Topic: google

Written on September 2nd, 2008 by Mojo about browsers, google, javascript with 1 Comment

Google Chrome First Impressions

Yet another browser? Well here we go again. Let’s take a look at Chrome and see what it has to offer. The download page is located here. The installer for Windows XP is only 474KB! You can watch the press conference video about Google Chrome or read the Google Chrome Book in the meantime.

What we knew so far about Chrome

  • Uses V8 JavaScript engine which supports Classes and compilation. There is a V8 JavaScript benchmark suite that gives FireFox 3 a score of 83, while giving Chrome a score of 1213! Safari 3 gets a score of 128. Judging by this alone, V8 blows away the competition.
  • Uses Webkit rendering engine.
  • Tabs run as independent processes which can be managed.
  • Lots of other features.

First Impressions

  • Installation was a breeze and imported FireFox settings.
  • No status bar, You only see the status bar when you hover over a hyperlink.
  • The Task Manager (Shift + Escape) updates in real time and shows memory, CPU and network usage for each tab, each plugin, and the main Chrome process separately. There is also a link to Stats for Nerds with lots more gritty info.
  • The Flash plugin is extremely CPU usage intensive and causes sluggishness when scrolling. I just loaded a popular flash website and noticed my machine came down to a near halt. It seems to happen more with Flash files that contain infinite loops, using as much as 70% of the CPU.
  • The built in JavaScript console looks like a combination of FireBug and Web Inspector.
  • There is a built in JavaScript Debugger (Alt + `)
  • Passes the Acid 2 test.
  • Chrome gets a score of 78 on the Acid 3 test, which is higher than FireFox 3 at 57, Safari at 72, and Opera at 45.
  • Omnibar - this is the URL/location bar in Chrome that has some fuzzy logic built in to suggest “smart” autocompletes. This is the current order of the drop down in the auto complete list. There seems to be no way of changing this ordering as of now. Would be nice to be able to customize them.
     

     

    1. Search Google for FOOBAR
    2. FOOBAR/ (I’m not sure how useful this one is really)
    3. Link to the FOOBAR Wikipedia page
    4. Link to I’m Feeling Lucky URL for term FOOBAR. This item gives you the ability to search within the URL. For example if you type in Amazon in the Omnibar and select the amazon.com option using the down arrows, you will see “Press Tab to Search Amazon”. See below instruction on implementing this search functionality for your website.
    5. Search Google for FOOBAR ANOTHER TERM
    6. Search Google for FOOBAR ANOTHER TERM
    7. A page in your history pertaining to FOOBAR
    8. Link to history search for pages about FOOBAR

Cool Developer related stuff in Chrome

Google Chrome User Agent String:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.X.Y.Z Safari/525.13.

Chrome has a menu option called “Create application shortcuts…” that uses Google Gears to create a shortcut to your webapp. Users can choose to place the shortcut to your webapp on their Desktop, on the Start menu and even the Quick launch bar in Windows. This is a pretty powerful feature. When a user clicks this icon, Chrome opens up without the Omnibar, and your website will appear in an “Application” format. You can customize how Chrome creates these shortcuts using meta tags. These tags are named: application-name, description, application-url, and shortcut icons in both 32×32 or 48×48 formats. The favicon is used if not specified. For example you can use the following HTML code in the head of your document. Note that with the Mozilla added support which is used in Chrome, you can use any supported graphic format as your favicon, and not just the old school favicon.ico file.

<head>
  <meta name="application-name" content="Gmail"/>
  <meta name="description" content="Google's approach to email"/>
  <meta name="application-url" content="http://www.gmail.com"/>
  <link rel="icon" href=gmail_32x32.png sizes="32x32"/>
  <link rel="icon" href=gmail_48x48.png sizes="48x48"/>
</head>

To open a new tab from your webapp in a separate process using JavaScript you can do this in Chrome.

var w = window.open();
w.opener = null;
w.document.location = "http://differentsite.com/index.html";

