Reflections of my thoughts…

There’s another browser to join the browser war. We had Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari as main stream browsers. Now it’s time to the web titan Google to join the battle of browser. Through my previous posts, I already claimed that, I’m a hard fan of Firefox Browser and of course Google Services like Gmail, Google Reader, and Calendar etc. I curiously look to every Google Products. How they’re starting, how they’re growing, how they’re integrating to user’s internet life. Some services are utter flops like Google Answers

Anyway Google has joined the browser war by releasing their early beta yesterday. Till this time I’m satisfied with Firefox. In the beginning I’ve tired of its crashes, memory issue and flash video performance. But the software was getting matured with in upcoming release. The new version of Firefox 3.x has the most modern features for a browser. Till this time the other browsers like Safari, Opera and Internet explorer are behind (IMO). The strength of Firefox is its add-on functionality. Hundreds and thousands of community developers are developing cool Firefox add-ons to extend its usability. Earlier I was using Firefox for tabbed browsing. But it’s more than a tabbed browsing.

Today morning I downloaded and installed the brand-new chrome browser. The official news was first released in the Google Blog. The blog was providing a link to cool comic book created by Scott Mc Cloud, which describes the features and under the hood technologies of Chrome. The browser’s appearance was appealing. It’s really simple and clean. In a single stretch I’ve noticed few things

1 - Google Chrome Window in Windows Vista

1. The browser has a clean and appealing UI. It’s using the similar color combination used in many Google services like Gmail and others.

2. The tabs are incorporated in the title bar itself. So its give more space for the web pages.

3. The tabs are detachable from the tab bar (title bar). But it’s not possible attach it back. The tabs can be attached back to any chrome window.

4. The tab home page is really impressing. It shows, most used websites as thumbnails, recently bookmarked items, recently closed items… etc…

5. On entering something on the address bar, it also search for the titles rather than only searching the web address as Firefox. This feature is also there in IE 8 Beta 2

6. On creating each tab, Chrome creates a new process. It’s similar to Forking in Linux. The advantage is that, the crash with some web pages won’t affect other running pages. Believe me I used to open lot of tabs in my Firefox browser. I can’t think of the number of process my operating system has to manage while I’m browsing

7. There’s no Main menu for the browser. It’s incorporated just near the address bar.

8. The status bar is not there. It will come to the bottom side whenever it loads data from web server and disappear once it complete getting the content. It’s again saving space for the webpage

9. The find bar is streamlined with the address bar on the top and it will be appeared when we press Ctrl+F. The incremental search feature like Firefox is supported in Chrome as well

10. The download bar at the bottom side shows the progress of active downloads and just completed downloaded files.

11. The wait cursor is truly impressing with its nice animation.

12. Application shortcuts are really impressing. We can launch the websites as simple application using Chrome browser. The window will be rendered as a normal application window. It will not be having the title-bar and other theme rendering of chrome. It’s not possible to attach an application window back to the browser window

2- Application Shortcut opened in Chrome

1. The browser support private browsing with incognito window

2. The zoom facility is there (you can use the same key combination of Firefox)

3. Importing bookmarks are painless. You can get your bookmarks from Firefox or IE

4. The tags and shortcuts supported in Firefox browser is supported in Chrome as well.

5. The address bar is acting as the search bar newly introduced in Firefox and IE. Chrome takes the IE6 style of search using the address bar.

6. Quick bookmark feature is available as Firefox 3.x

7. It’s stable so far regardless it’s a first beta

Java script performance

Chrome outperforms the other browsers in the Java script test. Google has its own Java Script test called V8. I just plotted the graph with the score I got with V8 performance test with Chrome, Firefox, IE and Safari. The scores were 617, 72, 21 and 26 respectively.

The other test I ran was SunSpider Javascript Benchmark. Again the Chrome won the game. See the result I got after the test. I can’t understand what really happened with Safari. Apple claimed that it’s the best java script performer among the browser community. Anyway this is the final score I got (smaller is better).

