About Time

Per The Verge:

You can download Chrome for Linux, and you can download Chrome for Arm devices — but if you’ve got a computer running Linux on Arm, not so much! Now, Google says it’s finally bringing Chrome to ARM64 Linux machines in Q2 2026, following Chrome for Arm Macs in 2020 and Chrome for Windows on Arm in 2024.

I'm not going to try to sell you on Chrome.

I happen to prefer Chromium -- which Chrome, Microsoft Edge, Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi are (or in some versions have been) based on.

Chromium is more naturally private (it doesn't send analytics data to Google), and it's open source for those who want to customize.

On the other hand, Chromium can be a little more work -- it doesn't come with some media codecs, etc. pre-configured and the updates are manual rather than automatic.

There are also, I understand, some browser extensions that demand Chrome rather than Chromium to work, but the reverse is also true -- Chrome does the "walled-garden" thing to keep you from running extensions Google hasn't approved.

The reason I say "about time" is a market thing. Low-end Arm Linux may not be a huge market segment, but its occupants are people who tend to throw money at offerings within the segment. They're always buying special add-ons, accessories, etc. that will work with their machines where generic stuff from Best Buy might not. Why would Google leave money on the table by making it harder to identify and reach those users more directly through its proprietary browser?

I guess there are counter-arguments to be made. Is someone whose "daily driver" PC is a Raspberry Pi really that likely to want Chrome? In this day and age, running a low-end Linux PC is kind of an attitude indicator, and that attitude problably correlates strongly with anti-Google sentiments. Those machines, in addition to Chromium, can also run Brave, Vivaldi, Firefox, etc. So maybe it really is an afterthought kind of thing.

Irony

In the sense of "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs":

Firefox seems to run Google's Gmail better -- much better, in fact -- than Google's own browser, Chrome. At least in Linux.

The site loads faster. When you click something, whatever is supposed to happen happens faster. When you choose to "send from" a secondary email address and hit BCC, the bug that just goes back to address selection, requiring you to do it again, doesn't seem to exist. And when you paste a metric shit ton of addresses into the BCC field, it takes single-digit, rather than double-digit, seconds to process.

The experimental change from Chrome to Firefox is looking more and more like a permanent thing. I did have to figure out how to create the visible tab separators that Mozilla, for some insane reason, got rid of (that involved creating and populating a CSS file), but for the most part things are going swimmingly.

I'll know for sure after Monday morning, when I'll publish the first daily email edition of RRND since maybe 2008, that hasn't involved Chrome. The only thing Chrome had that I would have missed vis a vis my daily work requirements was the ability to use the Caret text editor Chrome app ... and Google, in its wisdom, recently decided to not allow those apps to work in Linux, meaning I'd already changed over to Geany anyway.

Another "New Gmail" Bug?

Sometimes a new user interface grows on me over time -- at first I think it's ugly and dysfunctional, but later I admit that it's actually more intuitive and has improved my user experience.

So far, no signs of that happening with "New Gmail." It's still ugly, and new annoyances continue to pop up. Lately (only lately, which is why I think it's linked to "New Gmail"), when I start to type in an email address or contact list name for which there are quite a few possible options, "New Gmail" freezes. About half the time it regains its footing after a few seconds. The other half of the time, it never does and I eventually get one of those Chrome browser messages asking me if I want to kill the non-responsive page.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it" can be taken too far -- new stuff comes along that users just don't want to do without, etc. -- but in my opinion the previous version of Gmail wasn't broken in any respect. It worked great. It looked great. "New Gmail" is ugly and doesn't work right. Why, Google?

On the plus side, the Chrome browser now lets the user set to automatically invoke Gmail instead of defaulting to a desktop email client when clicking an email link on the web. That's nice!

Huzzah!

My Mac's seemed a little sluggish lately, so tonight I purchased MacPaw's CleanMyMac (not an affiliate link, and this is not a sponsored post!) and ran it through its paces. Sudden and dramatic performance improvement, and a bonus:

After running CleanMyMac's normal 'cleaning" routine, I also used it to uninstall some applications, and I thought "hey, why not see if uninstalling and reinstalling Chrome fixes it?"

It did. Apparently I had missed a preferences file or library file or something in my manual uninstall/reinstall attempts, and this got it.

I've got my NewsSquares (among other things) back!

So: I definitely recommend CleanMyMac. Even absent the miraculous restoration of my preferred browser, it was well worth the eminently reasonable price (use coupon code "mwe12" for a 25% discount, while it lasts). Some annoying pauses have completely disappeared.

Adventures in Browser Organization: Symbaloo

Since my forcible repatriation from Chrome to Firefox (I've tried everything, including multiple nukings/reinstallations, and Chrome just won't run correctly any more), I've been looking for a replacement for NewsSquares, the one Chrome extension which had most revolutionized my daily browsing routine.

