Rubénerd!

After my fairly disparaging posts about Chrome recently I was feeling bad for it, so I installed Chromium on my Linux Thinkpad again, but soon realised why I didn't use it: Chromium doesn't respect GTK's font anti-aliasing settings. There could be a solution to this, but I don't really see the point when Firefox works beautifully. And Kazehakase, which I'd use if I weren't so enamoured with NoScript :).

As an aside, I think Chrome and Chromium are really only usable (from a UI perspective) on the Mac because they're forced to have full menus. Ditto with Microsoft Office. Well, not that I use that either ;).

I'm pretty much over the whole Google Chrome WebM debacle, but John Gruber summarised it better than anyone else at the end of a recent Daring Firewall post. I'd leave a comment there, but... y'know ;).

How Google’s decision to drop native H.264 playback from Chrome serves to prop up Flash Player. [...]

The least amount of work these companies can do now, to continue serving video to Chrome users, is to keep using H.264-encoded video via Flash Player. There is no sign that any of these companies share the idealistic concerns of H.264 opponents, and every sign that they’re satisfied with H.264’s technical merits and legal status.

Thus, dropping native H.264 playback from Chrome while still allowing H.264 playback via Flash Player isn’t going to drive adoption of WebM. It just means that Chrome users will get H.264 via Flash.

Budda-boom

Exactly. As Alexander Sadlier pointed out in the comments thread in my previous post, WebM doesn't need Flash to be played in most browsers. I'm hugely relieved I was wrong about that.

Unfortunately, this doesn't negate the fact the immediate effect of removing the H.264 codec will be to push more people onto Flash. Say what you will about the legal status of H.264, but at least it can be played in an HTML5 <video> tag without the need for a closed, proprietary plugin..

The wrapup

• Google claims they're removing H.264 because they want to encourage open innovation, but they keep the closed and proprietary Flash plugin.

• Google lambasted Apple for being exclusive rather than inclusive at Google IO, and now they're being exclusive. Had Apple said this about Google, the tech media would be foaming at the mouth reporting how evil, closed and two-faced Apple is, but because its Google they've largely ignored it. Grilled cheese sandwiches.

• Most sites will likely save themselves the trouble and continue serving H.264. It has an enormous hardware install base, mature video editing tools (we're kidding ourselves if we think a ffmpeg stopgap counts) and can be delivered via Flash to Chrome users.

• WebM has its own legal and technological shortcomings; for example, did you know Google offers no patent infringement indemnification?

• I once walked down the street backwards in Raffles Place just to count how many people stared at me. Surprisingly, very few did because they had their faces buried in their smartphones.

• The legal issues with H.264 have been greatly exaggerated by an easily excitable tech press. I never thought I'd partly agree with Ed Bott on something :O.

• I also maintain a little conspiracy theory that this is a strategic move to cozy up to Adobe to counteract Apple and Microsoft (and HP/Palm... do people still care about them? Damn I've always wanted a Pre), rather than a philosophical position as they're claiming. They're proporting to be for openness on the one hand, while pushing people onto Flash with the other. Its an absolute master stroke of geniusness.

I have two footers

Anyway, I'm over this and ready to move on. I don't use Chrom[e,ium], nor do I even watch video through a browser. If I'm going to be downloading video on a relatively crappy Aussie internet connection, I may as well use BitTorrent and create a local copy so I'm not having it counted multiple times on the metered quota thingy. The Bird is The Word.

Exactamondo. When real video production tools start supporting it, and when its own patent issues are resolved, I really hope it can be used eventually. Until then, Google is asking us to adopt a codec that still has training wheels, exclusively.

So the iPhone is coming to Verizon? This is bigger news: The Google Chromium team have announced the impending removal of the H.264 codec from Chrome. Oh well, I never used it as my primary browser anyway.

Though H.264 plays an important role in video, as our goal is to enable open innovation, support for the codec will be removed and our resources directed towards completely open codec technologies.

I envy their convictions, but I see several glaring issues with this.

Being open by being closed

Leaving aside all the other glaring technical and legal shortcomings of WebM -- Google's proposed new video standard that's grounded in good intentions but alas falls short -- the main problem with it right now is it requires a Flash wrapper.

Google is claiming they're doing this for the sake of "open innovation"... by requiring Flash? Maybe they mean open because Flash is one of the most insecure pieces of junk online and they give open access to your machine by malicious users. Yeah, that must be it!

