Disclaimer: Google Enterprise is a client. This isn’t really my clients’ beat but its not unconnected given how much faster Chrome is with Ajax/Javascript than most things, and therefore Google Apps. Well, until Firefox 3.1. Maybe.
I love Firefox. I love Chrome. I’m switching between the two interchangeably at the moment. Here’s the good and bad of Chrome and why I haven’t given up on FF altogether.
Good
Fast!
Less resource hungry – no more memory leaks!
Clean interface
More stable than FF & IE!
Windows only (I maintain my view that Apple Macs suck, and am not bothered that Google hasn’t yet released non-Windows versions. I’ve read that they will, so that’s good in principle)
Neutral
Still can’t save passwords for Yahoo (FF can’t either). Why not?
Can’t distinguish between different Google Apps profiles (again, FF can’t either). Why not?
Not so good
Shortcuts go weird (e.g. CTRL – minus in Google Docs to delete a row doesn’t work)
Needs an IE rendering plugin, and lots of other plugins, which will come in time…
Some websites go bananas
Needs nicer animation around the shortcuts toolbar
Mozilla is trying to get into the Guinness book of records with most downloads in a 24 hour period. It’s going on now – get Firefox, spread Firefox.
If you don’t know what that is, and you’re reading this in Internet Explorer — [doink]. That’s me hitting you in the head with a rubber mallet. It’s an awesome web browser, and is to surfing the web what spoons are to eating soup — a necessary tool, and a curvy, shiny piece of awesomeness to boot.
(I haven’t actually installed FF3 yet. Mozilla’s load-balancing is good, which is to say the website was still up for me to hit download, but not that good, in that I’m getting 5 k/b per second down a pipe that should give me 1.25 mb/s. I’m looking forward to it, though, in a geeky kind of way).
Update: FF3 installed on three machines now and I’m loving it on all of them. Most of my extensions/add-ons have been upgraded (not the Delicious one, oddly enough) and it seems to run smoother, faster and less resource intensively than before. Although it does seem to have a larger RAM footprint than FF2, where my systems would grind to a halt with this much memory in use in earlier incarnations, FF3 seems well stable. Happiness is a shiny new browser. Yes, yes, I’m a geek.
Interesting not because I think its a particularly useful application of Twitter to turn lights on and off, but because of the growing chatter around ‘IPv6’, a technology protocol understood by few people outside the networking but that will come to have more relevance as the Internet carries on its ongoing march.
Essentially, every Internet connected device there is has a unique address. In your case, it may be your broadband modem, and every other machine connected to that shares that IP address. This IP address under the protocol we currently use, IPv4, is a unique identifier of that device and takes the form of four three digit numbers separated by full stops. For example, 222.129.228.110. The upper limit on each three digit number is 255, I think due to some relationship between the way the protocol works and hexadecimal base.
What’s happening thanks to cheaper and cheaper technology allowing connectivity, more and more advanced devices supporting connectivity and the general all-around goodness of Broadband is that people have more and more devices they’d like to enable as unique devices on the Internet. You might already monitor an IP CCTV camera remotely, or login to Slingbox, or want to use Twitter to turn your bedroom lights or oven off.
Gradually, as these requirements grow we’ll use up the 4.3 or so billion addresses IPv4 allows and we’ll really need everything to switch up to IPv6 – which supports trillions. There’s been limited imperative to move over to IPv6 in the past as people genuinely haven’t been able to understand why they would every need more than 4.3 billion addresses. Well, the maths has gotten a little bit easier to understand thanks to growing ‘net penetration and an understanding of how we can use the net in different ways that makes things like giving a light bulb an IP address useful.
Which is pretty cool, from where I’m standing.
NB There’s absolutely no need for the light bulb in question here to have its own IP address, but it is the principle I’m talking about here, people. Sure, it’s just massive geeks doing this stuff now, but Facebook just had geeks on it for a while and look at it now…!
I’ve been reading Tom Standage‘s book on the history of the telegraph this week. It is a fascinating read – Standage is totally accessible and every bit as brilliant as he gives the impression of being (he’s business editor at The Economist so I speak to him occasionally as part of my day job). Tom P and Matt made the point when they saw me with the book that it should be very short – simply reading “there wasn’t one” – but the parallels Standage draws to today’s Internet and some of the fantastic quotes he draws from makes it entertaining reading**.
A choice sample, James Gordon Bennett of the New York Herald, writing around 1840:
“The telegraph may not affect magazine literature… but the mere newspapers must submit to destiny, and go out of existence.”
A conversation (and a destiny) that is very much going on today.
There’s another quote in there that I can’t find at the moment but talks about how the telegraph made it seem as it you were in the same room as the person you were talking to — which I found particularly amusing given that I spend quite a bit of time talking to journalists about how my client Cisco’s TelePresence achieves the same effect in ever-so-slightly higher definition…
Anyway, it’s an interesting read, and occasionally pops up cheap on Amazon.
** I admit freely that part of this fascination with all this may derive in part from the fact that I studied the History of Science at university and spend a increasingly large proportion of my time talking about the Internet’s impact on communications / news dissemination.
Armand David's personal weblog: dadhood, technology, running, media, food, stuff and nonsense.
