Chrome

Something I've long been meaning to benchmark, but never really got around to, is benchmarking the amount of time it takes on a Raspberry Pi to open a browser, load a page, and quit.

This is a relatively decent thing to benchmark, compared to other raw performance metrics, because it's something that probably 99% of Raspberry Pi users who use it with a GUI will do, with some frequency (well, probably loading more than one page before quitting, but still...).

So I asked on Twitter:

So... if I want to measure how long it takes to:

1 Open Chrome/Chromium
2 Load a web page

And I want to do this in Linux (Debian), and have an objective measure of that time (until the page finishes loading)... is there any way to do that?

CLI opens then sits until you quit.

Recently, I was upgrading the infrastructure for Hosted Apache Solr, and as part of the upgrade, I jumped from Nginx 1.8.x to 1.10.x, which includes HTTP/2 support. I had previously used SPDY support in my server configuration to help the site run better/faster on modern browsers with SPDY support:

After the server upgrades, I was getting the following error on Nginx restarts:

So I switched the configuration to use http2 instead of spdy on the listen line, and restarted nginx.

Everything worked great in Safari and FireFox, but when I tried loading the page in Chrome, I was greeted with the following error:

Kerberos authentication allows your computer to log into certain services automatically without you having to enter (and re-enter) your password (it's a SSO—single sign-on—service). Kerberos v5 is baked into Windows and Internet Explorer and works great with many LDAP-enabled services (for example, Drupal's LDAP module allows includes a submodule for SSO support).

Kerberos is built into Mac OS X as well, but isn't as simple to use and configure with Chrome and FireFox as it is with Explorer on a Windows workstation. You need to do two things before you can use Kerberos for authentication in Chrome/FireFox:

Update (7/20/14): You can finally disable the notifications icon by selecting "Hide Notifications Icon" from the Chrome menu:

Original post below.

Today, I received a mysterious notification from one of my Chrome extensions that popped up under a generic alarm bell icon in my Mac OS X menu bar:

No thanks. I have Notification Center (built into Mac OS X), and if I wanted to see spammy notifications from Chrome extensions, I would enable them there. I know I can disable individual (or all) extensions from this Chrome Notification Center, but that doesn't make the icon go away. Nor does the standard trick of holding down the command key and dragging the icon off the menu bar.

Google lit up the hornet's nest yesterday when they announced that they were dropping built-in support of H.264 for their own 'open' WebM and OGG video formats.

I reconfigured Xmarks on all my computers (to sync all my bookmarks between FireFox, Safari and Chrome), and I'm back to using Safari full-time, with FireFox as my main backup. (FF 4.0 can't come soon enough).

It was good knowing ye, Chrome. I actually had my sights set on using Chrome indefinitely until yesterday.

For some users, being able to tab through all clickable elements on a page is a blessing. For most, though, it's a curse (at least, in my experience). The default behavior of a browser should be to allow users to tab through form elements only (textfields, textareas, search forms, submit buttons, etc.).

For some time now, Google Chrome has only allowed users to tab through every. Single. Element. on the entire page. Luckily, there's a new setting that popped up in the 'Under the Hood' settings recently that allows a user to turn off this insane behavior.

In Chrome, select Preferences, then click on 'Under the Hood.' Go down to 'Web Content' and uncheck the checkbox next to "Pressing Tab on a webpage highlights links, as well as form fields."

Voila! Problem solved - now I can substitute Chrome for Safari much more readily. That and being able to read PDFs in-browser...

Chrome was great. It was Safari, with a little more speed, better tabs, and a cool status bar that would only show when it needed to.

But I'm switching back, for the following reasons:

I've been using Chrome as my primary browser for about three weeks now, and two of the most essential extensions I've found are listed below. I'm still not 100% sold on Chrome, especially because of privacy concerns (do I really want all of my digital life stored on Google and accessed through Google?), but it's fast, and it's almost less buggy than Safari.

• RSS Subscription Extension
• Web Developer (for Chrome)