no Vista for us.
-Robert

After many hours of saving and retrieving ghost images from my XP machine, I decided to upgrade to Vista. What a big mistake! I have now decided to downgrade back to XP, because I cannot connect to the Vista machine using NET USE after many hours of trying, and I am sick and tired of searching for solutions. It shouldn't be that hard for an experienced IT pro. Computers are supposed to make life easier, and upgrades are supposed to do just that -- upgrade. Vista is not ready for prime time.
-Richard

I'm waiting for Vista SP2, hoping that will finally restore the Fax Wizard that even XP Home had, and that MS, in its infinite wisdom, opted to leave out of Vista Home Premium. But I'm not holding my breath waiting, and my hopes aren't high. I'm more likely to go the dual-boot route with Ubuntu, where a fax printer is just another package that's part of the distribution.

Beats me how Microsoft can think it's encouraging customer loyalty when it refuses to allow customers to buy the MS products they want.
-Fred

Posted by Doug Barney on September 02, 20080 comments

Google Browser Nearing Reality

Google must have been reading Redmond magazine. I wrote a column for Redmond, "The Barney Browser," in June 2008. My idea was for Google to build a browser and focus on intelligently storing searches, along with archiving the overall process of exploration. I wrote: "The Google Barney Browser integrates searching with a file system so the intelligence that comes from searches can be organized, used, shared and built upon. Perhaps these strings of pages can be cached so if the site goes down, the information isn't lost."

Posted by Doug Barney on September 02, 20080 comments

Patch That Web!

The Web is a wilder, woollier and perhaps more dangerous world. Researchers and vendors such as Cenzic have been pointing out how unpatched many Web servers and apps are. In fact, Cenzic claims that seven out of 10 sites aren't safe.

Posted by Doug Barney on September 02, 20080 comments