chromium

About:labs lands in Google Chrome -- brings tab overview to Mac, side tabs to Windows

Submitted by admin on Wed, 09/01/2010 - 13:00

 

Chromium -- Google Chrome's open source cousin -- recently debuted the new about:labs page which brings easier access to bleeding-edge features. The Labs page provides a simpler, GUI-based system for enabling things like side tabs which you previously had to activate via command line switches.

In the latest Chrome Canary update, Labs has arrived. That means Mac users can now enable tab overview (an Expose-like feature which shows all your open tabs) and Windows users can play around with side tabs -- no switches required! Just enable the feature on about:labs and restart, and you're good to go.

Remember, this has just hit Canary -- but the dev channel shouldn't be too far behind.

Hopefully Google will begin adding other features to the page now that it's made the jump to Chrome. First on our wish list; hardware acceleration!

 

See what Google Chrome extensions are up to before you install them

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/31/2010 - 09:45

 

There are a lot of great extensions in the Chrome Gallery. However, as the Chrome APIs round out and extensions have increased access to things like your history, cookies, and file system you may want to take a closer look at what a particular extension can do before you install it.

Fortunately there's a new extension which can do just that. What?! An extension to peek under the hood of other extensions? Yep. It's called Extension Gallery Inspector, and it's pretty slick.

Install the Inspector and head to the Chrome Extensions Gallery. When you browse an extension's detail page, the lightning bolt icon will appear in your Omnibar. Click it, and Inspector will unpack the .CRX file and scan for API calls, permissions, and OAuth support. It also tells you the uncompressed size of the extension and whether or not it has an options page and browser action icon.

Still not enough info for you? Click the view files link and you can actually check out the extension's source code, icons, and manifest file.

You'll obviously need a bit of technical knowledge to benefit from Extension Gallery Inspector as it stands right now. Still, for power users who want to know what an extension has access to -- or developers who are just curious how a particular extension works -- Inspector is a must-have Google Chrome extension.

 

iReader extension is like Safari Reader for Google Chrome and Firefox

Submitted by admin on Mon, 08/30/2010 - 10:00

 

One of the most talked about features in Safari 5 has been its Reader function -- Apple's built-in implementation of the Readability bookmarklet. Both are nice ways to reformat articles on blog or news sites for distraction-free reading.

If you like the look of Safari Reader but would rather not change from Google Chrome or Firefox, don't worry. The iReader extension brings the same functionality to your browser of choice!

Like Safari Reader, iReader shrouds the background in semi-opaque blackness . Hover near the bottom of the page to display zoom and print controls, as well as e-mail/Twitter/Facebook sharing buttons. iReader is also highly configurable -- set Gmail as your 'send page' client, change the display font, activate smooth scrolling, set the "curtain" to be more or less transparent, and adjust the reading area and margins. You can also choose hotkey combination to activate iReader (rather than having to click on the Omnibar icon).

Download iReader : Google Chrome extension or Firefox add-on

Chrome now has hardware acceleration, brings phenomenally faster fishes

Submitted by admin on Mon, 08/30/2010 - 08:30

 

I'm not sure when the changes actually landed, but Google has announced that an early implementation of hardware acceleration is now available in developer versions of Chrome 7.

Early testing suggests that performance is still worse than Internet Explorer 9, but the gap has definitely been closed a bit. The '1000 fish test' now clocks in at about 10 frames per second, which is definitely an improvement from last time -- but still some way short of IE9's 45 FPS.

The Chromium blog post says that only some content is being accelerated, so the Fish Tank might not be a fair comparison of the browsers. I'll try to find a better test or benchmark and share my findings later today. You can enable hardware acceleration in Chrome with the --enable-accelerated-compositing flag -- and if you discover anything interesting, please share your findings in the comments!

Update: you might need a nightly build of Chromium to take advantage of this hardware acceleration. It would be nice if Google could explicitly state when the changes were made...

Two more tablet-friendly features on their way to Google Chrome

Submitted by admin on Sat, 08/28/2010 - 11:00

 

Google had originally pegged December 2010 for the first release of Chrome OS, but it's been looking like a fall release is now a safe bet. It's certainly netbook-ready at this point, though some missing features (like an on-screen keyboard) may mean that tablet devices arrive slightly later.