If we were to draw their line of reasoning to its logical conclusion, Google should be dropping the closed, proprietary Flash from Chrome [fixed] as well. They're not, and there's no way around this glaring fact. Well, maybe if you're a Fox News presenter you could figure out a way, like Glenn Beck no doubt will after this fiasco! But I digress.

The Google IO Factor

This was a comment left by Bob Andfeld on my post back in May 2010 about Google's support for Flash (Google supporting Flash doesn't make it open). My verbosity frustrates even me, he put it more eloquently and in less space than I ever could:

For a company such as Google that prides itself on being open and advertises its mobile platform as such, their support of closed Flash is absolutely baffling, yet enough people are willing to parade in their defense.

But it gets better! Say what you will about the open/closed nature of H.264, but at the last Google IO conference Eric Schmidt made the comment that the web should be about inclusion not exclusion, in reference to Apple's exclusion of Flash from their iDevices. And now, Google is excluding something.

I suppose that's no different than people like Paul Thurrott poking fun at Apple for not including cut and paste, then rushing to Microsoft's defence when they didn't ship the feature in Windows Phone 7. I suppose doing no evil doesn't include having double standards ;).

Knowledge is better than ignorance ~ Sergey Brin

I’m not one to dwell on conspiracy theories (unless they’re fun ones like the moon landing was fake, or Area 51 was actually where Chuck Norris had a house), but I’m beginning to entertain the notion that Google is hiding something, and its only becoming more obvious. Why would a company that prides itself on being open have such support for a plugin that is anything but, even going out of their way to demonstrate their mobile phone hardware with it at events? Are they in kahoots with Adobe?

There’s something more going on here, and we’re not being told about it. I reckon Shantanu wants a ride in Sergey and Larry’s private 767 with the hammocks, and Sergey and Larry want some free copies of Illustrator so they can redesign the Chrome logo to not look like the Windows XP logo that's been swirled once. Yeah, that must be it!

There's hope!

At this stage I'd triumphantly talk about my browser vendor since 2003, but Mozilla will probably side with Google on this. At this rate maybe I need to switch to Safari with FlashBlock! Nah, eLinks is where its at! :D

Needless to say, I'm glad I heeded no attention to the constant and increasingly vocal barrage of advice from people to move over to it. Ruben, move to Chrome! Hey Ruben, Chrome is cool, use it! Yo dawg, I heard you like Google tracking you...!

With all this gloom and doom talk, sometimes its worth remembering though what makes the web so strong and open in the first place. If a browser vendor starts to not make any sense, or do things we don't approve of or agree with, we can always just switch to something else and access the same internet as everyone else. Well, other than Internet Explorer, or Windows Internet Explorer Service Pack 1 Home Premium Edition or whatever they're calling it now :).

And from how this affects me personally, I use [flavour of the month] wrapped in Matroska from BitTorrent anyway. I mean, wait, no I don't. You didn't read that.

Despite being released during the last ice age, Internet Explorer 6 is still choking innovation and standards on the web, perhaps just as Microsoft intended. We need to get Internet Explorer 6 users off the net and onto newer browsers such as Mozilla Firefox, Opera, Safari or if they're okay with companies calling home then Chrome might also be feasible. Heck even Internet Explorer 8 or Windows Internet Explorer 8 or Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer Home Premium Online Edition 2009 would be a start.

Fortunately there is a way to encourage users on corporate computers who aren't allowed to install or modify the software on their machine and inexperienced users who don't know how to install or modify software in the first place to move over to a different browser, and it's so breathtakingly obvious I'm kicking my left shin with my left foot for not coming up with it myself.

By going to Twibbon you can add an Internet Explorer 6 must die badge on your Twitter profile and let the entire world see it! I suspect once such a movement reaches critical mass even the companies still on Windows 2000 will start to take notice and upgrade.

Okay I admit it, I was being sarcastic (no, really?) but the truth is we do need to get Internet Explorer 6 off the net. Even if only one person changes their browser in response to seeing my Toblerone nose that happens to have an indecipherable graphic that I assume is a tiny Microsoft Windows Internet Explorer Home Premium Online Edition 2009 icon with a strike through it, then I know it was worth it.

So The Googles have just come out and said they're releasing an operating system dubbed Google Chrome OS. Cool. This part is my favourite:

The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.