I haven't found anything quite as useful yet, but this LifeHacker article on useful start pages by Whitson Gordon turned me on to Symbaloo.

No, Symbaloo doesn't do everything that NewsSquares does (integrate with Google Reader, let me preview articles and keep track of read/unread stuff, etc.). Not even close. But it does at least let me organize my "daily routine" URLs into pretty clickable squares that open in new tabs. It also has some nice built-in news tracking features. Both of those things are big time-savers in my 100+ site daily grind.

Symbaloo is also web-based and browser-independent, so I don't lose it if I switch to Safari, Camino, Opera, or even eventually back to Chrome. That's obviously a major plus.

Here's hoping that Symbaloo steps up its game and adds NewsSquares-like features, or that Rocket-in-Bottle or some eager beaver clones NewsSquares as a Firefox add-on, or better yet a web-based, browser-independent hangamajigger.

Anyone Having Problems with Chrome?

OK, I gave the SOPA blackout four hours. Now I need to be back in communication with my friends.

Is anyone else suddenly having problems with the Google Chrome browser?

I'm running Chrome 16.0.912.75 on MacOS 10.5.x.

Or rather I'm not running it, because suddenly it doesn't want to run.

As soon as I try to do anything (enter text in a form, for example, or clear the cache -- it did let me disable my various and sundry extensions, of which I assumed one might be the problem), it becomes unresponsive and stays that way until I force quit it.

This happened suddenly, mid-stream in using the browser. I thought an extension I installed last night (Weatherbug) might be the culprit, but 86ing changed nothing.

No other applications are acting this way, nor do various diagnostics reveal anything wrong with the machine (early model Mac Mini, Core Duo/2Gb RAM).

I do not want to return to Firefox permanently.

Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?

Update: I've disabled all extenstions, removed Chrome, reinstalled it from the Google site, deleted temp/cache files, etc. ... it's still not working.  To me, that means it's either something defective in Chrome (trying to find out when it auto-updated, possibly with a bug, right now) or something wrong with my machine. No other applications seem to be misbehaving, so that narrows it down to Chrome itself, IMO. So, I am resigned to Firefox, at least temporarily (I may revisit Safari and Camino and Opera ... but damn ... my Chrome setup was getting so comfortably lived in).

Four Chrome Tools for Bloggers

Image via WikipediaI write this post advisedly, knowing that each blogger has a different style, different needs, and different tolerance for different gizmos. Over the years I've test-driven various apps and add-ons, and frankly most of them are more trouble than they're worth. Here are four -- formatted, not necessarily exclusively, as Chrome extensions or apps -- that I'm finding useful now that I do most of my web work in Chrome.

Zemanta


Third party blog editors are usually a pain in the keister. I've tried editors like ScribeFire and always end up abandoning them, not least because I use customized fields, etc. in WordPress over at Rational Review News Digest.  Zemanta isn't an editor, precisely. It's an add-on that (relatively unobtrusively) improves your default blog post editor (in Blogger and Wordpress, and perhaps others) with several useful tools -- related images, complete with usage/license information, related stories from around the web or from a database of sources you can specify yourself, and so  forth. It's not just for Chrome -- it works with your browser of choice.

My only complaint with Zemanta is that it requires you to use the WYSIWYG editing mode, and I prefer to just hand-code my HTML as I go. Which is why this is the first blog post that I'm doing completely in Zemanta. It takes some getting used to. But it's worth it. I think.

After The Deadline


From the folks at Automattic (the guys who brought us Wordpress!), After the Deadline is an extensive spelling, grammar and composition checker. Invoke it with a (user-configurable) keyboard macro and it finds and highlights not only spelling mistakes but double negatives, passive voice and other writing no-nos that you may or may not want to correct. I don't always take its advice, but I'm always glad to have it. Once again, not Chrome-only, but that's where I use it.

Word and Character Count


Bhagwad Jal Park wrote Word and Character Count -- his first Chrome extension -- specifically so that he could give up Firefox and move to Chrome. And I'm very glad he did! That cool little "W" sitting next to my address bar saves me a trip to wordcounttool.com, and a bunch of of copying and pasting, whenever I'm editing something to length (C4SS op-eds, for example). Indispensable.

NewsSquares


It's still in beta, but Rocket-in-Bottle's NewsSquares is already changing the way I keep up with news and commentary sources for fun and profit -- at RRND, here at KN@PPSTER, and just in general.

Instead of folders full of bookmarks to open in tabs, I've got a screen (launched as a Chrome app) full of little squares, one per site I need to keep up with. Each square has a number representing the unread articles since my last visit. Click on the square and the article titles scroll across the bottom of my screen so that I can click'em, check'em out in summary, and launch the ones that bear further inspection in new tabs.

It isn't perfect -- some sites don't play well with it, presumably due to its reliance on RSS and integration with Google Reader -- but it's definitely a time-saver. I get to spend more time reading and less time finding things to read.