Archive for the 'Technology' Category

Ain’t Gonna Give up Firefox for Google Chrome

Published
by
Jon
on September 4, 2008
in Technology
. 4 Comments

During the last 24 hours, it seems that everyone and their neighbor has something to say about Google’s new open source web browser, Google Chrome.

I have blogged about my initial observations on Chrome yesterday, but today I finally had the chance to download Chrome and try it out for one full day.

Here are some of my quick follow-up thoughts, in Christmas carol format:

5 awesome things about Chrome

  1. The speed improvements are as good as advertised. Even when the page is loading slowly due to network effects, somehow it doesn’t seem as slow as in Firefox or Internet Explorer.
  2. The new V8 JavaScript engine is wicked fast. For most sites, this may not matter much, but Chrome really shines when you are using heavily AJAX-ed applications like Google Reader or Gmail.
  3. The “Create application shortcuts…” feature to run any web page as a desktop application with no browser controls is really cool.
  4. The multi-process architecture brings browser stability to a whole different level. I forcibly closed a chrome.exe process using my Task Manager, and only one tab is terminated without affecting anything else. And even then, the tab will suggest to you to reload the tab if you want to try again.
  5. The Omnibox will take some time getting used to, but I do agree that the intention of using the Omnibox to provide an integrated and universal browser “command prompt” is the correct approach.

4 things I can do in Firefox that I can’t do in Chrome

  1. Block advertisements using my Adblock Plus add-on.
  2. Access my delicious bookmarks using my Delicious Bookmarks add-on.
  3. Highlight some text from a web page and right-click to have the option to: a) search for the highlighted text on any of my search engines (not just the default), or b) open a new tab with the highlighted text as the URL (enabled by my Context Search add-on and URL Link add-on, respectively).
  4. Post content directly to Evernote and vi.sualize.us directly using my Evernote add-on and vi.sualize.us add-on, respectively.
(There’s actually a whole lot more, but you get the idea. ;-) )

3 things Chrome absolutely must implement to have a chance at being a IE/Firefox-killer

  1. A way to support extensions or add-ons like Mozilla and Firefox. Look, Firefox is not a perfect browser. But because of Firefox’s add-on framework and the hundreds of add-ons available in the community, users can tweak and extend Firefox close to perfection. Chrome absolutely has to support extensions if it is to be taken seriously as a “prosumer” web browser. If extensions are not possible because they compromise Chrome’s security model, at the very least Chrome must provide a Greasemonkey-style capability for users to do scripting. Anything for people other than Chrome developers to customize and modify the browser’s capabilities. Yes, I realize that Chrome is open source, and theoretically anyone can take the source and make improvements to it. However, I would bet that a whole lot more folks would be capable to do scripting or plug-in development than to hack on the actual Chrome source code.
  2. Built-in mashup capability. Internet Explorer 8 has Web Slices. Firefox has Ubiquity. Chrome has … ?
  3. Integration with other web browsers. How about the ability to right-click on a link and have the option to launch that URL in Internet Explorer? How about being able to drag and drop a Chrome tab onto Firefox and have it launch in a Firefox window, or even better, dock directly into Firefox? The former should be trivial to implement. The latter may sound like fantasy, but if you remember Google’s close relationship with the Mozilla Foundation and the fact that there are Mozilla developers on Google’s payroll, then it may not sound so far fetched after all.
  4. (Bonus) Export bookmarks. This feature is so blatantly obvious and simple to implement that I’m shocked that it’s not available in Chrome. I find Google Chrome’s Help Center entry on this matter very telling. Either they a) do not expect you to ever use any other web browser once you switch to Chrome, or b) they fully expect you to continue using your other web browser while you are giving Chrome a test spin.
This feature is not available at the moment. If you imported your bookmarks from another browser, your data should still be available in the original browser.

2 ways I’ll be using Chrome in the meantime

  1. Desktop launcher for my most commonly-used web applications. That includes Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Analytics, and my Wordpress control panel. Any application that is JavaScript-intensive and pretty self-contained will be a good candidate for this. As Steve Hodson puts it, there are just people that prefer certain applications living on the desktop as separate entities.
  2. As a toy and a testing ground. Unfortunately, that’s it for now. It is not ready to replace Firefox as my default web browser… yet.

One final opinion

Google Chrome is not going to destroy Microsoft or desktop software. Let’s just get that out of the way first.

