Jeffzilla

After a relatively short "announce to launch" window, Google launched its new, open source web browser, Google Chrome. It was announced over the weekend, and a comic book-style introduction was published yesterday. Unfortunately, it’s only available for Windows just yet - us mac users will have to either wait a bit for Google Chrome for OS X, or give it the ole Boot Camp try and take the dive to load up windows.

Although real world performance and deployment is the ultimate test, I think Google’s idea of making each tab of the browser into is separate, isolated process is a good one. This should allow for more power to be devoted to more robust web apps, isolate bad code and bad webpages, and overall provide a more customized and customizable operating environment for each individual website - I know that during my day, I am often times simultaneously working with sites that use flash, java, ajax, silverlight, embedded media, active x, etc etc etc. Being able to keep each of these isolated to just the page where it’s needed seems like it would be a huge performance and stability boost. Additionally, I’m excited to hear that Google Chrome is built from the ground up to be much better at managing memory. Although Firefox, my current browser of choice, is super fast and relatively stable, after using it continuously for an entire day, it tends to start eating up massive amounts of memory. The precise memory management in Google Chrome will hopefully work well.

That’s all for now - tonight I’ll hopefully find some time to install it in Windows XP pro in bootcamp on my MBP, and give at a real test run.

Sites I plan to test with Google Chrome, for performance and stability -

Gmail.com - web app - made by Google, so it should run perfectly.

Jeffzilla.com - obviously

Meebo.com - another great web app

Hulu.com - streaming video

Wordpress admin - non-Google web app which uses the Google Gears Framework

Potatoland.com - hosts some neat java applets, which create trippy graphics - visually intensive java applet processing

Lively.com - Google’s virtual world, fairly graphics intensive

Flickr.com Organizr - again, intense flash/java web app

Finally, elsewhere in the blogosphere… TechCrunch has some massive video action happening - but luckily if you’re using Chrome, it should be able to load up all those rich media YouTube flash windows with no problem!

Kara Swisher discusses the early comic book leak, and the ongoing re-ignition of the browser war.

Regarding process isolation, check this overview video on the Chrome Task Manager…

Gmail has been down for me for almost 12 hours now. And it’s only my main account. Seems like there is a documented issue, which is good to hear, but still not fixed. According to the Google Groups Gmail discussion board, they are working on the issue:

Update: our engineers have identified the source of the problem and are working to restore account access as quickly as possible. We know how important email is to our customers, and we are taking this very seriously. We apologize for this inconvenience, and we will provide updates as new information becomes available.

This makes somewhat glad about using my own domain for my email. Right now, any email you send me gets forwarded to my gmail account. However, if this gmail situation doesn’t get fixed, it’s a quick switch with my domain registrar to have my email forwarded somewhere else - either another gmail account, my own hosted webmail, or another email provider altogether.

Gmail 502 Error

**Update Update**

Google just updated the 502 error message, with more familar Gmail branding, and a very slightly more reassuring error message.

Update 2* - And… we’re back! Luckily gmail didn’t lose any messages. But those few hours were intense - also kind of nice.. like a vacation.

Update 3* - 2008-08-11 - Gmail is back down, but now it seems to be down for many more people. It’s down for me, too. Luckily, I’m still doing just fine with email. My email address is at a domain I own. I simply have it all forwarded to my gmail account, so I can use the great gmail interface and services - imap, etc etc. However, during the latest gmail outage, i fiddled with some settings on my webhost, and set it up to not only continue to forward to my gmail acct, as it has been, but to also use a locally hosted email box. So, for now, since gmail is down, I’m seamlessly switching over to my own hosted email box. Victory!

Google just announced, and will launch tomorrow, Friend Connect. Will this be another building block in the road to the ultimate ubiquitous social network? With any website being able to add a social networking component, and all of those components being able to network together via Open Social, we’re about to be one step closer to all being on the same social network, always. Additionally, OpenID integration will allow us to have just one login name/password to remember for everything. From the press release:

Visitors to any site using Google Friend Connect will be able to see, invite, and interact with new friends, or, using secure authorization APIs, with existing friends from social sites on the web, including Facebook, Google Talk, hi5, orkut, Plaxo, and more.

Read more on Techcrunch, and watch Google’s Campfire One tonight.

Instant Messaging while on the go - It’s increasingly more essential, yet with many current software/hardware offerings, increasingly more frustrating. 

I carry a Blackberry Curve 8300, which has its strengths and weaknesses. The hardware is actually decent, well built, good screen etc. The software, however, is absolutely worthless. It honestly feels like a 1st try beta version. There are random menu items where they’re not needed (example: “call voice mail” option in the camera options menu - why?!?!), and the UI is so un-optimized that despite reasonably powerful hardware, the thing still crawls doing the most basic tasks. One of those basic tasks, which you’d think the curve would be able to do easily is instant messaging. The Blackberry Messenger does work well, but not everybody has a Blackberry - probably for the better. I use AIM and gChat mostly. While there are decent clients for both of these networks, when running either one of them, it causes the rest of the phone to grind to a halt - text takes 5 seconds to come up after you’ve typed it, and it takes till the 4th ring for the os to catch up and allow you to actually take a call. Amazing how they could actually sell a product like this.

(more…)

Ah, those minutes troubleshooting video on the blog today were for nothing.. turns out that YouTube really did go down for a while this afternoon, when Pakistan Telecom apparently hijacked YouTube’s IP Range. Amazing something like this can happen.. and reminds me of the story a while back about some farmers using a high bandwidth fiber optic cable for target practice…  

Upon further reading.. looks like BBC is reporting this story too, but there’s a difference between the TechCrunch Article and the BBC Article - TechCrunch is discussing how Pakistan Telecom took down YouTube for the WHOLE WORLD, whereas BBC completely glossed over that fact, and even made it seem like YouTube access was only cutoff in Pakistan. YouTube is probably gone more permanently from Pakistan, but I think it defenitely would have been worth noting the worldwide effect  of Pakistan Telecom’s actions. What’s going on here?  

Some more clarification from ZD Net