Category: Rant

Chrome – still not great

Update: A few hours after I wrote that, I decided to quit and restart Chrome to free up some memory, and now none of the extensions I installed are showing up.

A few weeks ago, I wrote about my experiences with Google Chrome on the Mac. At the time, Chrome on the Mac was lagging quite far behind the Windows version. Supposedly now it’s all caught up, and so I’m going to revisit my previous complaints:

  • It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
    • Still happens.
  • It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
    • I haven’t been using Wave, so no comment.
  • It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
    • Still happens.
  • The fact that the tabs take up space in the window frame means that you’d frequently undock a tab when you were trying to move the whole window.
    • Still happens. There is a tiny bit of real-estate near the “+” to open a new tab that is still available, but it’s a pain to grab.
  • It doesn’t have a “Reload all tabs” option. Supposedly there is an extension to that, but in order to use extensions I’d have to upgrade to the latest development build. That’s more work than I’m willing to do when it has all these other problems.
    • I found an extension that will reload individual tabs on a schedule rather than the whole window on demand. That’s actually nicer than having to reload everything manually. It’s not bad, except when your computer goes to sleep you have to restart it by reloading all the tabs individually. Plus when it reloads on a tab that is on a different Space than the one you’re on, it will switch back to that Space, but that’s a Spaces problem not a Chrome problem.
  • It doesn’t recognize or tell you about RSS feeds. In Safari or Firefox, any page that has an RSS feed displays an icon, and if you click it, the OS opens the feed in the currently configured RSS reader. The functionality is so ingrained in browsers that many pages don’t seem to have any other indication that they have RSS feeds. Once again, I’m told that Chrome has a plug in for that. Once again, too much trouble.
    • The only RSS plug ins I could find will add the RSS feed to a web based RSS reader like Google Reader. There is no support I can find anywhere for the OS-defined RSS reader. So I’m experimentally putting NetNewsWireLite out pasture in favour of Google Reader. Not bad, but not great.

So over-all, it’s got a few user interface annoyances, but the really big sticking points have been taken care of by plugins. And I was happy. Until today. And that’s when I discovered that Google Chrome is utterly useless for a web developer – there appears to be no way to make it reload your javascript file that you’ve just changed unless you go to “File->Clear Browsing Data”, uncheck everything except “Empty the cache”, click “Clear Browsing Data”, and wait, and wait, and wait. In normal web browsers, you just have to hit shift-reload on your page and it will reload that page and all the attendent files, including CSS and JavaScript files. That’s it, I’m switching back to Safari (or maybe Firefox) for the page I’m developing.

Oh, plus the built in “Developer Tools” in Chrome suck in comparison with Firebug, but that’s apples to oranges since Firebug is a plugin.

Hosting again

My colo box, which I bought used on 10 January 2007, hung last night and needed to be rebooted. That’s the second time in 3 months, after nearly two years of flawless service. I wonder if it’s time to replace the hardware?

And once I open the discussion about whether to replace the hardware, I open another discussion in my mind: is it time to go back to Linode or some other VPS provider? I left Linode years ago because they didn’t have enough RAM and hard disk for what I needed, but over the years what they provide for the same amount of money has been growing and growing. I currently pay $100 a month for my colo space – I subdivided the box into three Xen domUs, and of the two guys who rent the other domUs, one of them pays me pretty regularly and the other guy sometimes remembers to pay but usually forgets. I don’t think either of them are making very extensive use. So essentially I’m paying $70 a month for 1Gb of RAM and 100Gb of HD for apps, and 370Gb for a music collection. Well, the music collection isn’t all the important, and for $60 a month at Linode I could get 1Gb of RAM and 50Gb of hard disk. Evidently adding another 50Gb of disk would add another $25/month to that, which isn’t optimal. Anyway, I’ve got to consider my options here before spending another $500 on a used colo box.

