Minimalist Geek

Google Chrome - Best Browser So Far

It has been almost six months since I last wrote about Google Chrome. In the meantime Google has launched two new products Wave and Buzz about which I will write in future posts.

So what has changed in the last six months? Chrome managed to convince me and is now my web browser of choice. Why? Easy. Chrome is fast, both to load the web browser and to render web pages. Memory consumption is reasonable. Tabs are treated as separate processes so no single tab can bring the whole browser down. In the last six months this only happened 3-5 times and I only had to kill that particular tab.

Compare this to having Firefox crash on you in a huge ball of fire bringing down with it all your open tabs. Guess that is what they mean by fire in Firefox, rather than because it is fast. It seems that judging a web browser by its name is not a bad idea at all. Take Google Chrome. Just like chrome it is polished, looks awesome, and does not rust, read slow down, with time. Well I know chrome does rust if it is not maintained properly, but you get my drift

Not to mention the awesome handling of downloads, with circular progress indicators, and a dedicated download manager page. The history page is another beauty with a detailed chronological breakdown of the pages you last visited. Tab dragging and dropping is another feature I really like and find useful. For instance, having two Chrome sessions running with multiple tabs open in each. One session is stuff related to project A the other session to project B. You accidentally open a tab for project B in session A. No worries. Just drag’n'drop it over to session B and you are done. Simple but useful.

Password management is integrated perfectly into Chrome. The only issue I had with it six months ago is that it did not manage to import the saved passwords from the SQLite database in which Firefox stores its settings. Thus, I had to enter them once to have Chrome offer to remember them. But if you have a little patience and give Chrome a try I am sure you will never look back.

Windows 7 Rocks

I have been using Windows 7 daily for the last 6 months now, and I can say this is the best OS Microsoft has ever developed. I installed Windows 7 on the same laptop on which I had Vista, so as to make for a fair comparison.

You might say it is easy to be better than Vista, the latter being such a complete disaster, but I think Windows 7 has not only fixed what was wrong in Vista but gone further and improved stuff that was lacking in all previous versions of the Windows OS.

Cold boot-up time is very fast compared to Vista. I did not bother to time this with a stopwatch, because statistics like 5.4 seconds faster does not mean anything to people, unless they are geeks. But I can confidently say it is fast because you will manage to do less in the time it takes to boot than you would have before with Vista. Windows 7 is also faster to hibernate and wake up.

Stability is awesome. It did not crash even once in the last six months, and I am not an easy Word user. I develop software on this machine, whilst having at least six other applications running, including a browser with on average 7-10 tabs open. Most of the time I just hibernate the machine. No crashes and few reboots in the last six months are both huge pluses.

Memory consumption is another winner here. Windows 7 on initial install consumed roughly 500MB. With Visual Studio and a browser running the system hovers around 1.2GB. This leaves decent space to load a virtual machine or two. Vista is a memory hog, consuming roughly 750MB on initial install.

Not to mention the subtle but oh so productive tweaks done to the task bar. I just love the small live window preview when you hover on top of the task bar icons. It is such a time saver. No need to switch applications to glance at the progress of a rendering or download. Just hover, glance, move the mouse and your work space is back to normal to continue working.

Docking a window to the left and another to the right to view side-by-side can be done without thought with mouse gestures. Drag one window to the left, the other to the right, and voila!

With Windows 7 Microsoft are back on the right track moving full speed ahead.

Part of the Reason Why Chrome Share Is Growing Slowly

Following my “Chrome market share and Matt Cutts” post yesterday I received a tweet from Matt Cutts himself asking me which browser I do use. I replied FF 3.5 and what compelling reason he could give me to use Chrome, since moving from IE to FF was an easy decision since there was a huge leap in quality and user experience.

As usual I kept on thinking on why a user using FF should decide to switch over to Chrome. Granted Chrome has a harder time penetrating the market since the browsers are now more mature. However, as usual there is always room for improvement.

