Chad’s News

Here at Chad’s News we have a love-love relationship with Firefox, but it has problems with the script-heavy Facebook site. So I use Google Chrome, with its faster JavaScript processing and minimal overhead, just for Facebook. And it makes a difference.

Google has just released a new version of Chrome. It has a few enhancements, about 300 bug fixes, and even faster script processing. If you haven’t already tried Chrome, this may be the time to test it out. I personally find it to be too minimalistic and wish it had some sort of ad blocking feature, but Chrome has benefits that you won’t find in Internet Explorer or Firefox.

Link: http://chrome.blogspot.com/…

(1) In a recent security contest, Chrome was the only browser left standing, and (2) it finally has support for user scripts (not as good as extensions, but it’s progress…). Oh yes, and the real reasons are because it’s lean and fast and it takes advantage of multiple CPUs.

Link #1: http://arstechnica.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Link #2: http://lifehacker.com/…

When Google released Chrome into an already saturated browser market, I seriously questioned their decision. Turns out one of the reasons was to speed up JavaScript, the language behind many of today’s most popular websites. By making their JavaScript engine so much faster, Google essentially forced other browser companies to follow suit.

Link: http://www.techradar.com/…
(via Slashdot)

Google Street View is an extension of Google Maps with pictures taken from the street. Here, for example, is my address. The service has raised privacy concerns, and the linked article explains how to get pictures removed.

Link: http://komando.com/…

Back on Monday, September 8th (yes, the Chad’s News submission queue is getting a bit long) United Airlines stock lost 75% of its value, or $1.14 billion, and its trading was temporarily halted. It all turned out to be a misunderstanding, and by the end of the day the stock had mostly rebounded to its previous price. There’s been a lot of finger-pointing and inconsistent announcements, but here’s the best take on what happened:

1. Nobody is sure why, but the South Florida Sun Sentinel’s website republished a six-year old Chicago Tribune story about United’s 2002 bankruptcy filing. The article showed up in the current news section with only the current date (Sep. 7th) on the page.
2. The automated Google web crawler picked up the story and, because of the incorrect date, classified it as current news.
3. A financial industry worker did a Google search on bankruptcies and encountered the outdated story. Despite claims that information in the article “would clearly lead a reader to the conclusion that it was related to events in 2002,” this worker distributed an alert through the Bloomberg News Service.
4. Traders received the alert and cried “Sell! Sell! Sell!”

So the headline of this article isn’t completely accurate, but in the confusion following the event Google was one of the parties being blamed.

Link: http://blog.wired.com/…
(via The Consumerist)

Google has spent months working with Microsoft and modifying its latest version of Gmail to work with Internet Explorer 6. Apparently the Gmail code was too “modern” for the older browser to handle well. Does anyone else think this is hilarious?

Link: http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/…
(via Lifehacker)

Ten days ago Google released a new browser named Chrome. Despite the fact that the browser market is saturated, Chrome has already gained a market share of about 0.80%. One of Chrome’s best features is its ability to take advantage of multiple processors/cores, thus boosting its performance on multi-processor systems.

Thanks to Josh for this topic.

Link: http://www.google.com/…

This is interesting. Apparently cows have a tendency to align themselves with magnetic North, either facing it or facing 180° away from it. The study shows the power of Google Earth.

Link #1: http://www.newscientist.com/…

Link #2: http://www.latimes.com/…

Update: Researchers have determined that the cows are definitely aligning with the magnetic field (versus pointing North or South).

The linked article has some statistics on just how much information is collected by Yahoo!, Google, etc on our browsing habits. Very sobering. I run all of my email through Google, which means I can’t complain if they use it to compile statistics.

Link: http://arstechnica.com/…

Tired of maintaining the mail server for your custom domain? Google Apps can manage it for you, with all the benefits of Google’s uptime and reliability. There’s a free version as well as a fee-based premier plan.

Link: http://dmiessler.com/…
(via digg)

Google has a toll-free 800 number that can replace your phone company’s (expensive) 411 service, and it may also turn your Yellow Pages into just so much paper. The number is 1-800-GOOG-411, and the video on the linked web site has more details. Note that it does not look up residential listings, only businesses.

Thanks to Josh for this idea.

Link: http://www.google.com/…

This guy wanted to determine if dynamic web content (such as that generated by javascript) would show up in Google search results. He created a web site with two nonsense words in static HTML, two in dynamic javascript, and two in another form of javascript. Only the static words were indexed by Google. So if you have a web site that relies on dynamic content, don’t expect it to show up in search engines. This does not apply to PHP-generated content, because PHP runs on the server—unlike javascript which runs on the client.

The Googlebot ignores both javascript and cookies, which has been known to cause problems with poorly designed web sites.

Link: http://www.brainhandles.com/…
(via Slashdot)