Chrome is Version 4 ... Where are you IE ? | The Coffeehouse

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

Yesterday Google released Beta version 4 of their Chrome browser with claims of increasing speed of browsing ... 400% from the initial version 1 ( which itself claimed few times faster than IE ) .. So within a year and few months they have 4 versions of their browser.

Critics can say that having so many versions within so short time is not good .. i can agree to that .. they also can say that within each version the features are not much different ... but all have to agree that within a short period of time, they have introduced a lot of features, speedy browsing .. (apart from the fact that they are working on multiple platform and IE is only on windows )

I distinctly remember the same type of dynamism that IE brought with it when it started against Netscape .. by introducing 1-4 version of IE within a short period of 2+ years with a lot of feature additions [anybody remember Favorite icon, IE page transitions ... Smiley ] ... this was in the era when Internet was still evolving and majority of information still passed thru magazines, word of mouth etc... where as now news spreads more quickly with blogs,twitter,online news etc...

One can say that IE was able to capture market because of Windows OS .. but now google in its arsenal similar things like Google.Com, Youtube, Gmail etc ...

So unless MS wants to see another one of its products go down ... it has to up the ante (for goodness sake it still does not have a proper download manager, Spell check, Still uses a decade old rendering engine) ... and become the same dynamic team for which it earlier came to be known ... What do you think ?

section31
OutOfCoffeeException

I was using IE for years, but with the IE8 release I switched to Chrome. IE8 is so heavy and buggy - just unusable. Chrome feels really fresh, simple and fast.

Maybe MS should think about another browser for the mainstream. Keep IE few years as it is now and just publish security patches for the business customer. But in parallel bring a competitive fast lightweight browser with short release cycles. Hey maybe with an integrated download manager Devil How crazy is that?

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

In reply to section31

#Nov 4th @ 9:36 PM

Currently I use IE8 ( on vista and Windows 7 its quite ok .. on XP it is really slow ), Opera ( for download manager and their innovative features) and Chrome equally. But with Chrome becoming more and more stable ( with less crashes on Flash / Silverlight and other addons) a lot of my work is currently getting done in Chrome.

Having a new branch of lightweight browser is also a good idea if MS wants to maintain its Market/Mind share. However, with hundreds of layouts already happening at MS it will further divide the valuable resources ... another route it can take is to make IE open source / crowd sourced (anyway it gives away IE for free ... and was one of reasons why it did not do any work on IE6 for so long ...as no revenue from it ) by which it can quickly bundle developer features in official release ( I have seen Sven's Find as you type, tabbed browser... long before IE8 introduced it )

CreamFilling512

In reply to xgamer

#Nov 4th @ 9:54 PM

IE does have a new rendering engine though. And I don't know about being heavier, Chrome seems to spam way more processes than IE8 does, I think its strictly 1:1 process per tab, that doesn't scale at all. And it's not like Google built their own browser, they made yet-another-shell around webkit.

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

In reply to CreamFilling512

#Nov 4th @ 10:10 PM

As per my understanding and knowledge.. IE8 uses a new standard compliant version of same old Trident engine ... I am not against Trident engine and acknowledge its strengths ...( i know many applications that use it internally and it was first few to provide a full access to DOM to developers ) but it has to be acknowledged that its getting old and need to be developed a lot faster to catch up with likes of Webkit ...

As per IE8 and Chrome Process i think they both use same Per tab process model with Chrome even taking it more extreme where every additional Activex/Plugin-Object within the page having its own process for security reasons .. This sometimes does make it take more resources ... but from the user perspective Chrome feels snappy compared to IE8 .. (try oepning a new Tab in IE8 and Chrome )

I understand google did not built their browser ( and so did Firefox they used the Netscape Gecko rendering engine ).. .. but they were not required to reinvent the wheel .... they took a very good rendering engine .... put their effort to further improve it ... and thats how i think smart companies should work in current OOP based S/W development

jamie

In reply to xgamer

#Nov 4th @ 10:34 PM

ie still works best. even with all the ie8 bugs... the web works with ie

wake me when it hits 59% of users. ok 49%.. Tongue Out

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

In reply to jamie

#Nov 4th @ 11:42 PM

Yes Jamie .... one way that's correct .. most of the webcontent created when IE / Frontpage were king .. works best in IE ...

