Faster Chrome/Chromium JavaScript and the Crazy GMail Signout Link!


It looks like the people at Google have been very busy working on both Chrome/Chromium and GMail. First the good news. Since all the other browsers like Firefox 4 are working on speeding up their JavaScript engine so they can claim vast performance improvements, well the Chrome folks have done so too. Since I always just use the latest release of Chromium on my Ubuntu desktop, I checked my version I just updated to using apt-get today and see that I am now using Chromium 11.0.676.0 (75353) which I am guessing is using the updated JavaScript engine as used in Chrome 10 (still in beta). Frankly, I cannot tell much difference since Chromium was already pretty darn fast. Perhaps at some point it just does not make any difference anymore.

What concerns me more are the little pesky changes they do that annoy people. For example, last night my son demanded he had to use my laptop so he could more properly play Minecraft since he was done with all his homework and his own laptop was too slow. So I decided I would be nice and let him use my laptop and I would log out of GMail and log out of my account (since I would never trust him logged into my account.) So I looked in the upper right hand corner for the "sign out" link and noticed it had disappeared. Instead I had to click on my name to get a drop down menu with a single option to "sign out". What a pain! I then proceeded to sit in a comfy chair and finish reading "Stop Acting Rich" by Thomas J. Stanley while my wife was checking her GMail nearby on her own laptop (hey, we are a geeky family.) Several minutes later I heard her say "Hey, where is the sign out link?" It seems like everybody has noticed it has moved and nobody is very happy with it! Why did Google do this to us? Someone must have thought it was a good idea so they could later add other items to the drop down menu. In any case it was a bit annoying, but I suppose I will get used to it. Too bad I had not discovered this on a free Cr-48 netbook Google never sent me which I had requested. I am sure mine was lost in the mail or something.

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