At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
So why are we launching Google Chrome? Because we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.
All of us at Google spend much of our time working inside a browser. We search, chat, email and collaborate in a browser. And in our spare time, we shop, bank, read news and keep in touch with friends -- all using a browser. Because we spend so much time online, we began seriously thinking about what kind of browser could exist if we started from scratch and built on the best elements out there. We realized that the web had evolved from mainly simple text pages to rich, interactive applications and that we needed to completely rethink the browser. What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for web pages and applications, and that's what we set out to build.
On the surface, we designed a browser window that is streamlined and simple. To most people, it isn't the browser that matters. It's only a tool to run the important stuff -- the pages, sites and applications that make up the web. Like the classic Google homepage, Google Chrome is clean and fast. It gets out of your way and gets you where you want to go.
Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today's complex web applications much better. By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers.
This is just the beginning -- Google Chrome is far from done. We're releasing this beta for Windows to start the broader discussion and hear from you as quickly as possible. We're hard at work building versions for Mac and Linux too, and will continue to make it even faster and more robust.
We owe a great debt to many open source projects, and we're committed to continuing on their path. We've used components from Apple's WebKit and Mozilla's Firefox, among others -- and in that spirit, we are making all of our code open source as well. We hope to collaborate with the entire community to help drive the web forward.
The web gets better with more options and innovation. Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the web even better.
So check in again tomorrow to try Google Chrome for yourself. We'll post an update here as soon as it's ready.
Unreal Tournament 3 delivers a pretty similar experience to the rest of the games in the Unreal universe, a mixture of powerful and futuristic weapons, very fast action, and fun gameplay. If you like a fast paced killmatic experience, then this is most certainly not your game. The game is packed with gore, jaw dropping graphical environments, and a bit of what we all love... all out kill or be killed warfare
Graphics
Well what can I say. The graphics in this game are simply stunning, the game engine utilises virtually all forms of lighting to make this game look jaw dropping. The game uses a range of different post-processing settings, with the most vivid one producing fantastically rich environments through the use of High Dynamic Range lighting, improved from its iterations in DX9, but it doesn't stop there. In DX10 mode, you can also make use of the improvements to water rendering, including realistic wave modelling and variable refraction, meaning that the water in this game looks incredibly realistic. The environments are however equally as impressive, with very high quality textures and incredible bumpmapping giving the games environments a realistic look and feel.
Gameplay
Gameplay varies depending what mode you play in, however anyone familiar with the rest of the Unreal Tournament games will find little here in the way of surprises, as the pace of gameplay is similar to what it was in UT2004, however the Assault mode has been scrubbed from UT3. Online gameplay is also largely unchanged, however unfortunately I was dissappointed with the Single Player story mode, as I felt it was rather lacking compared to in UT2004 and UT Original. The storyline is rather disjointed and makes little sense, and unfortunately the makers decided to deviate away from what most unreal lovers (myself included) love... deathmatch, and consequently most of the single player missions are in warfare mode, which gets rather repetitive after a while. Some people may well like it like this but I personally found the lack of variation in the single player story disappointing. However, fortunately the quick action mode makes up for this, however again there was a small annoyance for myself in the design of the game as if you setup a map cycle, and then begin a game you will always start at the beginning of the cycle, and if you attempt to start a game at a map later on in the cycle, the game will, instead of automatically moving onto the next map in your list will continually cycle the same map, which annoyed me personally as it means you end up playing the maps at the end of the cycle less than those at the beginning.
Technical
The gaming engine in UT3 is very well designed, as it appears to scale reasonably well to low end computers. Since I have installed my Quad I have also noticed that of all the games I have tried it is by far the most efficient in terms of multithreaded performance. Despite being significantly more graphically intensive than Half-Life 2 Episode 2, I am able to run (on a measly GeForce 8600GT) the game at 1280x1024 with everything on full and get playable framerates, yet if I run HL2 Episode 2 above 1024x768 the framerate drops in places, which is a testiment of just how good the multithreaded performance of this game really is. However due to the games very rich textures, I would recommend a minimum of 2GB of ram for smooth performance, which although it may sound daunting for some is pretty much a standard amount on modern machines, and thankfully ram is very cheap nowadays. Overall though, the game engine is extremely well designed, and makes the overall experience excellent.
