Being well on the techie curve, I went and tried to update my iPhone to the brand new 2.1 firmware...and have very almost (it's almost done fixing it now...hopefully) iBricked it.
So a word of advice to everyone...don't try to update your iphone whilst running Windows in a VMWare Workstation 6 virtual machine on Ubuntu...it may work...but it definately didn't for me...
I am now going to have to walk home with no "Short History of Nearly Everything" to listen to :-(
Every so often I'll mis-read something and it will end up being more humourous than the original, so here's today's:
In my 8am morning blurriness I read this as "McCain vows to fight change in US", which I found much funnier.
Oh wow, again a long time since my last post on here, but let's not dwell on that!
Instead lets have a quick first look at Google's new "Chrome" web browser. Many may ask why exactly is there a need for yet another web browser on the block what with Firefox increasing its market share, IE still up on top, and the Safaris and Operas doing reasonably well for themselves.
Google think that all of these browsers are doing it, not wrong, but not necessarily well. And I think I have to agree. I've been a web user for nearly a decade now, not really very long in the horn, but I do still remember when the majority of the "Internet" was actually just bulletin boards. Consequently I've used just about every web browser that's come along, starting with Netscape, Lynx, Motif all the way through to Internet Explorer and Firefox, and over the last couple of years Safari.
Now I've been pretty happy with the latest generation of web browsers, except for the inconsistencies in rendering, increasingly sluggish performance and lack of any real cross-compatibility.
Hopefully with Chrome I'll at least get some thing that addresses issue 2! IE for me runs slow as hell, Firefox is pretty much starting to chew up as much memory as it can get is grubby paws on and Safari just seems to be chugging along at its own merry pace. Chrome on the other hand seems to go like shit of the proverbial shovel. Of course my tests (load up as many tabs as Firefox would complain at) are hardly rigorous!
So that's one up for Chrome, but cross compatibility and rendering? Well on the rendering front its nice to see a sensible approach and the re-use of what looks like it could (or at least should) be come an option for a standard rendering engine, in the form of WebKit, which is already used in Apple's Safari browser.
The holy grail however for web browsers will be cross compatibility. I'd love the ability to take data from any web browser and re-use it in another one, and then port it back. Google would be in a prime position to do this, although they have already deprecated their Google Browser Sync plugin for Firefox (which kept multiple installs of FF in sync and was GREAT!). At least however it looks like there's going to be Mac and Linux Chrome versions to boot, which means in addition Opera and Firefox there's at least there's web browser that I can have a consistent experience on across my different machines. Of course the final strength should be the open-source nature of Chrome, unlike all the other browsers (with Firefox as an exception), and hopefully this will mean that all the nice OS specific features that make Safari really useful for me can get implemented too
