AdSense transforming in non-contextual advertising program?

Since AdSense appeared on the market, it was known for every publisher that it’s one of the greatest contextual ad serving networks. They advertise on every possible way that “[...] Because the ads are related to what your users are looking for on your site, you’ll finally have a way to both monetize and enhance your content pages. [...]”

And that’s almost OK. They really serve ads which are related to the (website’s) content, but. There always has to be a but, right? What about learn even more about the users before serving those ads?
I explain: Devoracles.com has quite a lot of content related to Google, Google Chrome and AdSense. So it’s quite easy to predict that if possible, AdSense will show Google-related ads for the users cos those are also relevant to our content. And if you look at our ads, you’ll see that sometimes there are Google related ads. If you look at the right ads in the right time, you will see that there are Google Chrome ads, too. Like, “Download Google Chrome“, or something like that.

Now look at the image on the left. What’s wrong with the image? I’ll tell you what’s wrong with it! I see adverts which keeps telling me to download Google Chrome even though — ironically — I’m seeing the advert through Google Chrome.
That’s the feature of contextual advertising? Advertising Coke and iPhone for the biggest fans of these products? Come on, Google, this can’t be right!

Google Chrome, accept a warm welcome from me

Truly!

Google Chrome, a brand new browser, written from scratch and thought from a different approach. It was announced to be released on 2nd of September, 2008, on the Official Google Blog and so it was. Yesterday, right after the conference held in Mountain View, CA, the officials of Google enabled the access of the public to the download url.

I’m writing this post using Chrome, and I have to admit, I’m impressed. Maybe it’s just me, but it seems to load everything a bit faster. The pages I visit are usually Javascript heavy, so I guess the increased speed is the result of the V8 Javascript Virtual Machine and Gears’s new caching method’s (where available).

Let’s see some things about the browser.

Installation of Google Chrome

While everybody believed that the download of Chrome will be available from the Gears Home, Google dedicated a separate subdirectory on their main, Google.com domain, so currently the Google Chrome Official page is situated at www.google.com/chrome. On a side note, do not download Chrome from anywhere else. I encountered a website, the owners of it stated it’s an alternative download site but when I downloaded it to my crash-server (a PC used for testing malware and viruses), it contained only malware. So, be good and download ONLY from a Google domain.

After download, the installation was minimal as possible. It asked me if I want to import anything from Firefox, then if I want to set it as default browser. And then it was done. That was all.

First impressions

I started it with a little fear in me, I was excited to see the innovation but feared my sites will not load correctly. The default home page is something similar to Opera’s default home page: it displays some thumbnails of the most visited pages and a search box which enables you to search in your history. I never use my browse history so it’s not so interesting for me, probably it’s good for others.

I opened a new tab to see how fast a new tab loads. Incredibly fast. Also, a great idea is that every single tab has its own search bar, a so called omni-box. Why omni-box? Because it has multiple purposes. It’s an URL box where you can type the URL you want to access, a search box to search on your favorite search engine set in the options, and a box which tries to guess what you want. Just to mention that with almost no luck.

With a great fear in me, i typed in the omni-box: http://devoracles.com
I expected to have some design issues. But everything loaded correctly, what a pleasure.
I also visited rapidly a few dozen other page, but none had issues. I think this is the result of the WebKit the developers of Chrome used as rendering engine. It’s present in other browsers too, in Safari if I’m not mistaken, and so if something works in another browser which has WebKit as base, it will work in Chrome too.
This is very good for developers, as we don’t have to check everything in one more browser. If it works in Chrome or Safari, it’s OK.

I knew that I can stop any process of Chrome without the need of stopping the whole browser. That’s true. Chrome has its own task manager from where you can stop any tab you want with one single click. You can also use Windows’s task manager, but in this case you have to rely on your own instincts. Why? Task manager lists every instance of Chrome, the only issue is that it lists only “chrome.exe”, no other information. Currently I have two Chrome windows opened, each has eight tabs, so in windows manager I have 18 chrome.exe . How will I guess which one to close, I have no idea.

The incognito window was a great idea for privacy addicts. If you open a webpage in an Incognito Window, nothing will be stored on your PC which can be tracked. I refer to cookies or browsing history entries. Of course, if you bookmark a page or download something in an Incognito Window, that will remain available after you close the window, but nothing else. An interesting thing I noticed when I’ve opened an Incognito window, is the warning Google placed on the home page:

Be wary of:

• Websites that collect or share information about you
• Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit
• Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
• Surveillance by secret agents
• People standing behind you

As per Google’s statements, the memory usage should be better than in any other browser because Chrome handles very efficiently the memory freed up by closed tabs, or the trash memory. Now this is something I didn’t notice yet. So far Chrome uses way more memory than any other browser I ever used.

The minimalistic design of Google’s applications is reflected on their browser too. Not that it’s a problem. The UI is very appealing and comfortable. It was very easy to learn what can be done from where.

