16 February 2009

Hackosphere: The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!

At last, a good reason not to try Chrome.

Hackosphere: The Web is not ready for Chrome yet!:
It is an understatement to call Chrome as a browser. It is a mini operating system for running Web applications. So far, most of the Web applications have been running on the server side and used the browser only for display. Recently, there has been a push towards Rich Internet Applications (RIA) that use your browser's advanced functionalities such as Flash, Javascript etc to deliver desktop application-like complex feature set. Zoho and Google docs are examples of popular Office applications that run in your browser. This trend has just started and is growing.
Hat-tip to Fencing bear at prayer.

Like many other people I've read about the Chrome web browser for Google, and have wondered if I should try it. Is it any faster than other browsers, any simpler, any more efficient?

And this article explains it better than anything else -- the push towards Rich Internet Applications.

But it misses out the most important thing: the web is not ready for Rich Internet Applications because of bandwidth caps. There is already far too much Flash and Javascript stuff around.

I've installed the Noscript add-on to Firefox to block Javascript applications like streaming video, podcasts and the like, because they are such bandwidth hogs, and all this "rich content" costs money to download.

It's a sort of electronic verbosity, like HTML in e-mail. People who never use one word where four will do love to clothe the most trivial statements with fancy fonts in different colours, animated smiley faces and the like, so that one gets the original message, and then the HTML version that is 10 times as long (and I have my mail reader set to only show the plain text anyway, so I never see the fancy stuff).

If the content was really enhanced by all these bells and whistles it might be OK, but most of it is trivial.

So if the main feature of Chrome is that it does more of what I'm already trying to stop Firefox doing, thanks but no thanks.

Until bandwidth caps are removed, the web is not ready for Rich Internet Applications, and therefore not ready for Chrome.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Was it your intention to make me feel so guilty? I enjoy the Chrome Browser! And it's free. That's a good thing. Free.

Steve Hayes said...

Firefox is also free!

Anonymous said...

Hi Steve,

I tried Chrome, because of Turbo, which actually puts the JavaScript on your hard drive. That way, it doesn't have to download over and over. Also, Turbo mode is faster.

Chrome doesn't have other features I use a great deal though, so I don't use it much.

Each browser has its pros and cons, as you know. Chrome was too buggy the last time I used it.

I use Firefox and Opera now about 50/50.

Firefox uses Turbo now too. Opera doesn't yet, to my knowledge. Ironically though, Opera is still faster at doing WordPress admin for me.

Blessings

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