Facebook

The Facebook “Suggestions” box, which normally shows me people who know somebody I know or groups that a Facebook “friend” or two has joined, is currently suggesting “We can find 1,000,000 people who DO believe in Evolution before June”. There are only two problems with that:

1) Evolution is a fact. It doesn’t matter if you believe in it or not, it just is. The only people who are swayed by arguments about whether something is true or not by how many other people “believe” in it or not are idiots. The world didn’t suddenly start orbiting around the sun because a majority of people “believed” Galileo and Copernicus, it was always that way. And it didn’t stop doing so when Galileo renounced his theory under torture. And anthrogenic global climate change isn’t going to go away if you stick your fingers in your ears and go “LA LA LA I DON’T BELIEVE IN YOU”. (I’d say that idiots who can be swayed by majority belief arguments aren’t worth arguing with, but unfortunately they hold a lot of political power in this country.)

1a) As a scientific fact, I don’t think “evolution” deserves that magisterial capital letter.

2) The fan group, rather than presenting facts or arguments about evolution, is actually more about making fun of people who believe in one or more Gods, especially Christians. So maybe they should state that as their purpose, instead of making it about evolution, a scientific fact that many theists, even Christians, understand is true.

This can’t be right

Is there anybody out here who knows anything about Subversion? I’m very new to it, and I think I might be used to better revision management systems like ClearCase and Git. Here’s the situation: My boss asked me to fix this project so that it could be built with Maven instead of Ant. One of the important things I had to do to was to move src/com to src/main/java/com, and move test/com to src/test/java/com, which I did using the “svn mv” command. I foolishly assumed that since I used Subversion commands to move the directories, that Subversion would then know that things had been moved. And when I merged my branch into the trunk, it appeared to work. But now somebody else just finished work on a branch that he branched off before my work. So we go to merge his stuff into trunk, and basically Subversion appears to think “ok, he made changes to src/com/foo/bar/baz.java, but that directory doesn’t exist any more, so it’s irrelevant, so discard it” instead of what I expected, which was “ok, he made changes to src/com/foo/bar/baz.java, but src/com has been moved, so I need to merge that into src/main/java/com/foo/bar/baz.java”.

Is there a way to make Subversion do the revision management, or am I going to be manually merging this guy’s changes for the next two days?

Google Chrome: not ready for prime time

Here’s what I discovered after a day of using the current beta of Google Chrome for Mac:

  • It frequently lost the text cursor in text input fields, especially on GMail.
  • It seemed much slower and more likely to corrupt the display compared to Safari in Google Wave.
  • It had a bad habit of undocking a tab on the slightest provocation.
  • The fact that the tabs take up space in the window frame means that you’d frequently undock a tab when you were trying to move the whole window.
  • It doesn’t have a “Reload all tabs” option. Supposedly there is an extension to that, but in order to use extensions I’d have to upgrade to the latest development build. That’s more work than I’m willing to do when it has all these other problems.
  • It doesn’t recognize or tell you about RSS feeds. In Safari or Firefox, any page that has an RSS feed displays an icon, and if you click it, the OS opens the feed in the currently configured RSS reader. The functionality is so ingrained in browsers that many pages don’t seem to have any other indication that they have RSS feeds. Once again, I’m told that Chrome has a plug in for that. Once again, too much trouble.

About the only thing I liked about Chrome more than Safari is that when I restarted it, it would re-open the three pages with 15 or so tabs between them that I had open beforehand. Safari can be trained to open the one page with 10 tabs that is my main window, but then I have to manually fiddle with the other pages. Oh, and Chrome opens new links in a tab instead of a window – that’s nice that I don’t have to hold down command when I click.

The main reason I was tempted to use Chrome is that using a busy wave in Google Wave causes browsers to eat memory like crazy. In Safari, to recover that memory I have to close the whole browser. In Chrome, you can recover it by closing the tab. Nice, but I was closing the tab and re-opening it every few minutes because the “space to next unread blip” functionality would stop working. I have to restart Safari about once a week if I avoid Wave, and about once a day if I use Wave.

I find it deeply ironic that the two biggest problems I had with Chrome were with Google apps. Maybe I’ll come back to Chrome when it’s ready. But not now.