The web is celebrating the advent of the new competitor in the browser arena - Google Chrome. Here are some points you should note before jumping into the conclusion that Google Chrome is a huge revolution in the browser history.

The bugs

Here are some bugs I saw in the Google browser:

1. The task Manager is a main feature in Chrome. But let us get this straight: It does not work as intended always. Look at the screenshot below:

Chrome crashed and the Task Manager option was disabled so that I could not check what was wrong. If the task manager is disabled when the browser crashes, what is the point in having a task manager in the first place?

2. The browser crashes too often. I used the browser in three different machines and the browser tends to crash once in a while. This is very annoying considering the fact that the latest versions of Firefox and IE are rather robust.

There is even a very simple way to crash the browser.

Just type “:%” in the omnibox (address bar). Voila !!!

Another annoying thing is that when the browser crashes, it crashes every single instance of the browser running, not just the current window.

Other Interesting facts

3. Chrome is not the fastest in terms of JavaScript performance it seems. Two different tests confirms this. In one test Firefox is ahead if Chrome while in the other, Safari is ahead. It is just that Chrome outperforms the other browsers in certain tests which Google handpicked by itself. Anyway it should be noted that Internet Explorer versions are all lagging behind by great margins in every single test.

4. Tab manipulation and the omnibox are not really a big step as far as web development is concerned. Those are just usability tweaks that can be incorporated in to any browser without much effort.

5. Chrome does not support add-ons as of now. This is a very huge drawback when compared to Firefox. Without add-ons, the functionality of Chrome is very limited. We can only hope that Google will incorporate the support for add-ons in the next iteration of the browser. The Firefox tribe (The early adopters) will hesitate to switch to Chrome because of this one single drawback.

6. Regional language support is poor. I still cannot not find out how to render some regional language web pages correctly in Chrome. Especially the option to change the font representing a regional language is missing.

7. There are many other smaller glitches like the absence of Full-Screen, absence of option to restart downloads etc.

So what is there to be excited about Chrome? The multi-threading capability and ability to isolate tabs are not a big innovation either. The IE team have been experimenting with this for IE8.

A much loved feature would have been the support for JavaScript multithreading. But Chrome does not support that also. There is no real innovation in the rendering engine front also. Chrome if just reusing the webkit rendering engine which is powering the Safari browser.

The only big thing about Chrome is the new fast V8 JavaScript engine and it capabilities. I am not sure if we can bank on that for creating wonders in the web.

As of now, I will go back to my much loved Firefox3. The Beta 2 version of IE8 also looks promising. It does have a lot of new features. It will make many Microsoft fans very happy. I will wait until Google comes up with some thing really different, something really game-changing.

Here are some Captcha images I saw on a Google page.

Looks like Captcha for aliens.

Can you solve all of them?

Probably we should ditch the Captcha idea altogether.

We have enough reasons for that.

The Internet is a world on its own. For many people around the world, it is the alternate world. And for many of us, it is where we live, and we dream - it is our primary world. But it turns out that the Internet is so broken, so insecure, and so dynamic that it is very difficult to live peacefully in here. Here are some problems I see with the Internet and why it works in spite of all these.

No or low Standards

99% of the websites (including this) are not made adhering to the standards and this is magnified by the fact that our major browsers are worse in standards compliance. People will respect the web standards only if the web browsers strictly follow the standards. But the current trend is that developers of the major browsers are competing in making standards of their own. Yes, the IE8 passed the Acid2 test, but that doesn’t mean Microsoft will not introduce any proprietary standards in it. And every new proprietary standard they introduce will result in a more broken web some years down the line.

Interoperability

There is nothing like this in the whole Internet, and most of the people don’t know what the term means. Interoperability is a big issue in today’s social web. Users would like the different web services they use to be helping them in combining the services. I would like to see the different web services to merge their services seamlessly and thus giving a unique experience to each user by forming a large application that incorporates all the small web services.

Data Portability

Data portability is an issue being discussed by many, related to the Facebook-Scoble debate. As Mathew Ingram puts it, the main question here is:

Who does that data belong to? It might have been collected and organized in the way it has because of Facebook’s tools, and he obviously agreed to the terms of use that he has since broken, but there’s no question that the information itself should belong to Scoble (and the rest of us). So what rights should he have when it comes to removing that data from a site like Facebook? And who gets to decide?

Obviously, the problem is that most of the big corporations ignore this right of a user. And this persuades users to continue with the crappy web application because their data is trapped in it for ever.

Privacy

Again, privacy issues are all around the place and people are enjoying the furious debates. Google knows what you searches for, what is in your e-mails and what videos you watch. And if you think that Google would not know you visited this site, think again.

The Adsense ads in this site may be tracking the cookies in your computer and it knows exactly who you are. It know exactly what tabs are open in your browser. We have heard the Facebook Beacon row too. Also I don’t mean privacy issues are related to just Google and Facebook. Something must be done fast before privacy becomes history.

Anonymity

Anonymity is different from privacy, but both are related. By anonymity I mean the inability to know who did what in the web. For example, in the real world you know who bought an item from your shop. You may not know his address but s/he has an identity. But in the web, you cannot know for sure who commented on your blog and who downloaded a software from your website. People do not have a face in the web. Anonymity or rather the feeling of anonymity is what boosted file sharing networks and caused widespread Piracy.

Others

There are other problems which I will just list here. These are mostly irritations which causes junk data in the web.

• Ads - Too much of them
• SEO - Why the hype?
• Meta-blogging - Blogging about blogging about blogging…
• Multiple accounts - Where do I store all these passwords?

If you can think of any others, please list them too.

So, how does the Internet work in spite of these?

The answer is simple. Millions of people out there are wasting billions of man hours trying to make the things work. It is not that the whole Internet is working in spite of it being broken. It is the magic of the hard work by human beings that make it work.

Orkut is famous for the never ending list of bugs in it. Users have even spotted bugs that can be exploited to view locked private albums. Today while browsing through a forum, I spotted this*:

As you can see, the forum shows messages 1-10 of 10. This means that there are no further messages. But the next link is active!!! What for?

This is just a case of not applying thought to the development of the product. Adding more features, bells and whistles and then more, you forget to get the usability right. If you have millions of users, who cares to fix these small bugs? You will be working on the ads. Won’t you?

As if it weren’t bug enough, I found something more when I clicked the next link just out of curiosity:

Yes. 11-10 of 10. Clearly, someone got his loop wrong.

*I have squeezed images parts to show the relevant portions.

From Google Adsense website:

AdSense for content automatically crawls the content of your pages and delivers ads (you can choose both text or image ads) that are relevant to your audience and your site content—ads so well-matched, in fact, that your readers will actually find them useful.

For example, I saw an Ad of “Colgate maxfresh” in my website homepage. No, I am not selling toothbrushs in there. The website just provides source code for some purely technical and mathematical stuff. Continue Reading »

After the spectacular success of Google as a search engine, people are waiting for the next big revolution in “Search”. As one of my readers pointed out, waiting for ‘Search 2.0′. But is search the exact thing that we need?

When Google introduced their search, people thought that it was the best solution to manage the overwhelming amount of data they have. Many corporations started using the Google search appliance. Still, lots of people are happy with what Google provides them. People use Google desktop search in their personal computers to search for their documents. In Gmail, the tagline used is “search, don’t sort”. But I think there is a problem with this solution. Continue Reading »

Google is our first candidate for testing CAPTCHA strength. Google uses CAPTCHA in many places. It is shown when you want to add your URL to google. It is shown when you want to signup for a new Gmail/Orkut account. It is also shown when you want to include some hyperlink in your orkut messages and scraps.

Continue Reading »