If you have been reading commentary in the past 24 hours on what Chrome means in the epic struggle between Microsoft and Google, you would think that Google Chrome is the key strategic piece to displace Windows and put everything in the cloud.

Not so fast. I would bet that after five years, folks will still happily run desktop applications just like they have happily been doing for the past decade or so even as we see the Internet become mainstream. Google may have grabbed 1% market share in a single day, but it will not crush Firefox much less Internet Explorer.

Yes, Chrome is a strategic piece for Google, but perhaps for different, less ambitious reasons, as many others have suggested.

Here are three possibilities:

  1. As a web company, Google needs to put its stake in the ground in the way web standards and technologies get adopted and implemented, and the easiest way to do that is by being a web browser vendor. If your web browser gets enough mind share and/or market share, you get a certain influence in how web standards get developed and adopted by websites.
  2. As David Mullings commented in Facebook on my earlier blog post, Google may be using Chrome as one of their entry points in collecting data to benefit DoubleClick, AdSense, and their other services which can benefit from behavioral targeting. And as TechWag noticed, there are just some things that don’t seem right with Chrome’s EULA. Well, looks like Google has updated their EULA.
  3. Google really just wanted to flex its technical muscle to the industry and placate their developers who have been dying to prove to the world that anything Google does, it does it better than the rest of the world. For publicity, for morale, or for ego - take your pick.
CrunchBase Information on Firefox
Firefox
Information provided by CrunchBase
CrunchBase Information on Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Information provided by CrunchBase

5 Observations on Google Chrome

Published
by
Jon
on September 2, 2008
in Technology
. 4 Comments

So the cat is out of the bag early. Google will be launching it’s own open source web browser called Google Chrome (as of Sep 2 in Singapore, this link doesn’t work yet). It has since been confirmed on Google’s official blog.

Give credit where credit is due: The news originally broke from Germany-based Philip Lenssen, who received a 39-page comic book in the mail talking about this new web browser. His website has been up and down all day due to overwhelming traffic.

Why was Philip the only guy who received the comic book? Well apparently, Google sent out all these copies of the comic book to various tech bloggers and expected all of them to arrive after Labor day in the US (Sep 1), since the US postal service doesn’t operate on public holidays. However, the post office does open in Germany, and thus Philip was serendipitously given an early scoop.

As powerful as Google is, they do not control worldwide postal service… yet.

And using a comic book to market a new technology product? Brilliant. Whatever you say, Google sure knows what buttons to push to excite and motivate geeks.

Believe it or not, in the span of a little more than 10 hours, the Google Chrome web browser has already been covered ad nauseam over the Internet.

I won’t talk about what Google Chrome means or how it works or what it will include. You can read all about it from many other wonderful folks like Dare Obasanjo, John Furrier, Mathew Ingram, ReadWriteWeb and BoomTown. And don’t forget to read the comic.

However, here are my observations on Google Chrome which I haven’t really seen addressed anywhere yet:

User Interface

I’ve found some initial screen shots of the Google Chrome web browser from ElectricPig, which seem legitimate to me. However, is it just me, or does the UI look quite a bit too simple and underwhelming?

The main emphasis of Google Chrome (at least for this release) seems to me to be back-end architecture and security, and not so much on the UI. If you look at the comic book, more pages were devoted to talking about the multi-process architecture, Google Gears, the new V8 JavaScript engine and the sandbox security model than about new UI improvements.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, since Google absolutely has to get most of the back-end stuff right the first time. But it just means that for now, from a user’s point of view, Google Chrome is perhaps only a marginal improvement in user experience (if any at all), compared to what I can currently do with Firefox/Internet Explorer + plugins.

Things like pr0n mode, the OmniBox, and even screen thumbnails to some extent are things that can already be done in Firefox with the right extensions.

Let’s just hope that the speed and stability improvements in Chrome can be the game changer as far as user experience is concerned (not that Firefox 3 has really crashed on me very often).

Update: More screen shots available from Google Blogoscoped.

Buy vs. Build

Jeremiah Owyang openly wonders on Twitter why Google, wanting to do an open source web browser, decided to build their own from scratch instead of building/buying/enhancing what Mozilla/Firefox already provided.