You can check the whole result of my test online (click on the links below)

• Chrome Beta

• Firefox 3.0.1 Result

• Internet Explorer Beta 2

• Safari 3.0.4 result

What I felt missing!

1. The Zoom is not really good as Firefox. In Firefox, the whole page can be zoomed with the images. i.e both text and image will be zoomed and we can see the real zoomed version of the webpage. But Chrome only zooms the text and layout size are still being fixed. I believe it’s because they’re using the Webkit rendering engine. Firefox is Gecko powered.

2. Even we’re getting more space in Chrome with reduced menus and all, it’s still missing a full screen option.

3. It’s missing an integrated RSS reader. It’s quite common with all new browsers. It can at least redirect to Google Reader

4. Double clicking on the empty area of tab won’t create a new tab. Since it’s the address-bar, it just restore/maximize the window. We’ve to find the small new tab button there or has to use short cut Ctrl+T

5. The status bar is showing is very short. It can’t display a moderate sized url fully.

6. Can support alternative themes.

7. Firefox users have to suffer without add-ons. Hope Google can start a new community for hosting add-ons for Chrome

8. Even the bookmarking is easy as we do in Firefox, the Chrome still displaying a small window just down the bookmark button. It could be avoided and best to show when pressing the button twice.

9. It misses a good bookmark organizer

10. The download window could be a smaller one.

11. They could have adopt the search style of Safari which is simply stunning

12. The new browsers support different website search like, search with Amazon, Wikipedia etc… in Chrome, we’ve can only have one search engine.

13. Managing tabs with multiple processes saves us from crashing. But each process creates its own memory foot prints and operating system has to allocate a new process for each tabs which is very costly. 

That’s all for now.. Let me conclude. It’s impressed me at first sight and let’s see what’s gonna happen with the final release of the shiny new browser.

PS: Chrome Suffers with its first security flow

Few weeks ago, I went Bangalore and later I realized that, instead of Hanging out in the shopping malls, I made some quality time with the book stores nearby. Yea, it’s a fact, I’m getting insane with books. Normally, I used to read the technical and self-help books. Later I realized that I’m not giving time to read other creative products. Now I just got mad with fictions. In the last two months I purchased few books. They’re

I was much fascinated with the story of Godfather. I just wanted to add that one to my collection. But when I started reading, amazing… it was just flowing. Truly impressed with Puzo. The next one I added to my reading list was Chetan Bhagat’s“3 mistakes of my life”. It’s his third novel. His language really attracts the Indian youth and he’s using the F word and screws up very nicely throughout his novel. It’s a kind of mix of everything. With the experience of reading his first and 3rd books ( delibratley skipped the second one), it’s kind of composition consists of love, friendship, sex (only to a minimum )etc… It was one of the mistake in my life to read it in the exam time. I just eaten it up in 3-4 days.

Paulo Coelho impressed me with his best ever book “The Alchemist”. My eyes were caught up with the new title “Brida“. I was hardly know about the theme and rating of the new book. But just put in the basket without further thought. soon after getting it into my home, my friend owed it . Hope she’ll give it back soon.

Another titles was Superstar India by Shobha De. I’m new to her books. Let’s see how she can impress me I’m also a newbie with Robin Cook. Just purchased his new novel CRITICAL. Seems the book is rated too low in Amazon. I’ve to check why he’s famous with his medical thrillers. Erich Segal’s The Class andLove Story found a cool place in my bookshelf and now I’m on Love Story. It’s a small book and I hope I can finish it soon. The adventures of Sherlock Homes and Robin Sharma’s “Who will cry when you die” are the other new titles. One of my friend Gifted me Devil May care, the new 007 Novel. The Art of war and the second copy (my first copy never returned from my colleague) of “The Art of Project Management” are the rest of the new titles.

