Here are a few of the stories that caught my attention over the last couple days. There isn’t a ton of news, just a lot of “early Black Friday” sale posts which are time sensitive and not worth reporting on.
Google Releases Chrome 87 With Big Performance Improvement Promises
Google this week has released Chrome 87. This version brings, according to the company, some of the biggest performance gains in the popular browser in years. Google has changed the behaviour of the browser to prioritize only the active tab, with other tabs in the background being put to sleep. Google says not only will this make the browser feel snappier, it estimates that laptops running Chrome 87 will see up to 1.25 hours longer battery life.
These are huge claims, and if they are anywhere close to accurate, represents a great improvement for Chrome. Chrome began in 2008 as a lightweight browser that was significantly better than the competition, but over a decade later it is one of the “heaviest” browsers on the market. There is no better example than recent Apple laptops, where reviewers consistently find that running Google Chrome instead of Apple’s Safari browser can cut battery life by at least 1/3rd.
Speaing of Apple devices, Google has also released a version of Chrome that will run natively on the new M1 based Apple computers that were released this week. It is available as a universal binary, meaning the same installer will install the correct version for whatever type of Mac it is running on.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/17/21571832/google-chrome-2020-speed-memory-improvements
https://www.theverge.com/2020/11/17/21572418/google-chrome-run-natively-on-apples-arm-macs-m1
YouTube Will Place Ads on Smaller Creator’s Vidoes…. And Not Pay Them
Unless you pay for YouTube Premium, there are a lot of ads on YouTube. The vast majority of those ads are on videos from YouTube “Partners” which is a fancy way of saying larger channels that opt into the ad program. YouTube’s partner program lets channels with over 1,000 subscribers have Google run ads on their videos and then get a cut of that revenue. There are rules around what kind of videos can have ads and be monetized, but at a high level, that’s how it works. Smaller creators do not have access to the partner program, which means that ads do not run on those channels and the creator sees no revenue.
Google is changing that, and not in a good way. The company says that in the near future it will start placing ads on videos of those smaller creators that do not qualify for the partner program, with Google keeping all of the revenue and not sharing any of it with the person who created and uploaded said video. This puts smaller creators at even more of a disadvantage, as viewers will now have to endure ads on their videos, with no benefit to the person putting the time and effort in to create those videos.
There is understandable uproar from those smaller creators, and Google is facing considerable pushback on this plan. Google has yet to respond publicly to this criticism.
RocketLab Successfully Parachutes a Rocket into the Ocean
RocketLab is a satellite launch company based out of New Zealand that specializes in launching small satellites into orbit. Its Electron Rocket is capable of sending about 600 pounds of cargo into space from a launch site in New Zealand. The company has been working towards being able to re-use its first stage rockets like SpaceX does, but it is going about it a very different way. RocketLab’s eventual goal is to have the first stage decent slowed by parachutes, and while the rocket is drifting towards the ocean surface the plan is for a helicopter to catch the rocket mid air.
I desperately want to see that happen one day, but unfortunately RocketLab isn’t there yet. Today’s mission was to test the parachute system on the rocket, and the company let it fall gently into the ocean. RocketLab aims to practice this maneuver a number of times before moving onto the real fun part of actually trying to catch a rocket with a helicopter.
You can bet that whenever that happens I’ll be glued to the nearest screen.