Episode: 178
Title: HPR0178: Google Chrome
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0178/hpr0178.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:58:13

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Welcome to another episode of HPR, I'm your host Enigma and today I will be talking about
Google Chrome.
Google Chrome is Google's first attempt at a desktop web browser and it was released
yesterday.
So since there was about six slash dot articles, I figured I'd talk about it since people
seem to be talking about it over the interwebs.
So the first thing I did was I looked for a Linux version and unfortunately they don't
have one released yet.
So my follow back plan, I boot up my little virtual machine on my box running VMware and
I install it to one of my XP VMs.
Now mind you, this VM has almost two giga memory allocated to it.
So your mileage may vary on slower machines, however I have talked to a few people that said
it has very similar performances on slower machines.
It does use WebKit, an outdated version of WebKit that has a vulnerability, mind you,
it should perform pretty well on some modest hardware.
So once I got it installed, it looks very strikingly like IE7, even down to the icons.
So I was just fiddling around with it and was going through their bullet points on
what features it offered.
And to be quite honest, the features aren't anything new.
I mean, most of them like tab browsing has been around since Firefox was an infant and
there really wasn't anything that stood out to me as something that I really needed.
One thing of note, I do have a traffic capture of my entire VM session.
So I'm going to go back through it and look, but I could have sworn I noticed some traffic
going back to the Google site.
Now this might have been just looking for updates, but I wanted to look at it a little
more.
I heard from a few sources that it does report back some information.
I didn't get into depth on what information is set back to Google, but it does report
back something at least.
So I wanted to look at that a lot more.
All in all, it's pretty quick.
It's not blow, it doesn't blow Firefox right out of the water.
I mean, it's comparable to Firefox, maybe a little bit faster.
It really doesn't have any features that are mind blowing like, I got to have this as
a switch.
So now I'm going to go through some of the features of Google Chrome.
One of the ones that I kind of did like, but again, it wasn't really anything special
is the one box for everything, what they call it.
And basically this means your web history, your address bar, and a Google like search
are all in your address bar at the top.
And it gives you suggestions on some of the sites.
If you type binref.com, it will actually finish the line for you if you do like a Google
search, it gives you an option to do a Google search on that line.
So it combines a search box, basically it combines the Google plug-in with the address
bar.
The new tabs page, one thing I did like about it is it gives you the most recently or most
recent sites or most visited sites.
This can be good or bad if you search a lot of porn and you don't want your wife to
know.
It could be a bad thing.
If you want to get to a site that you visit like slash.
or binref.com or hackupublicradio.org, quickly can be kind of handy.
Again, nothing mind blowing.
Application shortcuts, this one, this basically adds a shortcut to your desktop for other
Google apps, calendar, I don't use any of this, so whichever Google application you may
or may not use, you can make an application shortcut for it.
The next feature I wanted to talk about would be the dynamic tabs.
Dynamic tabs meaning that you have multiple tabs across the top of your browser and one
neat thing is you can drag those tabs out to a new window quite easily.
The next feature I wanted to talk about is incognito mode.
Incognito mode just means that the site that you're going to isn't added to the history,
and since the browser makes it so easy to search history, it would be very easy for your
significant other to find out exactly whatever sites you've been to, not that I can don't
go into sites that would get you in trouble, such as, you know, I'll use my porn example
again, but this allows you to go to any site you want and it not be added to your history.
The next feature I wanted to talk about is instant bookmarking.
You can just right click on the little star icon, kind of like an i7, and it creates
a bookmark for you.
Import settings, you can import settings from i.e. or Firefox, nothing special there.
The simpler downloads was kind of cool, a Firefox plugin will do it as well.
I don't know that it's off the top of my head, I don't know what name of the plugin is,
it basically adds a little bar at the bottom of your browser that when you click on something
to download, it adds it to that bar and it shows you the progress, and you can also click
on the link and it will take you to whatever you've downloaded and open it up for you.
So if you've downloaded an episode of HPR, you can click on the episode and it will start
playing it in whatever you have associated with that program.
So I was testing it and downloaded an HPR episode and it opened with VLC because that's
what I had the software or what the MP3 was attached to.
So that's pretty much it on the features.
I'm going to put my tinful hat on for a second and talk about some of the privacy issues
that have surrounded this.
As I said before, I'm doing webcatch, capture on all the traffic sent in and out of this
virtual machine that I'm running Chrome on.
And once I get through that, I'll know a little more on what actually was sent back to
Google, but you know, humor me for a minute and just consider if you're using this browser
in your everyday life and you know, you go to a site that you don't want Google to know
about.
I don't know.
I just, from the articles I've seen and the Yula that I read earlier today, they've
actually changed the Yula since the morning, which I haven't read the new Yula.
And I installed it.
I briefly browse through it, but I didn't actually sit down and read line by line.
But some of the articles that I've seen in regards to privacy concerns with Chrome,
I just have concerns with, you know, if we put all our eggs in one basket and say, you
know, Google isn't going to be our desktop web browser of choice.
How much information is that putting into Google's hands and granted it is an open source
application and we can, you know, go in and see the code.
But why bother go through, you know, however many lines of code it is, to strip out all
the questionable, you know, code that Google may have or may not have in there.
I haven't seen the source code.
When you can just use Firefox and not really, not be as concerned with the source code
since Firefox has been around for quite a while and I'm sure there's plenty of people
that have looked at that code.
So my whole, you know, stance on the Google Chrome issue is, yes, it's cool and yes,
I'd like to see where it goes, but why bother at this point?
Let them fix some of the bugs, let them fix the, you know, the outdated version of Web
Kit that they're running it on and just see what happens.
And with that said, I think this is going to be it for me today, a couple of announcements
before I go, guys.
One, I know I've said this before, but I will say it again and I'll probably say it on
every episode that I've, that I'm on is thanks to all the hosts that, you know, do all
the work.
I basically do nothing around here, I, I post a show every day and my hosts, you know,
the 30 or so guys that, you know, do all the work, pretty much take it from there with
great content that we've, you know, been doing since January and, you know, are up to
179 episodes now, 178, whatever.
And I haven't heard a bad episode yet.
So thank you again and one bit of news from my front is I've been recently asked by
Osprey Networks to air the show at 3pm on their internet radio station.
So as of I think last week, we are on at 3pm every day and we've got, I think, an hour
or two times slot to air our shows.
So hopefully that'll bring, you know, a lot more listeners to us and grow this community
even, you know, bigger than it is.
And one of these days I'll get on here and talk about stats and, you know, how much traffic
we do drive.
I don't have those numbers in front of me or I do it today, but we get a lot of hits.
We do fairly well.
And hopefully we can keep those numbers the same and keep them growing.
Another thing for you, social networking people, and yes, call me a media whore now.
But we do have a Twitter for HPR and it's twitter.com slash HPR and you can find out what
I'm working on, you know, what new shows I post, what the show topic is of the day, things
like that on my Twitter.
So you can find it there and call me a social networking whore, media whore, whatever.
You'd like, call me names, send me email, things like that.
The email address is admin at hackapublicradio.org or you can send your feedback to feedback
at hackapublicradio.org.
Thanks and you guys have a great day.
Thank you for listening to hackapublicradio, HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over
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