Webtropic

I keep experimenting with Chrome,  Google’s neat new browser, ever since it appeared. Now when I use gmail, greader or gcalendar and happen to work on a windows PC I use Chrome instead of Firefox. I work on windows for office task, linux for development and mac for fun, in case you are interested.

Chrome is so much faster and I love the tab independence feature (i.e. when something ‘breaks’ in a tab, the rest keep working).
But I also keep using it  for the discovery experience it offers.
Chrome is minimal: not many toolbars, no separate search fields, no arcane menus for configuration. Yet, most of the goodies that we are used to from the other browsers, are there somehow. And more.

My latest discovery has to do with the in page search. Chrome has the seach box on top right and, as in firefox, it appears when a Ctrl+F is pressed.
Again, like firefox, typing a word in the search box highlights all the occurrences of the word in the page, something really convenient. But here Chrome offers something extra: it also highlights the position of the occurrences on the slider on the right. Take a look at the picture below:

I searched for the word “web” on the front page of this blog.In the picture you can see some of its occurences highligthed plus some orange lines on the slider on the right. These are the positions of the occurrences. So, once in a pretty large page,  you can slide quickly to the proper position!

It is these little details that make the difference from  ”good” to “excellent”.

When  the scientists in CERN pressed the button to kick start the experiment of the century that is widely feared as the Doom’s day come, they, in fact, accelerated to the speed of light the ambitions and the animosities of a small greek hacker group against another. Because, contrary to what Roger Highfield of Telegraph seems to imply, the hacker attack was not caused by fears that:

…the machine could trigger a black hole to swallow the earth, or earthquakes and tsunamis, despite endless reassurances to the contrary from the likes of Prof Stephen Hawking. 

Of course, to assess differently one had to actually read the hacker message that was in Greek, which is precicely what I did and what Panayotis Vryonis did  too. Panayotis has shed some light on the issue posting a number of clarifying point. Number 3 of his points, is the most important: 

3. The main “message”, is nothing radical or extreme. It is more or less an internal debate of the Greek Hacking Scene.

That is, one hacker team was trying to  to prove to another they are more adept and skilled. CERN was simply chosen for the entailing publicity. 

Now, I do not really know whether it was a big deal in terms of hacking virtyuosity to break in the CERN system, or, whether there was a black hole in the security policy of the organization, but, assuming that the attack could lead critical equipment astray, with  fatal  consequences for the mankind and the universe as we know it (ok, I said  ’assumming’), what has been proven beyond doubt by the attack  is that human stupidity will be the last to perish.

The screen shot is from the aforementioned Telegraph article.

A new kid is on the block: since Monday morning Google’s new browser, Chrome,  has been the most hot discussion topic on the internet. And, I guess, lots of people, all over the world,, are punching keys franticaly as we ‘speak’ , to test it.

Here is my contribution to the buzz.  How does the new browser behave in terms of standards compatibility? Let’s take the tests.

ACID2 gives

Which means 100% compatibility.

ACID3 gives :

which means 78% compliance. Were it 100% it should look  like this:

How do these results compare to the browsers on the market? I have run the same test on all the known browsers that pass the ACID2 test  and here are the results. All the test were run on a Windows XP with SP2.

So Chrome does a fairly good job in ACID3, but still trails Opera.

Update: I just spotted an article on CNET about Chrome’s standards compliance.Instead of comparing IE8 it compares IE7 on the Acid3 test and gives a result of 14% which I could not confirm.  The acid servers were very slow to respond but when they did I just got a 12% as in IE8.