Google Chrome is now at version 5 despite being only four years old. Version 6 is in beta. Before I began my rant I just need to explain how the versioning of programs usually works. The first number is the major build number should only change when there have been major changes to the program. The smaller numbers are there to indicate smaller changes such as security and bug fixes. Since it’s release Chrome, as far as I can see, has only had two major changes to it and they are the addition of themes and extensions.

Firefox has been around about eight years and is only at version 3.5. Opera has been around over ten years and is only at version 10.50. With both of these browser they have only changed the major build number when they have made major changes to their browser.

So why is Google increasing Chrome’s build number more often that it has birthdays? Well others believe this is Google’s attempt at making the gullible believe that Chrome is a more mature program than it actually is. The less computer savvy are going to look at it and think, “Oh it’s on version 5 so must have been around a long time”. I tend to agree with their opinion as there is no other reason for Google to be doing this.

When Internet Explorer 8 came out Microsoft said they had seriously improved security and that it was now one of the safest web browsers to use. Apparently they were wrong. According to the Guardian newspaper here in the UK an exploit in Internet Explorer was used in the recent attack on Google’s systems in China.

source

So why keep using it? There are plenty of excellent alternatives these days. Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Flock and you could even use Apple’s Safari although it uses a stupid amount of memory on Windows.

Fancy trying the new OS that Google is working on? Well you’re out of luck but in the meantime you can try the Chrome OS that for some bizarre reason Suse has made and released on a Google hosted site http://sites.google.com/site/chromeoslinux/ (Google has taken the site down). What’s really funny is the amount of people that have been Tweeting about how either this is Google’s new OS or the rest that are calling it a fake. It’s not a fake as it really is an OS called Chrome OS it’s just people have been fooled by the sites design and hosting in to believing it is Google’s OS.

From the site:

• GNOME 2.24 desktop environment
• Google Chrome 4.0.223 web browser
• Google Picasa 2.7 photo manager New!
• OpenOffice.org 3.0 office suite
• GIMP 2.6 image editor
• Flash Player 10.0 plugin
• and much more!

• Processor: Intel Pentium, Xeon or newer; AMD Duron, Athlon, Sempron, Opteron or newer
• RAM: min. 256 MB
• Hard disk: min. 1 GB
• Graphics card: supports most modern graphics cards

Why they would try to make people believe this was Googles forthcoming OS I don’t know.

Google is a company which prides it’s self on it’s ethics. It only gave the bare minimum information when ordered to and went out of it’s way to get Google in to China. So why is it that their Adsense side of the business seems to accept adverts from the dodgiest of companies? Just lately I have found myself constantly adding new urls to the blocked advert list of my Adsense acount. Several of the urls I have blocked all are just cloaking urls that all point to the same site. The program in question here is called Registry Cleaner Pro. They make wild claims in their adverts that their program fixes IE 8 and also fixes nearly every Windows error you could possibly encounter. I currently have about five urls on my blocked list that point to this company.

And then there are the companies who’s adverts offer to let you download Spybot for free. Errr SpyBot IS FREE!!! Just go to the official Spybot site at safer-networking.org and download it for free. The sites that post these adverts expect you to sign up to them which is not free and therefore their adverts, in my opinion, are illegal in most countries.

I’m more and more tempted to stop using Adsense if only I could find an affiliate company with some kind of ethics.

You can see my list of blocked domains after the break.

My blocked domains:
2009softwarereviews.com
activexfixer.org
adwarealert.com
cleanupurpc.com
free-software-uk.com
ie-internet-explorer.com
internet-explorer-cleaner.com
pc-authority.com
pcregistryrelief.com
pctuneuptips.com
registrycleanercompared.com
registrycleanercompared.org
registrycleanerhelp.org
registrycleanersexposed.com
search-destroy2009.com
spy-destroyer.com
spybot.search-destroy2009.com
spybotdownload.org
stop-sign.com
stopzilla.com
virusprotectioncompared.org
which-registry.com
zaperrors.com

OK thanks to Google’s Chrome and Apple now making Safari a serious browser for Windows the browser war is getting ridiculous. They all seem obsessed with how fast their Javascript engines run with Google now saying the V8 engine in Chrome 2 is 25% faster than in Chrome 1. Who cares? The speed of the Javascript engines is now so fast few people if any would be able to notice a difference in everyday use. The only people who are are Geeks who think the extra milliseconds make all the difference.

I’m not interested in how fast their Javascript engines run I just want a browser that is configurable and doesn’t eat up resources. I’m sticking with Firefox at present as it lets me configure cookies exactly how I want and has some sweet extensions. I am impressed with the WebKit engine as used in Chrome and Safari. To me Opera fell to the wayside with version 7. So at some point I may switch from Firefox to Safari or Chrome but can’t see it anytime soon. Safari 4 beta looks good but is all eye candy and eats memory. Chrome is to basic with very limited options and no black/white list for cookies. Safari also has neither a whitelist nor blacklist.

There is an annoying bug/oversight in Googles Gmail that is starting to get on my tits. It does not honour the reply-to header in emails. Bascially an email has a From header which shows which address it has been sent from and this would usually be where the email is sent to when you hit reply. But you can also include a header called reply-to which the receivers email client should use when the reply button/link is clicked. My forum script, SMF, uses this method so that emails sent via the forum all come from my email address and the email address of the sender is put in to the reply-to header so if you hit reply it will send the email to them. Why Gmail does not support this I don’t know and I informed them about it about 2 months ago now if not longer.

I have just added a Javascript gallery script to the adult smileys page so you can see all the smileys including the ones Google objected to me showing.