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.

No, I don’t know stuffs about Chinese. Probably except the first two newbie lessons on ChinesePod. What interests me most about Chinese is how its hanzi sound map to Japanese kanji’s, how many characters used in Chinese are alien in Japanese, and how simplification makes the character between traditional and simplified Chinese awfully different.

I was reading about the romanization of Chinese today when I found the link for Google Pinyin, a Chinese IME. Before, when I need to access a Chinese hanzi I would draw it using Microsoft Japanese IME’s handwriting recognition. Of course many of the simplified characters like 吗 isn’t available there. The solution is to write the traditional characters like 嗎 and get the simplified equivalent through the dictionary program Wakan. Clumsy I know. That’s why when I read about Google Pinyin I thought “Let’s try a Chinese IME for the sake of it”. The fact that Google makes an IME also interested me much.

First of all, why the need for Google Pinyin at all? Well, because Microsoft’s built in Chinese IME sucks? Probably. I’ve tried both (very shallowly!) and I can say that the Google one seems to be more fun and easy to use.

To use it, just go to its website, download the program, and install it. The link is 下载 which in Japan would be read as kasai but I won’t even guess how it sounds in Chinese. Then you need to install Microsoft’s Chinese IME from the Control Panel. After that just switch to Chinese from the language bar. The default will be Google Pinyin but you can switch to Windows XP’s IME using Ctrl+Shift.

Thanks for reading. 我叫アグロ。我很好。我爱你。你呢？谢谢。谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢谢。(笑)