Overall
Despite my misgivings about some elements of this game, I would still rate it to be excellent, and I would recommend anyone with a computer meeting the minimum requirements to grab a copy and give it a play, as I do not feel it will dissappoint. Fun gameplay, and fantastic graphics make this game well worth a recommendation.
The IE team at Microsoft has released the 2nd beta Internet Explorer 8. Contrary to the first beta, which was aimed at developers, this one one is aimed at normal people like you and me. The list of new features and changes is decent, all focused around three themes (marketing alert): "We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we've called 'trustworthy' in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services)."
It might not have even been a story meriting any extent of coverage -- Microsoft's hiring yesterday of comedian Jerry Seinfeld as its new commercial spokesperson -- had it not been for the fact that Microsoft has an image problem. That problem is due in large part to Windows Vista, and the public perception of it as somewhat less than the savior of modern computing that it was originally promoted to be in the early months of 2007.
As was widely reported yesterday, Microsoft is reportedly investing $300 million in a new advertising campaign starring comedian Jerry Seinfeld, and designed by the firm responsible for Burger King's popular, yet disturbing "King" ads. You may recall, the ones where ordinary people find themselves conversing with a plastic, motionless, mute Burger King statue that they find in their midst for no apparent reason.
Crispin Porter + Bogusky's new ad campaign for Microsoft will reportedly pair Seinfeld (although Hollywood sources are reporting that Will Farrell and Chris Rock were also considered) with the always hilarious Bill Gates, whom we hope will not appear as plastic or immobile. The campaign is being called "Windows, Not Walls;" and for some reason, visions of Rowan & Martin's famous "joke wall" immediately come to mind.
It is the very fact that there will be a pairing at all for comedy purposes that will ensure this campaign will be compared for message, effectiveness, humor...lighting, cinematography, wardrobe...with the "I'm a Mac/I'm a PC" campaign mounted by Apple. Regardless of whether that campaign has the "reach-to-conversion" ratio of other campaigns for cars or home appliances or even computers, Apple's will most likely be viewed as among the most successful advertising productions in the history of the medium.
Not that Seinfeld's previous work in advertising has been all that bad. Just last year, he was a spokesperson for HP in its continuing "The Computer is Personal Again" campaign, which has included Mark Cuban, Pharell, Vera Wang, Shaun White, and Serena Williams, among others. That series of ads has coincided with an increase in notebook sales that amounts to 26% worldwide.
Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine.
The code was merged today (but is not yet ready to be enabled by default in the nightly builds) and is planned for inclusion in Firefox 3.1, the next incremental update of the open-source web browser.
I discussed this new optimization strategy with Mozilla's VP of engineering Mike Shaver and Mozilla CTO Brendan Eich, the creator of JavaScript. They are concerned that sophisticated web applications are being held back by the limitations of JavaScript interpreter performance. They aim to improve execution speed so that it is comparable to that of native code. This will redefine the boundaries of client-side performance and enable the development of a whole new generation of more computationally-intensive web applications.
They are "getting ready to take JavaScript performance into the next tier" with a radically innovative optimization tactic called tracing that has already produced performance improvements ranging between 20 and 40 times faster in some cases. They believe that this is just the beginning of what can be accomplished with tracing, and they expect to be able to achieve even better speed as the work continues.
Main Menu
At Google, we have a saying: “launch early and iterate.” While this approach is usually limited to our engineers, it apparently applies to our mailroom as well! As you may have read in the blogosphere, we hit "send" a bit early on a comic book introducing our new open source browser, Google Chrome. We will be launching the beta version of Google Chrome tomorrow in more than 100 countries.
Unreal Tournament 3 delivers a pretty similar experience to the rest of the games in the Unreal universe, a mixture of powerful and futuristic weapons, very fast action, and fun gameplay. If you like a fast paced killmatic experience, then this is most certainly not your game. The game is packed with gore, jaw dropping graphical environments, and a bit of what we all love... all out kill or be killed warfare
It might not have even been a story meriting any extent of coverage -- Microsoft's hiring yesterday of comedian Jerry Seinfeld as its new commercial spokesperson -- had it not been for the fact that Microsoft has an image problem. That problem is due in large part to Windows Vista, and the public perception of it as somewhat less than the savior of modern computing that it was originally promoted to be in the early months of 2007.
Mozilla is leveraging an impressive new optimization technique to bring a big performance boost to the Firefox JavaScript engine.