Developers keep plugging ahead, however, and continue to work on tablet-friendly features. Two code revisions have landed in the past couple days which will definitely make Chrome more at home on tablets. The first is device orientation support (think auto-rotating content on your Chrome OS tablet and accelerometer-enabled games) and the other is speech input (hello, voice commands!).

Both features have been part of the Chromium code for a while now, but they're now enabled by default and it's typically a very short amount of time between a new Chromium feature being defaulted and its arrival in the official Google Chrome builds. It's also worth noting that voice input support is only on by default for Chromium's Windows users -- Mac and Linux users would need to add the --enable-speech-input switch to their shortcut for the time being.

Developer Jeremy Selier has posted a simple-yet-cool demo video of device orientation using his Macbook Pro -- check it out after the break!

Google adds more official themes for Chrome -- to the Extensions Gallery?

Submitted by admin on Sat, 08/28/2010 - 08:30

 

I've asked about this before, and I'll pose the question one more time: if you're not going to put Chrome themes where the other Chrome themes go, shouldn't you at least create a category, Google?

Google has introduced half a dozen new official Chrome themes, but you won't find them if you click the get themes link on your Personal Stuff menu. No, like the scores of user-created themes out there these new themes from Google have been dropped into the Extensions Gallery.

I'm sure the plan is to list everything in the Gallery at some point (possibly once it's re-branded as the Web Store?), but it really shouldn't be hard to give themes their own section on the existing Gallery. Or, you know, post them on the page Chrome takes you to when you click get themes.

The new themes are called Modern, Adaptive, Vibrant, Inventive, Fresh, and Orkut_Hudson. They're artist-created, and generally not for those of you who like Chrome's interface to be as unobtrusive as possible -- some are downright loud.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course -- tell us what you think of the new themes in the comments.

 

Chromium Graphics Overhaul

Submitted by admin on Fri, 08/27/2010 - 12:00

For some time now, there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system. New APIs and markup like WebGL and 3D CSS transforms are a major motivation for this work, but it also lets Chromium begin to take advantage of the GPU to speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling. As a lot of that work has been landing in tip-of-tree Chromium lately, we figured it was time for a primer.

At its core, this graphics work relies on a new process (yes, another one) called the GPU process. The GPU process accepts graphics commands from the renderer process and pushes them to OpenGL or Direct3D (via ANGLE). Normally, renderer processes wouldn’t be able to access these APIs, so the GPU process runs in a modified sandbox. Creating a specialized process like this allows Chromium’s sandbox to continue to contain as much as possbile: the renderer process is still unable to access the system’s graphics APIs, and the GPU process contains less logic.

With this basic piece of infrastructure, we’ve started accelerating some content in Chromium. A web page can naturally be divided into a number of more or less independent layers. Layers can contain text styled with CSS, images, videos, and WebGL or 2D canvases. Currently, most of the common layer contents, including text and images, are still rendered on the CPU and are simply handed off to the compositor for the final display. Other layers use the GPU to accelerate needed operations that touch a lot of pixels. Video layers, for example, can now do color conversion and scaling in a shader on the GPU. Finally, there are some layers that can be fully rendered on the GPU, such as those containing WebGL elements.

After these layers are rendered, there’s still a crucial last step to blend them all onto a single page as quickly as possible. Performing this last step on the CPU would have erased most of the performance gains achieved by accelerating individual layers, so Chromium now composites layers on the GPU when run with the --enable-accelerated-compositing flag.

If you’d like to read more about this work, take a look at this design doc which outlines Chromium’s accelerated compositing system. Over time, we’re looking into moving even more of the rendering from the CPU to the GPU to achieve impressive speedups.

Google Chrome to get Gmail Labs-like experimental features

Submitted by admin on Fri, 08/27/2010 - 09:30

 

Many of our readers have been frustrated by having to add command line switches to Google Chrome in order to try out a new feature. In truth, it's really not a difficult procedure (though Windows and Linux users have it far easier than those on Mac) -- but wouldn't it be cool if you could just click something to turn them on?

Starting soon, you just might be able to do that. Google OS spotted a new addition to the Chromium browser: an about:labs page. Load it up, and you'll see experimental browser features which you can enable -- like side tabs on Windows and tab expose on Mac.

At least, very soon you'll be able to turn the features on via this page. Right now, it's not functional. Clicking enable on tabs on the left didn't actually activate the feature for me -- I still had to add the --enable-vertical-tabs switch to my shortcut.

