OpenZA

On 14 September Google launched Fast Flip. It is basically a way to flip through web sites like you would flip through the pages of a magazine.

Why would anyone want that? Well, for starters, it’s FAST. It makes it very quick to scan for content that you’re looking for. Once you hone in on the information you want, you can go to the actual web site.

Google accomplishes this by making use of an Ajax based page that loads images of the content into your browser. So basically pages are pre-rendered, so your browser doesn’t have to do the rendering. Think of how quickly it is to move around in Google Maps. Same story here.

It might just change the way people look at daily news forever. I haven’t tried it on an iPhone, but I imagine it would be pretty sweet. You could sit at the table in the morning, coffee in hand, and flip through all the news for the day, from around the globe, quicker than reading an actual newspaper.

I give this service a thumbs-up

Sometime over the past week Google quietly increased the version number of its Chromium development browser to 4.0 and it is every bit as fast at rendering web pages as version 3.0 was.

Officially Google only releases its browser as Chrome, and it doesn’t actually have a Linux version available yet so many Linux users have yet to give Chrome a spin. But Google does also regularly release development versions of Chromium for Linux, Windows and Mac platforms which offers all the benefits of bleeding edge Chrome development without the assurance of a “stable” tag.

Earlier this month Google released a beta version of Chrome 3.0 for Windows and said that it was as much as 30% faster than any other browser. I haven’t had an opportunity to test Chrome 3.0 on Windows so I don’t know how true that is but I did test a Chromium 3.0 version on Linux and – here’s the thing – it is almost 50% faster than Firefox3.5 on the same platform at rendering web pages.

I ran Opera 9.63, Firefox 3.5 and Google Chromium 3x through the SunSpider Javascript test (http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html). Firefox 3.5 turned in a very respectable 1766ms turn of speed. Which is enough to put it miles ahead of Opera’s sluggish 7613ms but not a patch on Google Chromium 3.0 which turned a score of 719ms. So, when it comes to rending pages it seems that Chrome has some legitimate claim to the fastest browser title.

Subsequently, however, a Chromium 4.0 version was released (I’m currently running version 4.0.204.0) and it is proving to be every bot as good as 3.0.

Instructions for installing Chromium builds on Linux can be found on the Chromium dev website. There are also a number of distro-specific builds available including for Ubuntu and Fedora.