Agronesia

Yes, Google will release its very own new browser! If you have time, do read the entertaining 38-page comic licensed in Creative Commons illustrating it.

The highlights are:

• It will be fully open source. It’s not surprising, being Google which uses lots of open source technologies itself and supports open source through means like Google Summer of Code.
• The rendering engine will be based on WebKit which also powers Konqueror and Safari. Why not Gecko, the one powering Firefox? Google claims WebKit is fast, easily runs on mobile devices, and is very easy for new developers to learn.
• Each tab will run in its own separate process. Therefore, one tab crashing won’t affect the whole browser. The Chrome UI will also allow you to analyze the resource consumption of each tab which is a very sweet feature. Closing a tab will completely release all resources associated with the process just like closing a normal application, preventing memory hog.
  
• A JavaScript engine designed from scratch designed by the Google V8 team at Denmark. It will be designed from ground up to run big demanding applications like GMail with blazing-fast speed.
• Google Gears will be included by default. This is the JS component that can make web applications run in offline mode and other stuffs that are supposed to make apps easier to develop.
• Address bar will be below tabs. Well, it’s kind of logical but… Well, big deal…
  
• Privacy mode like IE8 in which nothing of your browsing activity is recorded. Aka pr0n mode.
• Address bar, or Omnibar as they christened it, autocomplete like Firefox 3 but with additional entries like popular sites based on what you type.
• Opening a new tab shows the list of 9 sites you open most just like Opera, with the addition of search engines you might want to immediately use on its right.
  
• Pop up blocking and anti malware/phising features. the browser will continually download list of malicious sites. Kind of a must have in today’s browser anyway.

It’s nice to see Google playing nicely by making it a free software. What I have high hopes most is in the JavaScript engine. The comic actually goes quite a great length explaining many of its technical details in comparison with other engines with simple languages (for a programmer of course), so again read it :).

As a (would be lazy) JavaScript programmer, I’ve got IE7, FF3, Opera, and Safari installed anyway (I believe I have Amaya installed at one point too). Another one in the neighborhood won’t be such a shock.

PS: www.google.com/chrome should have a content appearing soon.

On a previous post I discussed about the results of a Windows BPM finder program MixMeister BPM Analyzer. It sometimes produces values that are 2 times or half the seemingly actual value. And then the doubt grew on me, “Is that program even accurate at all?”. So, I was set to program my own BPM finder.

But I don’t know any sound programming stuffs, so I went for the easy path of a human-assisted program in which the algorithm is very intuitive. A human would tap the beats while playing a song and the program will do the simple mathematical calculation (it’s “beats per minute” for a thing, so it’s basically just a division).

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I’ve downloaded the shiny brand new Firefox 3! Go download it yourself, and to celebrate it try to do these things:

1. Play JavaScript Mario

The classic scrolling game, but now using JavaScript! It isn’t faithful to the original in that we can go backwards though. Play!

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If you’re using JavaScript, you might consider using packer before deploying your code. It will compress your JavaScript code and in most cases will make your code smaller. When you use the compressed JavaScript online, it will result in bandwidth savings.

The method is simple, copy your code on the Paste text box, select whether you want to use Base62 encode and Shrink variables option, and click the Pack button. The documentation says that you must terminate statements, including function declarations, with semicolon so you better abide it.

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