Chrome lets users search your website from its ominbar. To enable and include your website’s search in Chrome you have to create an OpenSearch description document (OSDD).
For example you can create something like this:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
 <OpenSearchDescription xmlns="http://a9.com/-/spec/opensearch/1.1/">
   <ShortName>Web Search</ShortName>
   <Description>Use Example.com to search the Web.</Description>
   <Tags>example web</Tags>
   <Contact>admin@example.com</Contact>
   <Url type="application/atom+xml"
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}&amp;format=atom"/>
   <Url type="application/rss+xml"
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}&amp;format=rss"/>
   <Url type="text/html" 
        template="http://example.com/?q={searchTerms}&amp;pw={startPage?}"/>
   <LongName>Example.com Web Search</LongName>
   <Image height="64" width="64" type="image/png">http://example.com/websearch.png</Image>
   <Image height="16" width="16" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">http://example.com/websearch.ico</Image>
   <Query role="example" searchTerms="cat" />
   <Developer>Example.com Development Team</Developer>
   <Attribution>
     Search data Copyright 2005, Example.com, Inc., All Rights Reserved
   </Attribution>
   <SyndicationRight>open</SyndicationRight>
   <AdultContent>false</AdultContent>
   <Language>en-us</Language>
   <OutputEncoding>UTF-8</OutputEncoding>
   <InputEncoding>UTF-8</InputEncoding>
 </OpenSearchDescription>

Fore more tips read the Google Chrome FAQ for web developers page.

ps. Don’t use the Google gears Chrome download page which gives a JavaScript error!

_GU_SetupOneClick is not defined
onload(load )
Written on April 1st, 2008 by Mojo about google, microsoft with 1 Comment

Microsoft Buys Google for $200 Billion

Microsoft Buys Google for $200 Billion
The number one search engine on the planet has just announced the biggest deal to hit the internet since its YouTube buy. Microsoft has just made an offer for Google for the amount of $200,000,000,000 which is about $638 per share of the 137 million outstanding shares.

Google shares have plummeted to all time low of $41 per share on the news of the buyout, while Microsoft shares opened trading at an all time high of $121 this morning. Google is shipping its PageRank and search index which contains 1.34 Petabytes of data stored in over 550,000 tape drives over to Microsoft using 3,000 Armored Trucks, driving up north from Mountain View to Redmond. The 848 mile road trip will be overseen by law enforcement agencies both on the ground and in the air.

There is yet no official announcement as to what Microsoft plans to do with the new Google acquisition, but rumors are flying around that Microsoft plans to start selling a new search based operating system with a new built in software called Windows Internet Search that will perform web searches at an alarming fast rate using Google search. The new upgrade will cost around $149 for existing Windows Vista users. Microsoft has no plans of providing search functionality to Apple users.

Microsoft will also be offering a subscription based search to its customers starting next year that is said to incorporate the new Google logic. The search feature will provide subscribers with 10 Google searches per day starting at 0.99c.

In related news, Google announced that it is experiencing unusually high traffic today, as users of the search engine giant around the world are are frantically trying to back up the entire search engine’s database before Microsoft officially shuts it down in the coming weeks.

Google employees have made a pact to never give up and are voicing their disapproval of the announcement by forming their own Open Source startup search engine company called AprilFools that is expected to be a noteworthy replacement for the many fooled Google users worldwide.

Written on March 12th, 2008 by Mojo about ajax, google, javascript, stats, testing without comments

How Google Analytics determines Connection Speeds

Today I was looking for an unobtrusive method of determining a user’s connection speed using JavaScript. A quick search on Google returned an array of tricks mostly having to do with using Ajax to make a call behind the scenes, and track the payload time for the small file. In most cases people use an image with a random variable at the end to avoid caching, like image.jpg?foo=1Rt2X21. This is all good but adds an HTTP connection which could potentially interfere with the user’s experience, especially if they are already on a slow connection to begin with. Continue »

Written on November 28th, 2007 by Mojo about ajax, firebug, firefox, google, javascript with 4 comments

Sniff and Disable Firebug Howto (Gmail example)

Here is a simple test to see if users have Firebug installed on their browsers. Obviously this would also weed out non-FireFox users.

if (window.console && window.console.firebug) {
  alert("found Firebug");
}else{
  alert("can't find Firebug");
}

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Written on November 21st, 2007 by Mojo about google, software without comments

Using Gtalk with Miranda IM

If you use Miranda IM as your instant messaging app in Windows and you want to use Google Talk which uses the Jabber protocol, you can use these steps to setup an additional Jabber plugin for Miranda and configure it to use the Google servers.

This will allow you to use both a regular Jabber account and GTalk simultaneously withing Miranda.

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