31 Oct 08 More Detail on the Google Chrome Plugin Improvements
Google Chrome Plugin Improvements
When I first came upon a list of plugin improvements for Google Chrome I was thinking “Nice, we are going to get some real external plugin support for Google Chrome. This is HUGE.” Well, I was wrong, but with being wrong it is good to see some explanation of support for functionality like Adobe PDF Fast Web View and Adobe Flash. I am sure the Chrome developers have been thanking Adobe for some real good fun times.
What is Adobe Fast Web Support and what was making Google Chrome bomb on this so badly?
Adobe Fast Web Support is basically the ability to back and forth inside a huge PDF file very quickly without having to download to whole document just to get to page 144. For some reason the developers did not implement the NPAPI spec for stream seeking inside the PDF file itself. Needless to say this is implement now and seeking different parts of a PDF doc should be easier to navigate now!
On to the Adobe Flash issue and YouTube videos. When I would read about people having problems viewing YouTube videos using Google Chrome I was wondering what was going on. I wasn’t having any issues at all viewing videos. As the Google Chrome developers got to looking into this further, it turns out the video would stop playing if you moved the slider bar on the video exactly 6 times. 6 is a magic number in Google Chrome since 6 is the maximum number of HTTP connections it makes per host. Once the slider button was moved for the 6th time on a YouTube video Google Chrome was just go crazy since it couldn’t make any more HTTP connections to the host. Bottom line, the other I/O connections to the host were not getting killed and making Google Chrome very unstable and of course this has now been fixed.
It is always interesting to see and understand what goes on behind the scenes of a project like Google Chrome. To understand the inner workings of such a piece of software will make it a better browser in the future and who knows where we will see Google Chrome in the next year.
Tags: Google Chrome
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