Joseph Piché » chrome

A Second Look at Google Chrome Application Shortcuts

Joseph Piché — Sat, 30 Jan 2010 20:17:37 +0000

In August I wrote about Application Shortcuts for Chrome and noted that this new concept had the potential of being useful since I don’t like using standard desktop clients for email due to their lack of full Gmail support (like labels and the archive). Now having taken a further look, I’m not so convinced.

Application shortcuts are created by clicking on the “Page” button and selecting “Create Application Shortcuts…”. If you select to create a shortcut on the desktop, Chrome then creates the Application Shortcut and puts it on the desktop. All this is simple enough, but what it actually does is make a shortcut to Chrome at the current page and passes the --app flag.

I invite you to try this for yourself with something like Gmail and see what you think. When launched, a Chrome window is open without the tab bar or address bar. The confusing part is that internally, it is treated like a normal Chrome process. So cookies are shared with any open tabs in a normal Chrome window. Why would I want that? If this is supposed to be a Gmail App, wouldn’t I want cookies to be separate? What if someone else needs to check their email quick and I have the App open? I get logged off in the App and their session is replaces mine.

The Chromium bug list has a feature request for this, but it hasn’t received much attention.

Google Chrome’s Application Shortcuts Now for Linux

Joseph Piché — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 02:03:12 +0000

When Chrome was first introduced, one of the neat little features was the ability to use the browser to directly launch web apps from your computer’s desktop. This feature was called “Application Shortcuts” and can be accessed from the Page menu.

At first—and for a long time after that—I didn’t see the point. For example, launching Gmail in such a way still results in launching an instance of the browser, and if you are a cookie fanatic, you’ve noticed that the app window shares its session with other launched windows.

Today decided to take a second look at Application Shortcuts when I noticed the menu option mission from Google Chrome on Ubuntu, and surprisingly discovered they might actually be useful. With the example of Gmail, there is no native desktop application for Gmail so my options are either to use a web browser or some other desktop email client like Evolution, which I hate using since it ties me down to a single computer. Running Gmail as an application through Chrome surpasses this barrier and gives me more flexibility with my web browsing.

Getting to the entire point of this post though: Application Shortcuts are now available for the Linux build of Chromium. When I noticed this feature was missing I hopped onto IRC channel #chromium and asked about it. A nice developer promptly responded saying it was added to the SVN trunk a couple days ago. Sure enough, I ran updates and there it was. So, I tried it out. It’s not the best thing in the world, but Gmail is a lot better ran as a chromium application.

JavaScript Benchmarking

Joseph Piché — Fri, 22 May 2009 01:00:21 +0000

I work with a lot of JavaScript at my job. Specifically, I use a lot of Jquery when coding web applications used internally. But because I use Google Chrome at work—on my Ubuntu laptop I use Chromium—I tend to take some things for granted. Today I ran across the Benchmark Suite that Google uses internally for making sure that Chrome’s JavaScript engine is super-fast.

So, I tried it out on my laptop under Firefox and was pretty impressed to see the following scores, since the benchmark said that 100 was a reference score and that bigger is better.

Score: 186

Richards: 137

DeltaBlue: 208

Crypto: 161

RayTrace: 132

EarleyBoyer: 220

RegExp: 150

Splay: 391

Of course then I ran it in Chromium on the exact same laptop, under equal load and got the following. Then I was truly impressed and started to wonder why Firefox’s score was so terrible.

Score: 2739

Richards: 3140

DeltaBlue: 3069

Crypto: 2285

RayTrace: 2810

EarleyBoyer: 3959

RegExp: 914

Splay: 5171

I’m not sure I even want to know how Internet Explorer does.