Google released their first version of Chrome this afternoon and while I am quite disappointed to see only a PC version I can certainly understand it given the vast differences in market share.

Having said that I did fire up my handy dandy virtual machine in order to download and take Chrome for a spin. The first place I went was the Motorola USA Phone Browse page because I wrote most of the JavaScript for it and I wanted to see how it would perform in the version of WebKit Chrome uses. Much to my dismay the display of the page is horribly wrong and it looked like some errors were generated. This made me sad so I rapidly vacated the area and started looking at some other oft-used pages of mine¹ just to get a general feel for how things were operating. Everything felt quite zippy on those two sites but that is really to be expected.² So then I decided to check out Processed Tower Defense which is a pretty intense JavaScript application and it ran surprisingly well especially considering I’m doing this in a virtual machine with limited memory resources allocated to it.³ To be honest though I expected the JavaScript execution speed to be impressive, the thing I’m really curious about is how the garbage collection performs compared to other browsers.

The thing I found particularly impressive though was how useful the ‘omnibox’ was, I daresay it was quite a bit more awesome than Firefox 3’s ‘awesome bar’. I’ll go ahead and say a great deal of this is because I really dislike the ‘awesome bar’, I think it falls far short of it’s lofty goals whereas Chrome’s ‘omnibox’ delivers. A big part of the reason I feel the omnibox delivers while the awesome bar falls short is something mentioned in the comic on page 20. Essentially you don’t have to hit the down arrow to get what auto-completion is suggesting because it does it inline and you will only go to URLs you have explicitly typed before.

The feature John Resig dubbed ‘the killer feature’ is something I believe is pretty awesome but it will take a while for the impact John foresees to come to fruition. After all of the six tabs I have open in Chrome right now⁴ Gmail is consuming by far the most resources and Google is often hailed for it’s lightweight applications.

In conclusion, I actually like Chrome in a virtualized environment better than Firefox 3 which is running natively which I think says a fair bit. Of course I’ve also been using Camino over Firefox 3 so perhaps it is just Firefox 3 doesn’t really do it for me.

I can’t help but jump on the band wagon and be excited about the new browser announced by Google because from the ‘viral’ comic they released and has been subsequently scanned in and posted on the web. The reason the new browser is so exciting is because of the process information Google claims will be available to users.

And just like with your OS, you can look under the hood with Google Chrome’s task manager to see what sites are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes, and abusing your CPU.

Personally I can’t wait to get my hands on this gem when it is released and take it for a spin.

Having used TextMate for a while I have grown quite accustomed to being able to fold sections of code, particularly function declarations, so I can glance through the file to see what functions and variables I have defined. However, I recently made a totally nerd bragging rights based decision to test out MacVim. Well it wasn’t all bragging rights, being able to navigate a file without having to move my fingers from ‘home base’ would be a big plus.

The project I’m currently working on though has a couple of really large javascript files and navigating them quickly in MacVim without the foldings was something I found to be quite difficult so I started looking at the Vim help files and found the ability to create folds. Due to a disciplined use of tabs to indent code blocks :set foldmethod=indent worked fairly well but eventually it started to bug me because the of the fold was actually the first line of the content which meant the folds looked something like functionName: function() {
+ - - if (test) {
}, There had to be a better way. I realized what I wanted to do was create a fold on the line with the function declaration down to the line with the ending brace. I could not find an easy command to do this so I created a simple javascript filetype plugin (addfoldings vim plugin).

In order to get this to work I had to add filetype plugin on to my .vimrc file and I had to create the ~/.vim/ftplugin/javascript directory and drop the addfoldings.vim file into it. By default the foldings are all open but they have been created.

Update: Things are of course never as easy as they seem. The above works fine as long as you don’t add lines to the file you’re working on which is of course absurd, additionally it won’t update the foldings as you go which sort of limits the usefulness. Hopefully I’ll be able to update this to be more useful.