To me the answer is pretty simple:

  1. Hardcore developers love to build things from scratch, and Google is basically a company run by hardcore developers.
  2. Technically, it was not practical or feasible to retrofit Mozilla/Firefox into a multi-process architecture. Since the multi-process architecture seemed to be priority numero uno and mandatory for all the rest of the security and sandboxing to work, the only choice is to start from scratch

Plug-ins Anyone?

I may be wrong, but I didn’t get the impression from reading the comic that Google Chrome supports any kind of plug-in architecture whatsoever. The plug-ins I’m referring to are not runtimes like Flash and Silverlight (which I believe Chrome should support), but the numerous small extensions which one can use to incrementally improve and extend the functionality of the web browser, like what you can do in all Mozilla-based browsers like Firefox.

I sure hope that is not an oversight, because the last thing I want to see is dozens of different forks of the Chrome source code just because everyone wants to extend their web browser functionality in one way or another.

Although Mozilla and Firefox are open source projects, I believe the reason why their codebase has more or less avoided major fragmentation was at least partially due to the rich plug-in architecture provided to developers who wish to extend the browser functionality. It’s always more reassuring for the developer to be able to develop a plug-in to add a new menu item instead of mucking around with the core browser source code.

Let’s hope this is not an oversight and Google does eventually implement a strong plug-in architecture for Chrome, if not in the initial release.

The Hooking War

A lot has been said about how Google Chrome is basically a defensive move against Microsoft’s upcoming IE8 by protecting Google Search’s various “hooks” on the desktop (default search engine, Google Toolbar, etc.).

The thinking goes - IE8 will make it more difficult for Google to hook onto the desktop, since IE8 will not work with Google Toolbar and the search engine will default to Live.com, and thus Google will lose market share and lose all this money from search advertising and blah blah blah.

So Google must counter with it’s own browser so it can dictate its terms on how the browser war is going to be fought and won and so it can maintain an indefinite presence on the desktop to funnel users to their search advertising and blah blah, take over the world, blah.

Har? Am I the only one who doesn’t get this? Is the Armchair Theorist dumb? (apparently yes…)

Dear Google: your company brand is a freaking verb, for crying out loud. 99% of people who use the Internet equate Google to Internet search. Google may be lacking in certain things, but mind share is definitely not one of them.

Anyone who wants to use Google as their primary search engine already does and will continue to do so, regardless whether they are using IE8, Firefox, Safari or Chrome.

My opinion is that if anything, Google Chrome is a good move to force web browser vendors to continue to innovate and evolve, but a pawn in the hooking war it is not.

Google Stock Price

I’ve previously blogged about how Google always has a knack of reinvigorating its company outlook with industry-shaking news every time its stock price gets too low.

Anyone want to wager that after the Google Chrome announcement, Google stock will make a pretty nice recovery from it’s current four month low of $463 a share? ;)

CrunchBase Information on Google Chrome
Google Chrome
Information provided by CrunchBase

3 Social Media Applications I Left Recently

Published
by
Jon
on August 27, 2008
in Technology
. 2 Comments

Every shiny new application that emerges from Silicon Valley nowadays is always greeted by a flock of early adopters eager to try it out.

I don’t exactly consider myself an early adopter (imagine - I only started blogging recently, long after it was the cool and “in” thing to do so), but I do sign up and try out new services from time to time which I feel may fill a particular productivity void for me. (Still waiting for my Soocial invitation… Got it! Thanks!)

Some select applications, like FriendFeed and Toluu, instantly demonstrates that they has staying power for me. Most other applications? Not so much unfortunately.

Here are three social media applications which I recently gave up on and I’ll briefly explain why:

Identi.ca

Yes, I know some folks like John Hunt sing praises about open source microblogging, and it’s true that distributed architecture does wonders for scalability. However, my decision to leave Identi.ca boils down to one simple reason:

From a user’s perspective, it just doesn’t offer me any more value than Twitter.

For me, Identi.ca has exactly two useful features which Twitter doesn’t have: Auto-follow anyone who follows you, and OpenID support.

And in exchange, Identi.ca, users need to live with an inflexible content license, lose out a larger ecosystem of 3rd-party applications, and most importantly, don’t get access to the humongous network of existing Twitter users.

Now that Twitter’s scalability problems seem to be more or less under control, there is no reason for me to use any other Twitter clone, unless it brings something new to the table (like Plurk).

Also, additional minus points to Identi.ca for not allowing you to completely delete your account.