OK, now I’ve to manage the clock to read all these books… hmm may take one year or so … Wish you too a happy reading…

It’s really a proud moment for Indians. He bagged India’s first-ever individual Olympic gold medal in men’s 10m Air Rifle shooting. What I can say more. Rajyavardhan Rathore’s silver at Athens was the best ever individual Indian performance at Olympics. now the Goldy silver now replaced with pure gold.
It’s a proudest moment for 1100 million people in India. There are other few people who put Indian’s name in the olympic history like shooter Rajyavardhan Rathore’s silver at Athens, while there were bronze medals for wrestler Khasaba Jadhav (1952), tennis star Leander Paes (1996) and woman weightlifter Karnam Malleswari (2000).

When we compare the population in India, the country fallback in sports other than cricket and hockey. The fact is Indian schools are not giving importance for sports in their academies. The matter is different at other countries like China, America, Japan etc… India is a rising economy. Here the importance comes for education not for sports. We’ve only few spots schools in India. Why?

Neither me or my parents wished me to be a cricketer even I was font of playing cricket. I hadn’t a good sports background. I was just playing it for time pass. The most percentage in Indian population are either poor or middle class. What the middle class/poor parents need to get their children to see in high position, like a corporate company. He has to earn some money. Build cool home, get married with a beautiful and sexy girl and the rest is life. Had we deviated? OK. Let’s come back to the point.

We should give more importance for sports in academies. Engineers doctors or MBAs are not only an Integral part of a country. Hope in future we can see lot of new Indian achievers to show up to the world.

Congratulations Abhinav for the best achievement for the country!!!

In C++, we can pass by value, reference (pointers are also there) when we need to pass some data to a C++ function.

In the case of C# also we’ve the same facilities.(Pointers are still there). They’re named as ref, out and params.

Let’s take a look at ref keyword. As the name indicates, “ref” stands for reference. If the formal parameter (ref variable) modified inside the function, it will be also get reflected in the actually parameter. (Same as C++ reference). In C#, the object must be initialized before passing as a reference. The sytanx is clean in C# because we’re specifying the parameter modifier at both function definition and at the time of usage.

[sourcecode language='C#']
static void Foo(ref int nData)
{
nData++;
}
static void Main(string[] args)
{
int x = 10;
Foo(ref x);
int y;
Foo(ref y); // ERROR: Uninitialized variables
}
[/sourcecode]
Let’s take a look at out keyword. Out behaves similar to ref keyword but there’s no need to initialize the object passing to function. Even the object is initialized, inside the function, we’ve to re-initialize object. We can’t exclude this step.

In C++, there’s no constraint to use the reference variable inside the function. We can omit with/ without conditional statements. But in C# if you use out keyword, you will have to initialize the object inside the calling function. If you want the same behavior of C++ reference, it’s better to use ref keyword.

Ref and out keywords are same at the compilation time but behaves different at run time. So that you can’t overload “ref” and “out” with similar function signature.

[sourcecode language='C#']
static void Foo(ref Math m){}
static void Foo(out Math m){} // ERROR: can’t overload with ref and out keyword
[/sourcecode]

params are allows to pass pass arbitrary number of parameters to this function. Params keyword has the following constraints. There should be only one params argument as function parameter and it should be appeared as the last parameter of a function(or no other parameters can be passed after a param variable)
See the same sample from MSDN

[sourcecode language='c#']
using System;
public class MyClass
{
public static void UseParams(paramsparams int[] list)
{
for (int i = 0 ; i < list.Length; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine(list[i]);
}
Console.WriteLine();
}

public static void UseParams2(params object[] list)
{
for (int i = 0 ; i < list.Length; i++)
{
Console.WriteLine(list[i]);
}
Console.WriteLine();
}

static void Main()
{
UseParams(1, 2, 3);
UseParams2(1, ‘a’, “test”);

// An array of objects can also be passed, as long as
// the array type matches the method being called.
int[] myarray = new int[3] {10,11,12};
UseParams(myarray);
}
}
[/sourcecode]