The addition of about:labs is a nice touch, and will allow more users to kick the tires on cutting-edge features. That, of course, is a good thing for Google. A larger group of testers should allow them to tackle bugs more quickly and push features from the dev and canary builds to the beta and stable channels even more quickly.

 

Google Chrome dev channel hits v7 -- get ready for native code in Web apps!

Submitted by admin on Thu, 08/26/2010 - 08:30

 

Those of you who have been waiting patiently to see what Google's Native Client is all about shouldn't have to wonder much longer. With yesterday's bump to version 7, Google Chrome dev now comes with the NaCl plug-in enabled by default -- and as we've seen countless times before, once a feature is turned on it doesn't take long for Chrome developers to pounce on it.

So, what is Native Client all about? It's Google open source tech which allows native code (the kind of code which powers your favorite desktop apps) to run inside your browser. Assuming that browser is Google Chrome, of course, because no one else sports NaCl support yet. Native code in the browser should mean the arrival of Web apps that truly compete with desktop apps in terms of performance -- which could be a big boost to things like online media converters and photo editors. At the very least, you'll be able to play Quake in Chrome.

If you want to see Native Client in action, Google has a gallery of NaCl demo ports you can check out -- or at least you're meant to be able to check them out. Both Chrome dev and Canary responded with a "missing plug-in" message when i tried to load them, even though Native Client was enabled (as you can see in my screenshot).

The dev channel update was actually quite a major one, though it mostly contained bugfixes and cleaned up code. The full log of revisions is available here.

update: as reported in the comments, you need to add the --enable-nacl flag to your shortcut. I've done that, and the demos still don't load, however. The missing plug-in message did disappear at least...

 

Google Chrome Dev Hits Version 7

Submitted by admin on Thu, 08/26/2010 - 03:21

The Chromium developers have really redefined versioning at least when it comes to their web browser. The browser that made its first appearance in 2008 has now reached version 7 in the developer channel, with the likelihood that the beta and stable channels will follow suite later this year.

Usually, a major leap in version correlates to a big change in a product. Not so with Google Chrome 7, as the first release fixes one issue for all operating systems, one Mac specific issue and stability fixes for the Chrome Frame feature.

google chrome 7

That’s not really anything to get excited about, some would even go so far to state that the only reason Chrome accelerates the versioning is to beat Internet Explorer and Opera who currently sit tight in the first two spots with versions 9 and 10 respectively.

But it is only a matter of time until Google Chrome manages to get ahead of those two browsers. Will the developers top there, or will we see releases of Google Chrome 15 in two year’s time?

Users who want to download the latest dev release of Google Chrome 7 can do so at the official dev channel download page.

Chrome Pig extension checks Gmail, takes screenshots -- and lets you set clipboard images as wallpaper!

Submitted by admin on Wed, 08/25/2010 - 11:00

 

In general, I prefer Chrome extensions which don't try to do too much. Do one thing, and do it well is a good general rule, after all. However, once in a while a Swiss-knife extension crops up which is filled to overflowing with useful features and just begs to be installed.

Enter Chrome Pig. Yes, it's weirdly named. Yes, it includes a somewhat random mish-mosh of features, but dang, are they handy ones. Chrome Pig can:

  • Screenshot an entire page, the viewable portion, or a selected region
  • Check Gmail for unread messages (you must be signed in)
  • Open supported files types in the Google Docs previewer
  • Edit a page's CSS to your liking
  • Re-enable right click on sites which disable it
  • Search the site you're currently browsing
  • Open the current page in IE
  • Set a clipboard image to your desktop wallpaper

I've put the last one in bold because it's a feature which you would think should be included by default in a Web browser. Firefox, Opera, and IE can all do this, but Chrome can't? Why? At any rate, problem solved! With Chrome Pig installed, just right click and copy an image, click its browser action button, and set the clipboard image to your wallpaper -- it will even resize, center, or tile.


Some of Chrome Pig's features -- lyric search, form fill, and translate, for example -- I can do without. The configuration page offers checkboxes to disable unwanted items, though they still appeared in the drop-down after multiple disable/enable attempt and a browser restart. Hopefully the developer will address this issue in a coming update.

That shortcoming aside, I'm happily adding Chrome Pig to my extensions -- it'll replace two other and add a couple additional features which will come in handy.