CrunchBase Information on Identi Ca
Identi Ca
Information provided by CrunchBase

Brightkite

Brightkite is actually a pretty cool service, and I do believe that mobile-enabled and location-aware social networking applications will be the next big wave once we can agree on how different phones can automatically - and with consent - send location data to applications. (Google Android, perhaps?)

The reason why I deleted my Brightkite account was simply because there are not enough users in Singapore.

As Metcalfe’s law states, the value of your network is proportional to the number of users in your network.

If you have lots of friends and followers on Twitter or Facebook - you can gain tremendous value from your social network.

If you don’t follow many people on Twitter and not many people follow you - you gain less value from your social network.

If you have no friends on Brightkite because virtually no users live in the same location as you on a a location-based social network - it just gets downright depressing.

After diligently checking-in my location on Brightkite for a couple months and never getting any replies or notifications that someone is around me, I pulled the plug on the whole thing.

Maybe I’ll sign up again when there are more than 23 new user check-ins a month in Singapore.

CrunchBase Information on Brightkite
Brightkite
Information provided by CrunchBase

Atomkeep

I thought Atomkeep was the holy grail for solving the problem for people like myself who need to maintain personal profiles in like 18 different applications and services. However, at the end of the day I deleted my Atomkeep account for three reasons:

  1. The performance was piss poor for about a whole week while I was trying it out. It’s one thing that Twitter doesn’t scale because of it’s gazillion users, but a new startup? FAIL.
  2. At that moment, it didn’t support all of the applications that I used (ironically, Brightkite was one of them), and I would of still needed to maintain my profile in multiple locations.
  3. The biggest issue for me however, was the incomplete vision and poor execution. I would of imagined Atomkeep having some slick GUI-driven capability to do basic field mapping and transformations so you can truly integrate all of your profiles together in as few data fields as possible. Instead what we got was basically a huge aggregation of all of the profile fields from all of the services. That provides no value for me. And there is repetition everywhere also. In order to synchronize my LinkedIn profile with my Twitter profile properly, I need to provide my home page (i.e. blog) URL in at least two fields. Why not give me the option to map both of those fields onto the same data?

Folks, maintaining multiple profiles may be a pain, but it’s hardly a deal breaker. A profile synchronization service really has to bring something unique and new to the table. What about pulling your profile photo from Gravatar? What about custom privacy settings so that some sites will receive your birthday and other sites won’t?

CrunchBase Information on Atomkeep
Atomkeep
Information provided by CrunchBase

FriendFeed Proves its Worth as a Research Tool during South Ossetia Crisis

Published
by
Jon
on August 12, 2008
in Technology
. 0 Comments

I don’t blame you if you haven’t heard yet about the military crisis between Georgia and Russia in South Ossetia right now.

I mean, how much attention can one spare when the Beijing 2008 Olympics is all that everyone is talking about?

In fact, it was downright serendipitous that I found out about South Ossetia tonight while watching CNN, since I tune into CNN like once every three months, and coincidentally only while traveling in Thailand.

In any case, the situation there is very real and extremely grave. I wish the Russians and Georgians can stop this mindless aggression immediately. The world has enough wars going on right now as it is, and we certainly don’t need another one.

However, I’m not here to talk about Eastern European politics today. I’m here to talk about FriendFeed.

Like any other information maven, the moment I saw the Georgian-Russian conflict on CNN, I immediately wanted to know more. Yes, I could of waited a couple hours for CNN to do their news recap, or waited a week for CNN to do their Georgia-Russian special report, but I couldn’t wait that long.

So off to the web I went.

Doing a Google web search for “south ossetia” yielded decent results. Google blog search and news search also got me a lot more detailed information to scour through.

However, pages and pages of search results only yielded a lot of facts. What I was looking for is a recap of how did things get to this stage, and some guys’ analysis and commentary on what all this means and why is South Ossetia so important that both Georgia and Russia wants the territory so badly.

So I tried searching on FriendFeed. And voila! The fourth search result - a conspiracy theorist’s take on the South Ossetia conflict - is exactly what I was looking for. And the fifth search result - an article by David Wescott - agrees with the conclusion that I’m about to make:

While the mainstream media and even Wikipedia can provide facts and current reporting, you really need to rely on social media and social content aggregators like FriendFeed to get the entire story quickly. It was through FriendFeed that I found a possible conspiracy theory backing up the war. It was through David’s blog entry that I discovered the Global Voices Online site and their excellent coverage on the South Ossetia crisis.

