Browsers: Chrome vs Iron

Well, this was going to be a Chrome review of sorts, but after a very short time using it I've moved on to another browser so it's now less of a review than a comparison post.

The rest of the pack

I've used Internet Explorer (IE) for most of my browsing years, simply because it was bundled with Windows. Recently I was doing some web development and (a) my browser (IE7) wasn't quite cutting and (b) I needed to test the website in multiple browsers to ensure compatibility with them. I installed Firefox and Chrome and (later) IE8.

  IE: My main issue with IE7 was that it lacked some features the other browsers had, such as web developer tools/plugins. (After acquiring IE8 later, it turns most of those missing features have now also been adopted by Microsoft... imagine that!) In terms of displaying websites, IE in general isn't as compliant as other browsers; this means that where other browsers display website components as expected, IE can give unexpected results, meaning that extra coding is required to deal with IE's many quirks.

  Firefox: Firefox has plenty of handy add-ons, one of which came in very handy during web development: Firebug. I won't go into details, but it's a developer's dream. Unfortunately, after installing only a handful of add-ons in Firefox, the browser took very long to load (5+ seconds) and that is simply unacceptable.

  Chrome: During web development, I installed Chrome in order to test the site in what I expect may become a mainstream browser. I decided to jump in and give it a chance, abandoning IE. Chrome is supposed to use less memory and crash more gracefully, and more. Here are some issues I came across:
- pictures often didn't load (just showed a placeholder instead);
- slow site loading (could be due to safety settings);
- frequent failed page loads ('oops this page appears to be broken or missing');
- freezing to the extent that I couldn't access Chrome's own task manager;
- I can't set it to auto-load the home page upon opening a new tab;
- there isn't much in the way of options;
- a big intrusive prompt (almost) every time I try to download a file; this seems to have been addressed, however, in the latest release.

Iron

  So what is Iron? It's a web browser by SRWare that, just like Chrome, is based on the open source project called Chromium. Iron looks and feels pretty much like Chrome, with a key difference in mentality: it's all about privacy.

Chrome sends Google the following info:
- anything you type into the address bar, regardless of whether you manually submit it (by hitting Enter or clicking Go); this is how Chrome can give search suggestions as you type, by submitting data to its servers as you type'
- when and from where it was downloaded;
- details of crashes or failures;
Further:
- Chrome creates a unique identifier that could theoretically identify a user;
- Chrome remember exactly when it was installed;
- Chrome uses error pages from Google's own servers instead of local ones;
- Chrome installation includes installation of Google Updater;

Bottom line: Google does a lot of usage tracking. Apparently it's in the process of anonymizing collected data, so that the end user can't be linked to any data... yikes!

Iron scratches all of the above data collection, and in addition it has a built-in ad blocker.

A few of the above 'issues' can be overcome in Chrome in its options or with various tweaks or add-ons.

Now I'm no security freak, and I have nothing to hide browsing-wise. But in principal I'm against rampant data collection by Internet companies. Plus the existence of Google Updater on my system has always annoyed me. Hence my interest in Iron. So far it's been stable, fast, and without the bugs I encountered in the version of Chrome I'd been using in the last month.

new hard drive

I ordered a new hard drive this week from TigerDirect. Unfortunately I delayed for a few days so it won't be arriving until Monday. Yes, I can be an impulse buyer and hate to have to wait to get something. More than once I've planned out a perfect system to purchase and then bought something completely different because they didn't have what I wanted in stock; that's the problem with shopping at physical stores.

I ordered a Seagate 1TB drive (1000GB). It's not the largest capacity drive available, and I don't need even that much, but for the cost per gigabyte it was easily the best bargain.

Speaking of cost per gigabyte, I threw my hard drive purchases onto a chart (or the ones I have receipts for anyway) to see the progression of prices over the years. Click to enlarge.



It's on a logarithmic scale and looks fairly straight. Of course, being a log scale, any minor crookedness can mean major deviation. Take the period around 2000... doesn't fit the pattern at all. That happens to be when the dot-com bubble burst.

Also note the lack of data between 1996 and 2000... no receipts :(.

So what pattern am I talking about? Since around 2002, the cost per GB seems to halve every 18 months. That's about the same as dropping by a factor of 10 every 5 years.

Somewhat relatedly, there once was this guy named Gordon Moore. Okay, he's still alive. He co-founded Intel. And 44 years ago he came up with Moore's Law, which initially predicted that the number of transistors that can be crammed onto an integrated circuit doubles every year. A decade later he altered his prediction to doubling every 2 years. Combined with other improvements beyond simply better cramming, performance of integrated circuits seems to double every 18 months.

The cost per gig during the dot-com craze was halving every year, possibly due to inordinate amounts of money going to R&D. But that obviously didn't last. If current trends continue, we'll be able to buy a 10TB hard drive for $100 before 2014. Place your bets.

Ooh and I look forward to 1PB drives before I'm 45. Let's just hope they're not the same big clunky noisy failure-prone heaters we have today.