I use FreeBSD as well as Mac OS X on the desktop and while it does have some nice features, X11 is kinda kludgey. I'll be really interested to see what Google does as a graphical front-end instead.

The other question on my mind is: will Google Chrome OS run Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird? :)

I seem to be having trouble with Google Reader this afternoon, it won't let me comment on stories (perhaps it's frustrated I haven't cooked a grilled cheese sandwich in a few days). So instead I'm posting the story summaries here and commenting on them with Clipmarky goodness!

Slashdot: Google To Air Chrome Ads On TV

Google plans on advertising with spots promoting its Chrome browser this weekend. Google Japan had already released a 30-second video promoting Chrome on YouTube, but the company will distribute that video through the Google TV Ads network this weekend as an experiment to see if it can drum up interest in Chrome. Google advertised their browser on the New York Times' website on Wednesday.

I get the feeling the kind of people who would be technologically literate enough now to install software after watching a TV advertisement are the kind of people who are mostly watching shows online anyway not on TV.

Aside from the evening news on the ABC or SBS here in Australia or BBC World and CNN International in Singapore, I can't remember the last time I watched television. Or TV. TV or Television, both.

When I initially moved back over to Firefox on my Mac so I could use Greasemonkey to make Google Reader usable again, I had no idea that in a matter of weeks I would become a Firefox addict again. Not necessarily because of the interface (on Mac the Firefox 3.0 interface is quite clumsy and certainly not as streamlined as Camino or Safari), it's because of the extensions.

For example, yesterday CNET announced that Google's Chrome browser would be made available for Mac OS X and Linux at some point in the next 100 years:

Showing signs that it's working to meet requests for new developments to its Chrome browser, Google on Friday said it hopes to release versions for Mac OS X and Linux by the first half of the year, and it released a new version Wednesday that paves the way for the most requested feature: extensions.

While I was impressed initially with the Windows version as I wrote about last year, I soon yawned and moved back to Firefox. As someone who used to use KDE constantly I appreciated the fact that WebKit was being so well endorsed by being used by another vendor's browser, but I couldn't really see the market it was attempting to fill other than perhaps the idea that each tab is a separate process.

The fact such a large web company is also producing it does scare me a little too.

But back to extensions, now that I've read a few reports that Chrome will include extension abilities I'm somewhat appeased, but what I'm more immediately concerned about are the extensions themselves. While I value a few themes which make Firefox look more Mac like, I've become so used to using a handful of security extensions that moving to a browser that doesn't either have similar built-in functionality or the ability to extend the browser to do the same thing would make me feel unsafe using the web.

This is probably more paranoia than anything else, but I've become so used to blocking all the JavaScript, suspect advertisements and cookies loaded on a page and keeping meticulous whitelists that the alternative of allowing essentially a free-for-all scares me. Which is ironic, because less than a year ago I didn't have problems with this at all. I'd also miss the ability I have now to scrub URLs to remove unnecessary redirects, and being able to check whether or not secured certificates are using MD5 or not, or whether super cookies are active... the list goes on. This will be the topic of an upcoming post.

Who knows, perhaps Chrome will finally release versions for other OSs and allow extensions which will generate enough interest as to create replacement extensions for their equivalents for Firefox. Unfortunately this will take time, and to be honest I think Firefox and Chrome target two different groups of people, the latter of which perhaps aren't as security obsessed. I guess time will tell.

It seemed less than 5 years ago after Microsoft's dominance over Netscape that the browser wars were over and innovation was all but dead. What a glorious time to be alive now!

Ah yes the intertubes are all abuzz with Google's release of it's Chrome web browser. As soon as the initial reaction of "oh no, not ANOTHER browser to test documents in!" quickly faded, my curiosity and general love of Google products took over and I went to their website to download the first beta, and to see how it compares with my beloved Camino.

As far I as I can tell given the limited information available (and feel free to corrrect me if I've made a mistake!), Google Chrome is based on Webkit, the rendering engine Apple adopted from the KDE Konqueror project. This is of course the same rendering engine used in Apple's Safari web browser and Nokia's Symbian browser amongst others.

Unfortunately for me, Chrome currently is for Windows only, and it has to be XP or Vista as well; my Windows 2000 virtual machine on my MacBook Pro couldn't even feel the love. Given it is a very early beta that's understandable though, and Google has stated that support for Mac and Linux is in the pipeline. As I'll elaborate further below, whether this means the support of the latter OS and presumably X11 will mean I'll be able to run it on FreeBSD or not will be interesting to see.