It was FriendFeed and social media that allowed me to quickly discover new insights and information that is different from the same stories and takes that the mainstream media and traditional information channels feed us all the time.

And like I have said many times before, the importance of social media in offsetting complementing mainstream media coverage is 10x more important in the country where I come from, where our press freedom is ranked 153rd in the world, sandwiched between luminaries such as Iraq and Kyrgyzstan.

FriendFeed - You have graduated to the top spot as one of the first places I will search whenever I am doing research. Congratulations.

CrunchBase Information on FriendFeed
FriendFeed
Information provided by CrunchBase

Google’s Jolly Good Fellow Wants World Peace

Published
by
Jon
on August 4, 2008
in Technology
. 4 Comments

Yeah, I know it’s been five days since, but here’s my obligatory post on what happened on last Wednesday (Jul 30, 2008) - otherwise known as the let’s-see-how-many-interesting-events-we-can-squeeze-in day.

Last Wednesday was the day that, due to the infinite wisdom of the organizers, both the i.JAM Networking Session held at the Merchant Court Hotel (organized by E27) and TDM’s Meet-the-Meng session at DXO were scheduled together and even overlapped for a couple of hours.

Having recognized from the crowd quite a few people who attended both events, I believe it would of been better if the events were scheduled on separate days. However, I understand from the TDM organizers that Wednesday was the only time that Meng was available, and the i.JAM event has a minister in attendance (and we all know how busy our million-dollar ministers can be :roll: ), so I guess it couldn’t be helped. C’est la vie.

Anyway, let’s keep this short:

Both events were fabulous.

Both events were well-run.

For the TDM event, Jean live-blogged it here. Zit Seng also wrote about it here. The Geek Goddess was excellent as the MC (she said she was nervous? It didn’t show at all).

Had the pleasure to chat with a bunch of cool people that day, including Claudia, Keith (co-founder of iHipo), Shannon (co-founder of Shoplette), Jeff (from Friendster), KK (old salsa friend), Ken (from IDA’s National Grid Office), John, Bernice (founder of youth NPO Syinc), and TDM’s very own Nic.

I had a great time at both events.

There. That’s that. Now let’s talk about something more important.

Let’s talk about world peace.

Chade-Meng Tan, known for being Google’s “Jolly Good Fellow” and first Singaporean employee (as well as having quite a sense of humor), wants to save the world and bring about world peace.

As Meng explained to us in the audience during the climax of his talk at DXO, he plans to go about doing it by researching meditation techniques and creating courses which can systematically increase one’s EQ. So the theory goes - increasing one’s EQ brings about increased self-awareness and self-mastery, which may bring about compassion and love for a greater good, and thus resulting in world peace.

And how does this tie back to Google? Well, Meng is able to pursue his goal because Google is the kind of company that encourages, or even demands, its employees to have world-changing and world-saving ambitions. And Google provides them all the resources within its power to fulfill these goals and ambitions. Or something like that.

And finally, Meng also took the opportunity to encourage all of us to think big, and to believe that each of us can change the world as well.

I certainly applaud Meng’s noble cause, and I wish him all the best in fulfilling his grandiose dreams. It certainly will benefit all of us.

And I also admire Google for creating and nurturing a “dream factory” culture, where all you need to do is get in the door, and you have a chance to change the world and create your own legacy. This, of course, is an incredibly sexy selling point when Google is recruiting the best engineers in the world.

And while it’s nice to think that everyone has world-changing potential, I’m not certain if everyone thinks about (or even cares about) changing the world.

Certainly not the struggling accountant making $4000 a month who have to support his wife and two kids, as well as his mother-in-law.

Perhaps not even the entry-level Google engineer recruited in 2008, making $95K before taxes with no stock options vested and still thinking about striking it rich first.

My point is, Meng has most of his hierarchy of needs well taken care of already (largely thanks to Google’s IPO in 2004, I would believe), and thus he can afford to think about bigger things in life.

Google already has its advertising cash cow, and thus can afford to invest in other projects such as Google University (where Meng currently works and where he develops his courses).

It’s always easier to dream big once you have the biggest worry of your life (finances) all neatly taken care of.

Unfortunately, most of us aren’t that lucky.