johnmccollum.co.uk

Well, I didn’t see this one coming yesterday.

Google continued their assault on Microsoft by launching their new browser, Chrome, today - 24 hours after announcing it! 

I’ve just installed it, and first impressions are that it will be a serious contender in the browser market - as you would expect.

Installation was fast and easy, taking all of about one minute. It imported my settings from Firefox - bookmarks, passwords, the lot.

Another minute later, and I was up and running - actually, make that sprinting. This thing really moves - it’s lightning fast. The sleek interface adds to that feeling, and anyone coming from Firefox will be immediately at home, organising tabs and bookmarks like an old pro.

Text and graphics look great on Chrome - there’s a lovely soft, anti-aliased edge to the display. No surprise, given that the rendering engine is based on Safari’s Webkit.

The launch page borrows from Opera’s excellent quick-dial, giving you instant access to your recently bookmarked and most viewed pages.

There’s also incognito mode - where you can browse safe in the knowledge that no trace of your - ahem - browsing habits will be left on your PC.

All in all, Google Chrome is a frighteningly polished product, given that it’s a beta. The response has been very positive and I can’t wait to see some developer extensions appear to add to its feature list.

You can download Google Chrome here.

Have you tried Chrome yet? What are your thoughts?

Today sees the launch of Cuil (pronounced ‘Cool’), a brand new search engine launched by ex-Google employees.

So far, the launch has not gone smoothly. Having tested it quite a bit today I can report the following:

• It’s really, really slow just now. Probably just teething issues, but not a good sign.
• “No results because of high load…Due to excessive load, our servers didn’t return results. Please try your search again.”
• Nasty interface. A three column layout for results by default (ew!) means that I don’t immediately know where there most relevant results are. I’ve been trained to read search results top to bottom since the days of AltaVista - I am supposed to be reading left to right? One column then the other?
• Related searches at the top, and related categories on the right. Wha? Where? Who?
• Their about us page returns a 403 forbidden error!
• Thumbnails for search results that don’t relate to the content (for example, superstring theory - NSFW! Well spotted by digger Crypticlabs)

The performance issue on day one are forgivable; the usability issues less so. With excessive AJAX, and the issues mentioned above, the site is uncomfortable to use, at best.

Having said all that, I hope they do manage to provide an alternative to Google; everyone will benefit from a more competitive search market (rather than Google eating an ever-increasing slice of the pie), and their committment to privacy is laudable.

However, they’ve got a long, long way to go before they can match the power and simplicity of the big G.

Have you tried Cuil yet? What have your experiences been like?

While it will take a long time for the full implications of the Viacom vs. Youtube battle to be known, one thing has already become clear - user privacy is an extremely low priority.

The great fear, of course, is that users are held responsible for having viewed copyrighted content, wittingly or unwittingly.

Yes, I said unwittingly!

You may or may not know this, but many modern applications prefetch links. They’re smart enough to know what link you’re likely to follow next, and they queue it up for you, in advance. This speeds up your browsing experience quite dramatically!

It affects your privacy too though, since the act of prefetching registers that you’ve loaded a particular page, even with no action on your behalf. From Mozilla:

“Privacy implications

Along with the referral and URL-following implications already mentioned above, prefetching will generally cause the cookies of the prefetched site to be accessed. (For example, if you google amazon, the google results page will prefetch www.amazon.com, causing amazon cookies to be sent back and forth.”

(http://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Link_prefetching_FAQ)

I know of at least two applications that prefetch links - Firefox and Stumbleupon. You can check your settings quite easily.

• Open a new browser window
• Type about:config in the address bar
• In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘prefetch’. You might see several settings.

Network.prefetch-next is Firefox’s setting for prefetching links; double-click this to toggle it from on to off, if you like.

If you want to adjust Stumbleupon’s settings for prefetching links, it is easiest to do this through the SU toolbar thusly:

Tools->Toolbar Options->Configuration->Prefetch Stumbles (makes stumbling faster)

So will I be changing my settings? Probably not. I don’t honestly believe that my youtube viewing habits will get me into trouble. However, knowledge is good; and you should know that the prefetching options that speed up your browsing comes with a cost to your privacy.