I'm going to come right out and admit it now: the user interface of the Chrome browser is just gorgeous. For the first time in a while, I'm ready to admit that another group or company has been able to beat Apple on appearance in a competing software product. Safari and Camino with the UnifyCamino plugin on Mac look swisher than Firefox, but Chrome looks even better!

Google Chrome running in Mac OS X

ASIDE: The above image is a shamefully misleading use of the Unity feature of VMware Fusion which allows applications running inside a Windows XP or Vista virtual machine to appear as though they're running on the Mac desktop.

Chrome uses the same rough layout for the widgets and URL bar as Opera with the tabs positioned at the top. This has always made visual sense to me, because the displayed URL would obviously be different for each tab! In place of a menu bar, the Google folks opted for two discreet buttons on the right hand side which expose lists of options and functions. While I think the layout of these popup menus are a bit on the cluttered side, it's certainly a slicker approach when compared to Internet Explorer 7's cluttered and visually unappealing smorgasbord of widgets beside the tab bar.

This layout style is remarkebly efficient and uses far less screen real estate than Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox in their default configurations. Not only that, but it actually looks like a next generation browser compared to Firefox 3.0's dissapointinly old fashioned style, or Interent Explorer 7's horrible layout! The widgets are a bit big though, I'm hoping in the final release there will be an option to scale them down as you can in Firefox, Camino and Safari.

In terms of features it certainly is lacking when compared to Firefox, but then again Phoenix and Firebird lacked features in their early releases too. Whether or not Google allows third party developers to create plugins or whether this will just be a delivery mechanism for Google services will be interesting to see. I'm really looking forward to seeing how they utilise my Google Calendar, Maps and Gmail!

Google Chrome's Incognito mode

One feautre I think is very swish is the "Incognito" mode, similar to Safari's "Private Browsing" mode in that it stores no information about anything you do in the session once you close it. This means you can browse to sensitive sites with confidence such as internet banking and por... uh... recipie sites for grilled cheese which you don't want others to see.

It will be interesting to see what effect Chrome has on Firefox's still growing market share. Unfortunately a very significant portion of people who run Windows see Interent Explorer as "the internet" and don't even know you can swap it out. People who know enough about browser software probably are using Firefox now, and they're the ones who'll be checking out and using Chrome. Then again, Google has shown time and time again that it's capable of generating interest in it's products outside the core of computer savvy users. Perhaps Firefox will take a hit.

Of course the thing I'll be looking at closely is the licence it will be released under, and specifically the way in which others will be able to access the code. Some sites are reporting that Chrome will be an open source browser, but others I read claim that only the underlying guts of the application will be open source and the interface will be closed, ala Mac OS X. If it's the former, as a FreeBSD user I'd be delighted to compile it for use on my machine if they don't supply native FreeBSD binary downloads, if it's the latter I guess I'd be stuck with using the Linux version with FreeBSD's Linux Compatibility Layer which would be workable, but less than ideal, especially when browsers such as Opera officially support FreeBSD, and Firefox and Konqueror can both be compiled and natively run.

The Google Chrome user interface

ASIDE: My caesar salad just arrived! I never used to like anchovies; actually I used to HATE anchovies, but now I just can't get enough of them! What salads have to do with a Google browser I'm not sure, but since when have I let relevency get in the way of what I'm discussing here?

For what it's worth, the first thing I tried with the Windows version of Chrome I downloaded was trying to get it to run under Wine: for those who don't know Wine is a project working towards complete and free implementation of the Windows API so regular Win32 applications can run in Unix-like environments. In FreeBSD 6.3-Stable and NetBSD 4.0 virtual machines on my MacBook Pro it spat out a list of errors relating to drawing elements on the screen from what I could gather; perhaps you Linux folk might have more success. If you've got it running under Wine, I'd love to hear about it!

All in all I'm very interested to see where this Google Chrome whatnot goes. I'm not sure whether I would personally use it as my day to day browser (LONG LIVE CAMINO!) but more software in the browser ecosystem can only be a good thing, especially when it comes to getting people off Internet Explorer. Perhaps Firefox's market share may suffer slightly, but such is the nature of competition, and more is good!