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148 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
148 lines
9.0 KiB
Plaintext
Episode: 178
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Title: HPR0178: Google Chrome
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Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr0178/hpr0178.mp3
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Transcribed: 2025-10-07 12:58:13
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---
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2
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Welcome to another episode of HPR, I'm your host Enigma and today I will be talking about
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Google Chrome.
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Google Chrome is Google's first attempt at a desktop web browser and it was released
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yesterday.
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So since there was about six slash dot articles, I figured I'd talk about it since people
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seem to be talking about it over the interwebs.
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So the first thing I did was I looked for a Linux version and unfortunately they don't
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have one released yet.
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So my follow back plan, I boot up my little virtual machine on my box running VMware and
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I install it to one of my XP VMs.
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Now mind you, this VM has almost two giga memory allocated to it.
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So your mileage may vary on slower machines, however I have talked to a few people that said
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it has very similar performances on slower machines.
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It does use WebKit, an outdated version of WebKit that has a vulnerability, mind you,
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it should perform pretty well on some modest hardware.
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So once I got it installed, it looks very strikingly like IE7, even down to the icons.
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So I was just fiddling around with it and was going through their bullet points on
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what features it offered.
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And to be quite honest, the features aren't anything new.
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I mean, most of them like tab browsing has been around since Firefox was an infant and
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there really wasn't anything that stood out to me as something that I really needed.
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One thing of note, I do have a traffic capture of my entire VM session.
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So I'm going to go back through it and look, but I could have sworn I noticed some traffic
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going back to the Google site.
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Now this might have been just looking for updates, but I wanted to look at it a little
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more.
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I heard from a few sources that it does report back some information.
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I didn't get into depth on what information is set back to Google, but it does report
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back something at least.
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So I wanted to look at that a lot more.
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All in all, it's pretty quick.
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It's not blow, it doesn't blow Firefox right out of the water.
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I mean, it's comparable to Firefox, maybe a little bit faster.
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It really doesn't have any features that are mind blowing like, I got to have this as
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a switch.
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So now I'm going to go through some of the features of Google Chrome.
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One of the ones that I kind of did like, but again, it wasn't really anything special
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is the one box for everything, what they call it.
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And basically this means your web history, your address bar, and a Google like search
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are all in your address bar at the top.
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And it gives you suggestions on some of the sites.
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If you type binref.com, it will actually finish the line for you if you do like a Google
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search, it gives you an option to do a Google search on that line.
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So it combines a search box, basically it combines the Google plug-in with the address
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bar.
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The new tabs page, one thing I did like about it is it gives you the most recently or most
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recent sites or most visited sites.
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This can be good or bad if you search a lot of porn and you don't want your wife to
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know.
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It could be a bad thing.
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If you want to get to a site that you visit like slash.
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or binref.com or hackupublicradio.org, quickly can be kind of handy.
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Again, nothing mind blowing.
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Application shortcuts, this one, this basically adds a shortcut to your desktop for other
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Google apps, calendar, I don't use any of this, so whichever Google application you may
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or may not use, you can make an application shortcut for it.
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The next feature I wanted to talk about would be the dynamic tabs.
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Dynamic tabs meaning that you have multiple tabs across the top of your browser and one
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neat thing is you can drag those tabs out to a new window quite easily.
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The next feature I wanted to talk about is incognito mode.
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Incognito mode just means that the site that you're going to isn't added to the history,
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and since the browser makes it so easy to search history, it would be very easy for your
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significant other to find out exactly whatever sites you've been to, not that I can don't
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go into sites that would get you in trouble, such as, you know, I'll use my porn example
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again, but this allows you to go to any site you want and it not be added to your history.
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The next feature I wanted to talk about is instant bookmarking.
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You can just right click on the little star icon, kind of like an i7, and it creates
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a bookmark for you.
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Import settings, you can import settings from i.e. or Firefox, nothing special there.
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The simpler downloads was kind of cool, a Firefox plugin will do it as well.