The developers have their own tools incorporated into Chrome. If you are familiar with FireBug, you will easily recognize the same features in Chrome’s developer tools. But! For some reason this is a bit more complicated. May I say overcomplicated? While using FireBug was a pleasure, using Chrome’s developer tools is like a pain in the… in the… finger. For some reason I have the feeling that the developers who were responsible for the Dev Tools thrown everything in a case, mixed it then released. I find hard to get some things working, like the Inspector. It should highlight the HTML inner elements if I hover over them, but it seems it highlights only things it has mood for.
The Javascript debugger and the Javascript Console was also implemented in FireFox before so that’s not new at all.

As per Google’s agreement with Mozilla about the Search Giant’s indirect support of the Firefox browser, which by the way brings Mozilla some incredibly high revenue, has been renewed and will expire only in 2011. So, I think the final and stable version of Chrome will be released only then. No. That’s not plausible cos there are almost 3 years till then, even a snail with Alzheimer disease would release a stable browser in that time. (well, except Microsoft, but that’s another post for another time).
I would be incredibly happy if somebody would enlighten me why Google supports a competitor’s browser when they have their own browser

In general and considering that Chrome is a Beta (version is 0.2.149.27) I think it’s an awesome browser. It has some things which can be optimized and I’m sure the developers of Chrome will do optimize it.

Google Chrome screenshot

I forgot to add this in my previous post about Google Chrome, so here is a sample screenshot about the brand new Google Chrome.

New kid on the block… sorry, web-browser

Let’s list the most important browsers currently used by millions: Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari. I took these from the Google Analytics account which tracks the visitors browsing this site.

Now let’s think why are so much browsers. Most likely that each introduced new futures which attracts users. But why nobody made a browser which incorporates all the features which is present in the above browsers? I’m not a desktop-software developer, but I think that the reason is that it would be too resource heavy. Basically it would use too much computing resource. Also, none of these browsers are multithreaded, multiprocessed (is that a word?) on Windows based systems. Even if they have tabs, all these are in the same process. So if a tab crashes, you loose all the others too, you can restart the whole browser.

Did you use Gmail or the new, AJAXified Yahoo! Mail? Did you observe that when these are loading the browser is practically locked, you can’t do a thing until they are not fully loaded. OK, that is because the browser has to wait for the Javascript(s) running these applications to send a signal to the browser, a signal like “OK, I’m ready.” But why does it have to block all the browser window?

Did it happen with you ever, that you notice that your PC became slow and when you check the running processes you notice that, for example Firefox is using up almost all the memory? If you would have dozens of tabs open, this would be normal, but you have only a few. That happens because some versions of Firefox didn’t free up the memory allocated to a tab when it was closed. So you ended up with a PC without memory. Cool.

Google decide to put end of these things and announced their own browser: Google Chrome.
Well, announced. This is a bit harsh said as they practically released a comic book first, then after a few they officially announced the browser on black-and-white.

So why Google Chrome should be better than the other browsers?

Let’s see, it’s tabbed, multi-threaded, better memory management, V8 Javascript Virtual Machine, fully open source and many other things.

Two, I think the most important things are Multi-threading and V8, let’s see what do they do:

Multi-threading: separate task manager for the browser, independent from the OS’s which brings you the ability to see the websites opened in separate tabs how much memory use, how much did they transfer and what plugins do they use. Multi-threading also enables the user to close a so called “sad tab” (a tab which crashed) without the need to close the whole browser.

V8: this “just” a new virtual machine for Javascript. I think its greatest innovation is the implementation of a so called Hidden Class Transactions. What this means? When you create an object, you create it with classes. Take the scenario of creating many, few dozen of objects which also involves many classes for each object. V8 will look at the classes and their results (return value) and if a class returns the same result as a separate, other class, it will use only one of them, without executing both, to decrease the execution time. This on the virtual machine level, obviously. It’s pretty hard to explain.

Now from the developer’s view. Since All the Google Gadgets are very popular, I think we’ll be forced to develop applications in the way to work flawlessly on GC, too. This might be a headache, my experience is that when a new browser is launched, it just doesn’t do what it should do. I really hope now this will change.
We should also take the advantages of Google Gears (Learn more here about Gears) and V8, at least from Google’s point of view. Since none of them is a native browser extension, or better said native browser part, applications which takes the advantage, or depend on the above will not work on the current popular browsers, or they will work only if the end-user installs a browser extension. This is very bad and can only distract users from the application we worked on for weeks or even months.
So I think developing applications expressly for these innovative APIs is not a good idea. Yet!

Google Chrome Beta or release candidate (?) will be available for download on 2nd of September in more than 100 countries. In my country there’s already 2nd of September but I can’t download it. I hope I won’t be locked out from testing.

You can also try to download it here: gears.google.com/chrome/?hl=en