For example, FF sucks up huge amounts of memory for no apparent reason. I usually keep FF open all day and hover between 8 tabs open at a time. Nonetheless this does not justify consuming over 200MB. And no I do not have a single add-on installed or shaky third party plug-in.

Even if that was the case, the browser should take care of that.

So to give Chrome a second chance, since the last time I tried it was months ago, today I decided to learn a bit more about how it works and the motivation behind it. For a quick introduction, this comic book style look at the technology and motivation for Chrome is great.

I agree completely with what the Google guys are trying to do with the web browser. The browser has to behave more like an OS, with proper process and memory management. As they outline, having the browser crash while editing an online document or email is a big deal.

So next, I decided to take Chrome for a spin once again. Plus points, minimalist design, better memory consumption, faster to load. On this last point I would need more time to see how it fares after three months worth of browsing history.

At this point I decided to import the FF3.5 settings, especially the saved passwords. Without those it would be a pain to initially re-enter all passwords I use. So I clicked on the wrench icon, clicked import, chose Firefox along with the option to import passwords. Everything seemed to work fine. I then browsed to one of my daily sites, and the login and password fields remained empty.

Quick search on Google returned “Chrome won’t import passwords from Firefox 3.5” support question. It seems Chrome cannot import passwords when they are saved in the sqlite database used to store FF settings.

Now, since I am a geek and want to try Chrome I will use it anyway, but what about the millions of Firefox users out there. The conversion funnel does not look rosy if after getting a percentage amount of users to download Chrome they discover that their passwords are not available. Those users will uninstall Chrome as quickly as they downloaded it.

This surely is affecting the adoption rate of Chrome. If I were Google I would give it high priority. I think Google Chrome is a great innovative browser so it would be a shame if adoption was suffering cause of a minor glitch in those important early minutes when a user is experimenting with a new product.

Changing StumbleUpon Password

So you, just like me, want to change your StumbleUpon account password and are experiencing frustration. You logged into your StumbleUpon account and spent a few minutes going through the available options without finding the simple option to change your password.

The simple answer is you cannot find an option if it is not there. StumbleUpon decided that it will provide all the options and settings in your online account profile except changing your password. This is ridiculous.

To change your password you need to download and install the StumbleUpon toolbar in your browser and then from the Tools drop-down menu choose change password. I might be wrong, but to me this seems like a marketing ploy to force users to download and install your toolbar. I for one won’t bother to download and install any toolbar.

I like the whole idea of StumbleUpon and this password changing decision goes against the grain of online communities. First of all, I do not like to load my browser with myriad toolbars, hence the Minimalist Geek, and secondly if I want to change my password while not on my personal computer and haven’t the option to install toolbars, how will I manage to change my password.

Please StumbleUpon listen to your community and let them be free to choose whether to download and install your toolbar. Add the change password option to our online profile.

Good password policy… not!

Following good security practice I recently went through the process of changing my passwords. I started off this exercise by changing my ISP account password. So I went through the process, entered my strong password, and logged out to try out the new password.

Next, I tried to log on with my new password but I got an invalid account or password message. As happens to common mortals I thought, oh I must have entered the new password wrongly. So I tried again carefully typing in every symbol. Same result same frustration.

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Google’s simplicity vs Yahoo’s complexity

I continued to think about what I wrote in last Wednesday’s post, The Minimalist March to Success, and did some more research on the internet. While doing so, I came across two interesting posts one by Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror fame, and the other one by Prof. John Maeda, associate director of MIT’s Media Lab, on his blog simplicity.

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The Minimalist March to Success

In this post I want to focus on what I feel is a recurring pattern adopted by all of today’s successful technology companies, minimalism.

Let me take the following companies as an example to support this argument: Microsoft, Google, and Yahoo. You’ve all heard about them and most probably you either hate them or love them. With all probability you either witnessed or have been part of a flame war involving a combination of these companies. If not, just head to slashdot and go through some of the posts. I am confident you will find evidence of endless conversations in the line of my platform is better than yours, Bill Gates is evil, Google rocks, Yahoo sucks and so on and so forth.

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