New Flock Browser Based On Chromium

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/24/2010 - 11:54
Foreword: When we released Google Chrome almost two years ago, we also released the source code under an open-source license. Just as Firefox, WebKit, and other open source projects helped to drive the web forward, we wanted to follow suit and ensure that others could use the code we developed to make their products better. The Chromium codebase provides a complete browser to build on, so that if you want to focus on one particular piece, such as drastically changing the user interface, you can do that without having to worry about how to get amazing performance in the rest of the browser.
 

 

Recently, Flock released a new beta version of their browser built on top of the Chromium codebase. For those of us in the Chromium project, this is extremely exciting and encouraging. We believe that users having a choice between multiple browsers is a great thing, as it spurs innovation and competition, and lets users choose a browser that provides the best experience for them. Flock brings an innovative approach to their "social web browser," and we are glad to welcome them into the Chromium community. As part of that, we wanted to offer the team behind Flock an opportunity to talk about the ideas behind Flock, how Chromium helped them in achieving their goals, and their vision for the future. What follows is a perspective from Clayton Stark, VP Engineering at Flock.
 
When Flock began developing its first web browser five years ago, "the social web" was a small, niche market. Today social is the mainstream web, and this evolution in the market drove our development roadmap. With the new Flock browser, our engineering team focused on designing a straightforward and integrated social dashboard that delivers an experience simple enough for a mass audience. This is where the technology behind Chromium came into the picture for Flock. As Chromium emerged, we saw that not only was there significant improvements to performance, but also apparent was a simple and elegant user interface and architecture across all the various systems.
 
A core goal of new Flock is to keep our users in touch with all of their friends and feeds with a minimum of configuration, and at the same time, make it fun and simple. With all of the users’ feeds and social activity streams flowing into the scrolling sidebar, we knew the performance had to be first-rate, and that techniques we used for earlier versions of Flock were unlikely to perform at scale. With Chromium under the hood, we were able to leverage web workers, and that, combined with the raw horsepower of V8, allowed us to scale the use of the sidebar to manage very large data sets (in the first few weeks after the beta launched we saw a few hundred million activities flowing into Flock’s sidebar). Most importantly, benchmark testing shows us that New Flock with Chromium performs in the top-tier of all browsers available in the market.
 
Clearly the web is evolving very quickly, and we are seeing more and more people discovering content through their friends. The Flock team is energized by the big developments coming fast in this emerging, interest-graph-enabled web, and we have a roadmap in front of us that we are really excited about. The browsing platform needs to continue to mature at a rapid pace to support the dramatic changes in online user behavior. And, as it does, we already see the performance and power in Chromium that we need to allow us to focus on the innovations we want to bring forward, on top of the platform.
 
So, I’d like to send out a huge thanks on behalf of the Flock team to all those who have contributed to the Chromium project. Your work has made our project possible, and made new Flock our best release ever.
 

Chrome extensions with right-click context menus coming soon! And your chance to win a Chrome hoodie...

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/24/2010 - 09:00

In a move that is surely an effort to keep pace with Firefox's helter-skelter development of Jetpack, Chrome Beta now has a context menu API!

There's also a bunch of other new APIs, the most exciting being the Omnibox API. Imagine Chrome's built-in search engines (type 'Amazon', then a space, and then a book name -- it searches Amazon!), but with extension access. Type the name of an extension into the Omnibox, and then any further input is redirected to the extension. Actually, having said this is an exciting addition, I'm really not sure what an extension would do with it... Perhaps something Ubiquity-esque?

The new Infobar API might be of interest, too. You know that blue bar that appears when Chrome asks you whether you want a page to be translated? Well, extensions can now pop those up for you. I can see security and privacy extensions like LastPass making use of them, or an extension that alerts you when a page you're visiting has an 'official Chrome extension' (you know, instead of that awful JavaScript hack...).

Oh, and if you make an extension (featuring the new APIs? It's not clear), let Google know and they might send you a free Chrome hoodie! Hooray.

New in Google Chrome Beta: More Extension APIs, Free Hoodies

Submitted by admin on Mon, 08/23/2010 - 20:10
Since we launched the Google Chrome extension system, one of the most frequent requests we’ve gotten is to add the ability to integrate with the context menu (the menu that pops up when you right-click on a link, image, or web page).
 

 
Now in Google Chrome Beta, developers can do just that. The new context menu API allows extension developers to register menu items for all pages or for a subset of pages. Developers can also register menu items for specific operations, like right-clicking on an image or movie. For example, you could create an extension that makes it easy for users to share interesting images from images.google.com with their friends on Google Buzz.
 