But now the many of the newer sites with their script/css intensive frameworks break it ... i dont know whose figures about %users to believe... but recently somewhere i read that mozilla is already 40% of .. so u just have to another 2-3 months for 49% i think .. Smiley )

jamie

In reply to xgamer

#Nov 5th @ 12:04 AM

and i shall...cherish...those months... Wink

PS - FP user!

ZippyV
Fired Up

In reply to xgamer

#Nov 5th @ 12:04 AM

http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0

IE is now at about 64% losing more than 1% each month. Firefox is at 24%

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

In reply to ZippyV

#Nov 5th @ 12:36 AM

@ZippyV - as I said i do not know who to believe about browser stats cos all sites have their own stats

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers#Summary_Table can be used as a mean ... where IE is currently 58%

but other sources say different things ...for eg http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp or http://www.webreference.com/stats/browser.html

Anyway as they say "Lies, damned lies, and statistics"

That aside point of my initial post was the slowness of IE development .. in a market where the competitors are trying to develop browsers which are faster and compliant ...

magicalclick

IE8 rendering is sharper and smoother. Meaning high resolution + AA. So, rendering wise, I think IE8 is pretty good. Sadly it is kind of too high resoltution that text are rather small. Oh well.

I do agree on rapid development. IE8 tabs so like, hack, it has its own process, and why the hack the tab manager is affacted by it? It is like process isolation and convert it back to shared process. Stupid IMO. I would say the rendering engine is good, but, the GUI is terrible. And no download manager and spell check with tons of stuff that most of us don't care. I even think some of the stuff should be disabled by default until the IT person enable it using GPO. It is bloated with legacy stuff and couldn't focus on end user experience. I hope MS could get back to their senses and take look around why other broswer is getting popular.

Almost everyone I know, either use FF or Chrome. So, I really think MS should take this seriously. Sure, you can use statistics, and how much of them is still IE6 on legacy system? That's old gen and we need to think about new gen. Or MS is just another IBM waiting to get retired? (aka "IBM: oh home PC is such a small nitch market, it is not worth it" I think Balmer said something similar recently)

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

In reply to magicalclick

#Nov 5th @ 1:47 AM

IE8 has its good points too .. I recently read somewhere that Chrome Uses some sort of very quick polling timer/thread .. due to which its power consumption and CPU consumption is high.. whereas IE has the least power consumption (ideal for netbooks)... also this may be due to the fact that it uses Windows built in technologies like ClearType etc ...

Its a interesting idea to disable all legacy stuff by default and may be offer those as seperate download ( i wonder that's possible with the huge IE code base ... because typical FF/Opera installer is 8/9 MB on Windows whereas IE on Windows is double the size of that )

LeoDavidson

Other than Javascript speed (which I think Firefox is catching up with anyway, and I've never understood why anyone gives a flying fruit how fast their browser can calculate pi Smiley ) I'm not aware of any/many features Chrome brings to the table which other browsers didn't already bring.

MS were pretty much ignoring all those new features when Firefox (etc.) made them mainstream so I don't see why Chrome would change anything. Okay, we finally got tabs in IE, but after how many years of people wanting them?

There are some good ideas in Chrome, and I think it's progressing really well -- considering the complexity of writing a fully-featured browser -- but it hasn't changed the game in any way, shape or form. I think Chrome has potential but I think all the hype about it is purely because it's from Google and not because it does anything special or unique (yet).

For me the actual browser isn't that important anyway. They all browse the web pretty well. The important thing is the extensions which let me tailor things to work exactly as I want and save huge amounts of time/effort when doing certain tasks. IE has allowed extensions to be written since before Firefox existed, yet not many people seem to have realised it, or at least not many took advantage of it. Who knows why. That, to me, is IE's real disadvantage. And Chrome's, Safari's and Opera's.

Firefox is to browser extensions what Windows is to applications.

Sven Groot
My name has 9 letters. Coincidence? I think not...

In reply to LeoDavidson

#Nov 5th @ 5:34 AM

Who knows why.

As someone who has written an extension for IE, I have a fairly good idea why: because it's really bloody hard to do. IE needs an extension model that doesn't require you to be an expert at C++ and COM.

LeoDavidson

In reply to Sven Groot

#Nov 5th @ 5:37 AM

Yeah, that's true for many types of extension and the more interesting extensions would require people to go down that route.

IE also lets you write simple context-menu extensions in Javascript, though. Almost nobody has taken advantage of it, even though it can be used for some of the popular Firefox extensions (e.g. "look up selected word in dictionary/google/etc."). I only found out it was possible by accident when I was looking in MSDN for something else.