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I don't know that it's off the top of my head, I don't know what name of the plugin is,
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it basically adds a little bar at the bottom of your browser that when you click on something
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to download, it adds it to that bar and it shows you the progress, and you can also click
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on the link and it will take you to whatever you've downloaded and open it up for you.
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So if you've downloaded an episode of HPR, you can click on the episode and it will start
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playing it in whatever you have associated with that program.
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So I was testing it and downloaded an HPR episode and it opened with VLC because that's
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what I had the software or what the MP3 was attached to.
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So that's pretty much it on the features.
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I'm going to put my tinful hat on for a second and talk about some of the privacy issues
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that have surrounded this.
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As I said before, I'm doing webcatch, capture on all the traffic sent in and out of this
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virtual machine that I'm running Chrome on.
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And once I get through that, I'll know a little more on what actually was sent back to
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Google, but you know, humor me for a minute and just consider if you're using this browser
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in your everyday life and you know, you go to a site that you don't want Google to know
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about.
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I don't know.
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I just, from the articles I've seen and the Yula that I read earlier today, they've
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actually changed the Yula since the morning, which I haven't read the new Yula.
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And I installed it.
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I briefly browse through it, but I didn't actually sit down and read line by line.
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But some of the articles that I've seen in regards to privacy concerns with Chrome,
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I just have concerns with, you know, if we put all our eggs in one basket and say, you
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know, Google isn't going to be our desktop web browser of choice.
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How much information is that putting into Google's hands and granted it is an open source
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application and we can, you know, go in and see the code.
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But why bother go through, you know, however many lines of code it is, to strip out all
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the questionable, you know, code that Google may have or may not have in there.
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I haven't seen the source code.
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When you can just use Firefox and not really, not be as concerned with the source code
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since Firefox has been around for quite a while and I'm sure there's plenty of people
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that have looked at that code.
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So my whole, you know, stance on the Google Chrome issue is, yes, it's cool and yes,
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I'd like to see where it goes, but why bother at this point?
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Let them fix some of the bugs, let them fix the, you know, the outdated version of Web
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Kit that they're running it on and just see what happens.
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And with that said, I think this is going to be it for me today, a couple of announcements
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before I go, guys.
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One, I know I've said this before, but I will say it again and I'll probably say it on
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every episode that I've, that I'm on is thanks to all the hosts that, you know, do all
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the work.
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I basically do nothing around here, I, I post a show every day and my hosts, you know,
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the 30 or so guys that, you know, do all the work, pretty much take it from there with
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great content that we've, you know, been doing since January and, you know, are up to
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179 episodes now, 178, whatever.
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And I haven't heard a bad episode yet.
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So thank you again and one bit of news from my front is I've been recently asked by
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Osprey Networks to air the show at 3pm on their internet radio station.
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So as of I think last week, we are on at 3pm every day and we've got, I think, an hour
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or two times slot to air our shows.
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So hopefully that'll bring, you know, a lot more listeners to us and grow this community
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even, you know, bigger than it is.
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And one of these days I'll get on here and talk about stats and, you know, how much traffic
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we do drive.
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I don't have those numbers in front of me or I do it today, but we get a lot of hits.
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We do fairly well.
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And hopefully we can keep those numbers the same and keep them growing.
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Another thing for you, social networking people, and yes, call me a media whore now.
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But we do have a Twitter for HPR and it's twitter.com slash HPR and you can find out what
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I'm working on, you know, what new shows I post, what the show topic is of the day, things
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like that on my Twitter.
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So you can find it there and call me a social networking whore, media whore, whatever.
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You'd like, call me names, send me email, things like that.
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The email address is admin at hackapublicradio.org or you can send your feedback to feedback
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at hackapublicradio.org.
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Thanks and you guys have a great day.
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Thank you for listening to hackapublicradio, HPR is sponsored by Carol.net, so head on over
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to C-A-R-O dot E-C for all of us in need.
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