Wednesday, September 03, 2008

Google Chrome and Scott McCloud (Updated)

Update: TTL said:
Google has released a couple of quite watchable videos about Chrome.
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Google hired the brilliant Scott McCloud (Understanding Comics) to explain their new browser. Good call.

Ivor said:
Just one small point. Shouldn't the comic format have been landscape, then I wouldn't have had to keep scrolling.

Funny you should say that. In one of McCloud's own web comics, this one, about making web comics, he makes the point emphatically that it gets his goat when somebody makes portrait-oriented pages for web pages. :)


Scott McCloud tells me:
We're working on a side-by-side, landscape, screen-fitting version. It was a actually a *printed* comic by design, this is just an online adaptation. Still, should be more readable, I agree! :-)

It may be related to the fact that the comic book was sent out too early by mistake, so perhaps it was scanned and put up in a rush in lieu of a proper web version.

TTL commented:
Nice to see someone applying the software development methodology called Clear Thinking™ to web browsers. I will certainly switch to Chrome as soon as it becomes available.
Now, if you had asked 100 Unix engineers in, say, 1988 whether separate browser sessions should have their own OS processes, they would all have thought it's a rhetorical question, for it is so obvious.
It's good that 20 years later at least one of the big players actually figured this out. Maybe all is not lost and sometime in the future we will start seeing some overall progress in computing again.

10 comments:

Karen Rayne, Ph.D. said...

So it looks cool and all - but what's up with this Windows-only BS?

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

They say Mac and Linux versions are in the works. Fair enough, no reason everything should be finished at the same time.

Karen Rayne, Ph.D. said...

Grrr...I am currently super frustrated with Firefox and got v. excited about the idea of a new browser option. Sigh. I guess I'll have to be frustrated a little while longer. Thanks for the info!

Eolake Stobblehouse said...

Safari works nicely for me, except for a few things, unfortunately including posting on Blogger. (I can't copy/paste into a post if I'm in Safari.)

Anonymous said...

Nice to see someone applying the software development methodology called Clear Thinking™ to web browsers. I will certainly switch to Chrome as soon as it becomes available.

Now, if you had asked 100 Unix engineers in, say, 1988 whether separate browser sessions should have their own OS processes, they would all have thought it's a rhetorical question, for it is so obvious.

It's good that 20 years later at least one of the big players actually figured this out. Maybe all is not lost and sometime in the future we will start seeing some overall progress in computing again.

Alex said...

Not only are portrait oriented pages a problem. I don't like the ones which don't accommodate my older machines. I have an older 1024x768 laptop.

There are four of us in our house trying to share 4 laptops. I can only afford a new one every 2-3 years, consequently the clunker is still kicking around.

As for Chrome. It looks very nice, but on my 1.4GHz Pentium Mobile it seems dog slow. I have almost 1GB free disk space on that machine, and it has its full 512MB of RAM. Chrome took 4-5 times longer to load the same page as Firefox, even though the page was not in cache on either.

I think I'll wait for them to fix that. I wonder how it works on my 2GHz Core2 Duo with 2GB RAM?

Alex said...

Okay, Chrome works better on a 18 month old PC than a 4 year old.

Still, on the old PC Firefox was open, and the installer moved my book marks over (not links to RSS feeds though).

On this PC Chrome insisted Firefox be closed before installation began, and it copied my history, but no favourites that I can find.

I like the "incognito" mode - a session which stores no cookies or history. That way you can do your nefarious stuff without having to trash your regular stuff.

By nefarious I mean looking for a birthday present etc. Do people still just log onto the PC with one account and then use different user profiles in their browser? Imagine that, all my work e-mails and my kids e-mails getting mixed up - what a mess. (this post composed within Chrome, but why are the fonts so small?).

Anonymous said...

this post composed within Chrome, but why are the fonts so small?

It's like that on Safari too, and Safari uses the same rendering engine. Something changed with blogger a couple of days ago, maybe they screwed up their CSS.

Anonymous said...

Google has released a couple of quite watchable videos about Chrome.

Anonymous said...

I'm really intrigued about Chrome. It seems as though Google is one of the few companies driving innovation in the computer industry these days. It'll be interesting to watch, that's for sure! :-)