Here area a few simple examples plus a link to the MSDN docs: http://www.pretentiousname.com/iethings/index.html

(Today it might be better to use accelerators and search-providers for some of these things, but the Javascript context-menu extension method existed for years before those came along.)

spivonious

Since when did version numbers mean anything? Chrome 1 was a buggy mess. Chrome 2 was bug fixes for Chrome 1. Chrome 3 was Chrome 1 with support for <video> and <audio> tags.

At best, they're at Chrome 2.1.

I tried Chrome 3 for a little bit and didn't like it. I don't like how the tabs are in the title bar, and I ran into some issues with the Flash plug-in.

IE8 works and it has the features I like (tabs, built-in search bar, accelerators). I really don't see any reason to switch.

ScanIAm
On a scale of 1 to 10, people are stupid.

Google released a beta version of something.

Awesome!!!!

On a more serious note, The IE/VS teams should get together and implement something that makes writing plug-ins/add-ins/whatever as easy as it is to create Ribbon code in office.

Bas
It finds lightbulbs.

In reply to ScanIAm

#Nov 5th @ 8:38 AM

They should make some sort of managed Visual Studio template that somehow exposes the document and lets you write managed code for it. I know about the whole IE=unmanaged process that can't run managed code thing, but they're Microsoft. If anyone has the means to do this, it's them.

staceyw
Before C# there was darkness...

If you version based on bug fixes then I could see. Versioning fast does not mean good. It could me they are spastic and not deliberate.

xgamer
Two Sides to Everything

In reply to staceyw

#Nov 5th @ 12:42 PM

@Leo : Though currently they have not introduced any game changing features .. the catch up/advancement they have done in a year is amazing ( they have most of the useful features of many other browsers already bundled in theirs ) ... They have some good features like application shortcuts, reduced UI space and speed ( which for me and many other i think is a feature ) .. I think the game changing thing will come when they integrate Google Gears, Google Native Application Client, HTML 5 Audio/Video etc ... use of which I think they will be able to make for commonplace using their sites like Google, Youtube, Gmail etc... just as they did XMLHttpRequest aka AJAX commonplace with google maps. gmail.

@stacyew / @spivonious : I understand its not about version numbers ... but its about dynamism ... how quickly you bring the features people request / want to the people ... ( i understand you may consider certain features unnecessary .. but when all other competitors offer the same feature... it becomes a standard feature requirement ) by the current version they already have many of the features IE8 offers and they are already offering extensions in the latest version ...

we all like IE for what it is ... but i think it has rested on its laurels for long and just being good enough ... and I hope MS IE team is already working on a product with features which can keep its leader position in the competitive browser world ...

elmer
I'm on my very last life.

Am I the only person in the world who really doesn't give a rat's about "features" in a browser ?

I just want it to be secure, not crash, render/print correctly.

Unfortunately, IE8 fails to get much of those basics right.

Sort those out, and everything else... I really couldn't care less about.

spivonious

In reply to elmer

#Nov 5th @ 11:47 PM

No, I'm that way too, although I feel IE8 on Vista/7 does a fantastic job. It still seems a bit buggy on XP, as I get the occasional crash.

As far as rendering correctly, I'm not a web dev, so it doesn't really affect me. The sites I visit all render fine in every browser.

CKurt
while( ( !succeed=try() ) ) { }

I think the Ie team is hard at work on the next IE but they can't release that often. I would like there to be huge changes between IE9 and IE8 because then I can convince my IT department to update all the computers to IE9.

Updating still is a hassle. At school all desktops still run IE6. At work i maintain the Server and it is still not that easy to update IE on all computers.

So let them work on IE9 and improve tab performance and rendering speed and maybe build a download manager. They might even be working on implementing HTML5.0 but won't release it until the draft is a standard. Chrome has a small user base, mostly consumers so updating everybody is not that big a deal yet for them.

fknight

When using Chrome, I can say without a doubt, absolutely, that I have never had to wait more than a second for anything to happen. If I didn't know better, I'd think web pages were completely rendered before I hit <ENTER> on the address bar. Opening a new blank tab in IE takes 4 seconds (no add-ons).

Chadk
excuse me - do you has a flavor?

How can there ever be too many updates?

I have been running with Chrome since v1. I have *NEVER* dealt with updates. And at this point in time, I'm running with the latest build.

Chrome updates itself. I get to run with the newest possible version and make use of the latest improvements in performance and stability. And I don't have to care about having to update it once in a while.