Archive for September, 2008
TLAPD 2008!
Every year on September 19th it’s Talk Like A Pirate Day!
This day, all my postings and comments will be ‘piratized’ just to get you all in the mood. 
Our welcoming committee
Whenever any of the two of us come home, we are always welcomed back by one of 6 (!) cats who patrol our neighbourhood.
Often, the are with three or more, and they tend to lie flat on the ground beneath my car to enjoy the radiating heat.
I do not dislike cats, or experience dismay from the presence of them in my front-yard. It’s the fact they are often taking a dump in my backyard. It stinks. Therefore, we’re going to make our yard kitty-proof in the near future, to avoid us from stepping into a smelly garden or worse!
Anyway, the welcoming committee is in the picture below.
A nerdish dilemma
I’ve mentioned it on some previous posts already, I’m a long-time Firefox addict. Everywhere I go, and on all computers I work, I’ve installed a version of Fx3, and on most including my favourite plugins.
Maybe I’m a tad late with this, but since the release of the thing, I’ve been using Google Chrome on my work-laptop.
What can I say about it?
It works differently, it looks differently and it lacks some of the functionality Firefox has or gained which I find necessities for a browser.
To start off with Chrome: the interface is, well, let’s put it this way, radically different. I’m not exactly chuffed with the tabs being on top, although it has an interesting side-effect: I’m constantly clicking on my top-hidden RocketDock. (Google it!)
The browser itself feels really smooth and, as promised, the Javascript-engine and renderer work really fast. Even though comparisons have been made and show it’s not true, it feels that way. Concerning the memory-consumation of both browsers (Fx3 and Chrome) I can be quite short: when browsing with several tabs open, it does not differ much.
My Fx peaks at about 200 megs, while Chrome does about the same. In fact, it’s a 10% difference, but those 20 megs are only a small part of the 1GB I’m currently working with. An unnoticeable difference. (Well, for me that is.)
As Chrome is open source, the project shares (unstable) builds of the browser under a different name. You know there’s Google Chrome, but the OS-version is Chromium. The dev-builds of Chromium can be found here, and the changelog is here. The difference between Chromium and Chrome is the fact it’s unbranded, and there’s a whole lot of bugs solved in the unstable builds. Furthermore, there’s no need to use the installer, so you can just download the zip-file and unpack&run. Yay for ease of use on that point!
I’m not churning out advice here, but would like to say every internet enthusiast should try Chrome (or Chromium) for a testdrive once. It’s no complete browser (yet), but it’s a nice experience. i’m hoping for some lendig and loaning amongst the Chromium and Mozilla communities which hopefully lead to a merger of the best of both browsers…
