Scrupuli

The personal computer devolution.

Around that time, electronics got small and cheap enough that a family or a small business could buy one and make room for it on a desk. By 1980, over a million had been sold worldwide. At the time, we called it the personal computer (PC) revolution. That was when it began to be easy to work at a computer outside a data center.

A computer that didn’t slow down considerably in the afternoon. That you could update yourself when there was an application you needed. That had a printer that was never busy with someone else’s project.

But a cheap PC, with cheap software, that would frequently eat your disk or crash after you had entered an hour’s worth of work or fail to boot after you installed an application.

That wrote disks that another PC would not read. That could call another PC on the phone and transfer a 20 page document from it in about 20 minutes (and maybe fail to open it).

High speed networks bridge the gap.

Thirty years later, PCs have gotten much better, and the network has gotten fast and cheap. The family and the small business have a high speed link from the PC to data centers all over the world. And the new network made it possible to unify the two models of computing.

Enter Google. The Google applications and documentss are stored and kept up to date at the data center, and used from any PC. The application and the document are flash-transfered to and from the PC automatically, over the new high speed network.

The PC, not the mainframe computer, actually powers the application. If the application is underpowered (or when the PC fails, because they all fail—it is only a question of when) you replace the PC without the pain of migrating documents or restoring them from a backup that you made six months ago.

A new browser makes it better.

Finally, enter Chrome, a new browser released by Google in September.

Despite the limitations of the first release, I immediately abandoned Mozilla Firefox for Chrome. Chrome is the next step in the evolution of the PC. Chrome is designed to run network applications differently than other browsers in three ways which I shall call Better, Stronger, and Faster.

Better.

The Chrome developers did not make a more complicated, feature-heavy browser. They made the browser controls simpler and less intrusive than in other browsers. They learned from Firefox and Opera, and added some good ideas of their own.

Stronger.

Mainframe computers were shared by many users running many applications. Barriers had to be erected between applications and between users. These made it impossible for one user to access another user’s private documents. They also made it impossible for one application to crash another application. If an error occurred, it was contained. One bad actor could not bring the whole system down.

These barriers were not originally available on the cheap PCs. It took more than ten years for them to appear. But they did, and PCs crash a lot less. But web browsers have not taken full advantage of this—until Chrome.

Chrome has put these barriers around each browser tab. If an error occurs on a page, it is contained. One bad web based application cannot bring the whole browser down, or interfere with another tab, or access another tab’s private data.

Faster.

By putting barriers around each tab, Chrome also recycles all the memory of a tab when you close it. I can’t tell you how often I have restarted Explorer, or Firefox, or (faugh!) AOL because poor recycling of memory had led to a memory shortage on the PC. I have never had to do this with Chrome.

Chrome even provides a task window that shows the size and activity of each tab and plug-in, so you can see any bad actors and close them.

Problems with Chrome.

Chrome is brand new, and there are still problems to be worked out. There are two problems that plague me in the first release.

One is a software glitch. Applications that rely on plugins such as Java, Flash, Adobe Reader, or Google Gears can still cause the entire browser to come to a halt. I tend to run into this with YouTube, Google Analytics, and National Weather Service radar loops.

Incredibly, the other is that Chrome—the very application that is helping unify the PC with the data center—stores its browser settings, bookmarks, history, and open tabs on each PC instead of at the data center! With Firefox there were add-ons available to do this (Google Browser Sync and then Mozilla Weave) which I sorely miss.

Being a data center kind of guy myself, I could not wait for Google to fix this. I added an application called SyncToy from Microsoft. It keeps my Chrome settings the same at work and at home, including bookmarks, history, and open tabs. It’s very easy to operate, but it took a little work to set it up.

Here’s how I set it up.

Both PCs run Microsoft Windows XP.

I installed WebDrive 8.2 on both PCs. This shareware app lets any other app on the PC see a remote file server as a local hard drive with its own drive letter such as Z:. I gave WebDrive a password to a public FTP file server that I already have an account on. (Before I selected WebDrive, I tried NetDrive and FTPDrive, which are freeware apps. They nearly worked, but they corrupted the files. WebDrive was reliable.)

I installed Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 on both PCs. I did this because SyncToy needs it.

I installed SyncToy 2.0 on both PCs. I gave SyncToy the name of the Chrome user data directory on my PC:

C:\Documents and Settings\Edward\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default

I created an empty directory on the Z: drive and gave that to SyncToy to sync with the Default directory. I told SyncToy not to copy the Thumbnails file or the Cache subdirectory, and for my peace of mind I told it to check file contents.

That was all. Now, before I start Chrome and after I stop it, I bring up SyncToy, preview the sync, and run it.

I expect I’ll have to work out a bug or two in this procedure, and then I hope to use SyncToy’s scheduling feature to make the extra steps automatic. If I accomplish that, I’ll post a followup article.