Tag: chrome

Nexus 7 Review

I recently purchased a 16GB Nexus 7.  My review so far:  awesome, a truly great gadget.

The plusses:

  • HD video from Netflix looks amazing. Youtube looks, well, like Youtube.
  • My Kindle books look great
  • Jellybean (the new Android Operating system) is very nice. Resizable widgets, notifications that are allowed to be longer, overall very polished.
  • It has serious hardware chops. It can run 3D games well, as well as HD video.
  • The form factor is very pleasing – it can be held with one hand
  • The screen uses Gorilla glass.  So far, it has survived a dog walking on it (pugs walk on couches, it turns out), a baby swiping at it (more on that in a moment) and still looks perfect
  • A $25.00 credit on the Google play is nice.
  • The baby (Matilda) loves the tablet. She likes a fractal program I downloaded, and a wallpaper program that lets you pick a solid color background. It’s hilarious to watch her swipe at the tablet – once she ended up on a page reviewing a local French restaurant, not sure how that happened.

Minuses:

  • Not that I care, but I could not read the free magazines when I first got them.  I deleted them, and then an hour later got a patch that basically said, make magazines work on a Nexus 7.
  • I didn’t expect to care about no 3G, but I went to a convention recently and ended up in the bar just to get WiFi since the meeting WiFi was not available.
  • When I first got the tablet (about a month ago) I could not use the home screen in landscape mode. This was annoying since it’s so nice to watch videos on. A recent patch fixed this.
  • I’m not a huge fan of not being to upgrade the SD card, which is part of the reason I picked the 16GB version of the Nexus rather than the 8GB version.
  • A few apps aren’t available on Jellybean yet – this will fix itself

New stuff after nearly two months usage:  I’m quite happy with the Nexus 7 still. I’m reading Kindle books (or Nook books more recently since the client is better), web surfing, and watching Netflix, as well as the usual Facebook/G+ and Twitter.  I had a scare with it not starting up but that turned out to be the wall outlet being funny. There are still some website out there that need to lose their Flash or proprietary video junk, but not many. (And I can use Firefox for Android with Flash installed if I really want to.)  I hardly ever use my laptop or desktop anymore.

Firefox 4, RC2 overwrites Firefox 3.6. Gee, thanks.

The Firefox betas, all 12 of them, used to nicely install alongside the production version of Firefox, version 3.6.x. When I installed Firefox 4 RC2, this is no longer the case: Firefox overwrites the old version.

So far, installing Firefox 3.6.15 to its own directory (after installing FF 4) and making a shortcut by hand seems to be working, although FF 3.6 can’t be run at the same time as FF 4: it just runs Firefox 4 again instead. Although Firefox users seem to upgrade faster than Internet Explorer users, I still have to keep an eye on Firefox 3.6 for a while. For instance, although FF 3.6 does CSS3 gradients, it does not support SVG backgrounds, which Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) does support. IE9 of course, does not support CSS3 backgrounds, but does support SVG backgrounds.

I’ve already switched my loyalties to the lightning fast Google Chrome a while ago. For a while, I was using Firefox just for Firebug, but now the Google Chrome Web Inspector is getting pretty competitive: it shows declarations it doesn’t consider valid and marks them with a little exclamation point icon, so you can see you -moz-box-shadow declarations (or even your -webkit properties where you do something silly like rgb(0,0,0,0.5) instead of rgba(0,0,0,.5). This is my new favorite mistake, by the way.

Frankly, despite some differences like the SVG versus CSS3 gradients, the whole browser area is headed in the right direction after many years of languishing in IE6 limbo, so I don’t care nearly as much whether IE9 or Firefox 4 comes out on top as I once might have. Despite the progress, there’s still going to be jobs for CSS3 and HTML wranglers: now with mobile, it makes even more sense to have someone focus entirely on the front end, even without a large team.

Speaking of which, I’m currently available to add all sorts of CSS3 and HTML5 goodness to your favorite website.

Census 2010 Data Site Has All the Latest in Fail

The 2010 data is finally starting to come out, and is available at the new website, American Factfinder, version 2.

Problems:

  1. Using Google chrome (version 9), the ability to add a geographic filter fails silently. This is incredibly annoying.
  2. Many things (including clicking on what should be normal web pages) on the website require JavaScript.  This is not fancy things like scooting data from one area of the page to another.  For some reason, this is one area where accessibility seems to be taking giant strides backwards.
  3. Once I use Firefox with JavaScript on, the filter works, and I start looking at the data. Then I receive a really irritating error message that seems to be blaming me for its random failure. This occurs several times.

So maybe I want to complain about their annoying lack of working with Google Chrome or their bogus error message.  Well, I would, except it’s a state secret who to contact about any website issues.  No webmaster email is in sight upon clicking on the tiny “Contact Us” button. After a long and fruitless search, I give up on trying to send an email.

Maybe the Census bureau folks don’t want email.  Maybe they got too much hate mail when the story broke that Census data was helpful  in rounding up Japanese Americans for placement in internment camps in World Ward II.  Whoops.  I have to say, if I were a Muslim, I wouldn’t get a real warm feeling about that whole incident and giving my information to the Census bureau.

Update: I finally found a “Feedback” button on the site. But it’s too small, and in a weird place – the top bar area where ads usually go. Feedback links should be at the bottom!

Google Chrome 7

Dammit Google, fix the text-shadow bug I mentioned in my last post. Do you guys have version number envy?  Do You want to have Chrome version number higher than Internet Explorer 9?

Why am I using Google Chrome?  It’s fast as hell.  I did a cold start test – ie, right after a reboot, and it was about 3 seconds for Chrome 6, 14 seconds for Firefox in safe mode. I used the highly scientific one-one-thousand method of timing).  Safe mode means no extensions.  I also tried turning off the automatic update checks, but that didn’t help either. Chrome is also very fast and robust when you ask it do something like open 20 tabs all at once.

However, having said that, I am still using Google chrome as my default browser at home and at work.  I still use Firefox for web development (gotta have my Firebug). What can I say? Apparently, the extra 11 seconds Firefox takes to start up is in loading the text-shadow rendering.

And last, and certainly not least, it’s the browser that has the most CSS3 and HTML5 goodies to play with that isn’t from Apple.