internet explorer
Google Chrome Crashes and Burns
While I have had my issues with Google on a few occassions I was optimistic to try out Google Chrome as I mentioned yesterday. I waited till about noon and fired up VMWare Fusion at work on my MacBook Pro and installed Chrome without issue on Windows XP. It seemed to work ok, although the initial reviewson Chrome left much to be desired, and at least left Firefox the speed king. I thought I would give it a shot when I got home from work and the gym so I fired up my trusty Dell desktop and Windows Vista and installed it. The machine itself is about a year and a half old with a Duo 2 processor and 2 gigs of RAM on the 32 bit version of Vista. After installation I’m immediately greeted with:
Wow that’s not good. What happened? I read Matt Cutt’s blog entry today, which in part touted how stable it was, and not full of bugs. Part of his self Q&A mentioned:
Q: This is going to be some buggy, crashing piece of beta download, isn’t it?
A: No, I don’t really think so. Google determined one million pages that users are likely to surf to. Then a piece of software known as “ChromeBot” ran a torture test by loading those one million pages that we crawled for every new build of Google Chrome. This is a smart testing methodology because this real-world torture test quickly highlighted which bugs were most important to fix and helped determine priorities for the most important bugs. So Google Chrome has already been automatically “fuzz tested” on tons of web pages. Google Chrome is very robust against anything the web can throw at it. If I had to guess where the browser might crash, it would be because we haven’t seen Google Chrome run across all the weird, wild hardware that runs Windows. But I’ve been using Google Chrome for months with essentially no crashes; it’s been rock-solid for me.
Now I wasn’t expecting a rock solid piece of software, but at least the ability to launch the browser, and navigate to a website I thought was within reach. I understand that testing one million pages is quite a feat, but ensuring that the application can be installed on a run of the mill Dell computer with Vista might be helpful as well. Clicking “Ok’ on the error message just left me with the following:
I appreciate the humor that Google put on the sad face, but all it did was leave me frustrated. Rebooting didn’t solve the problem, either did un-installing and reinstalling. After I sent a message to Google letting them know about the problem I haven’t found much about the problem online so far. So here I sit eager to play around with Google’s first attempt at a web browser, but unable to do so because of error messages and sad faces that leave me reminisicent of the days of the sad Mac icon:
Has anyone else had any issues with Google Chrome, either during installation or while utilizing the browser? Update: This issue has been somewhat resolved and you can read about it here.
Google Chrome
Today Google announced that their new web browser, ‘Chrome’ will be available for download tomorrow. The download location is available at this location. Surprisingly enough Mozilla says that they are not concerned, but when Google funds 90% of your company I guess you have to say that. What is left to be determined is how this will play into market share. Currently in the web analytics profiles that I administrate Internet Explorer is dominant, and Firefox only plays a minor role. For those of you who have more tech savvy sites obviously you’ll see Firefox higher. Here at Sonicko Firefox had a 57% share of browsers for the month of August, far higher than the normal 8-12% that most sites see. If anyone has any initial reviews of Chrome please feel free to post them.