Some users have lots of extensions installed. To help these users avoid ending up with gigantic unwieldy context menus, Google Chrome automatically groups multiple menu items from the same extension into a sub-menu.
 

 
We’d also like to announce two new experimental APIs. These APIs aren’t quite ready for prime-time yet, but we’re really excited about them and couldn’t wait to get your feedback.
  • The omnibox API allows extension developers to integrate with the browser’s omnibox. With this API, you can build custom search support for your favorite website, keyboard macros to automate tasks, or even a chat client right into the omnibox.
  • The infobars API allows extension developers to display infobars across the top of a tab. These infobars are built using normal HTML, so they can be heavily customized and interactive.
For the complete list of new extension APIs in Google Chrome beta, see the docs. And let us know if you make something cool. If we like it, we’ll send you a free extensions hoodie and may even feature you in the gallery.
 

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!
 

Get your apps ready for the Chrome Web Store!

Submitted by admin on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 13:10

Since our announcement of the Chrome Web Store at Google I/O, our team has been hard at work preparing for our launch later this year. Today we’re making the first step towards this milestone by making available a developer preview of the Chrome Web Store.

Developers can now start uploading apps and experiment with packaging them, installing them in Chrome (using the latest Chrome dev channel) and integrating our payments and user authentication infrastructure.

To get started, take a look at our recently updated documentation for installable web apps, which explains how to prepare and package your apps. You should also review some additional documentation we just released on the store’s licensing and user authentication features.

To upload your app, you’ll need to use the upload flow of the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery .

When the Chrome Web Store launches, it will replace the current gallery, featuring a completely new design for users to discover great apps, extensions and themes all in one place. Until then, only you can see the apps you upload - they will not be visible to other visitors of the gallery during this developer preview. In the meantime, you can continue to use the gallery for publishing Chrome extensions and making them available to Chrome users.

We look forward to sharing more news about the store and its features over the next weeks. Meanwhile, we encourage you to subscribe to our developer discussion group for apps and look for updates on the Chromium blog.

Security improvements and registration updates for the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery

Submitted by admin on Thu, 08/19/2010 - 13:00

Since we introduced extensions in Google Chrome, we focused on making the platform more robust, by continuously exposing new APIs to developers. This has helped our extensions gallery blossom where more than 6,000 extensions are listed today and more than 10 million extensions are downloaded by Chrome users every month.

We designed security into the extensions system from day 1 but we’re always looking for more ways to protect users. So, today, we are introducing two significant changes in the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery: a developer signup fee and a domain verification system.

The developer signup fee is a one-time payment of $5. It is intended to create better safeguards against fraudulent extensions in the gallery and limit the activity of malicious developer accounts. Starting today, this fee will be required to publish extensions, themes and soon apps in the gallery. We are waiving the fee for developers who already registered with the gallery (specifically before 11am PST today), so that they can continue to update their extensions and publish new items without paying the fee.

Domain verification is another addition that we believe will protect users and developers alike. Developers will be able to associate their extensions (and soon their apps) with domains they own or manage using Google’s Webmaster Tools. This way, they can clearly associate their extension with their brand and website, which in turn will help users identify “official” extensions in the gallery.

We believe that these are important improvements to the security of the gallery. We understand that changes like these can create a lot of questions, so please reach out to us on our developer discussion group for extensions.

Chromium hits version 7

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/17/2010 - 14:00

 

Get ready, Google Chrome users -- version 7 is now a little more official, with Chromium's snapshot builds making the leap today.

While the number has changed, I didn't notice any significant changes at first glance -- other than a broken sync window which was totally blank (and will no doubt be fixed immediately). Google's accelerated release schedule for Chrome means you're likely going to see version bumps more frequently. Anyone want to place bets on where we'll be at this time next year? 9? 10?

Chrome's dev channel will likely be bumped in the coming days. If you want to make the jump now, grab a Chromium snapshot build.

 

Chromium Hits Version 7 As The Chrome Train Keeps Speeding Along

Submitted by admin on Tue, 08/17/2010 - 03:02

It looks like Google wasn’t lying when they said they planned to more rapidly iterate their Chrome web browser. Today brought the initial release of version 7 of Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on. If all goes as planned, this latest iteration should begin to trickle into the Chrome stream in just a few weeks.

It wasn’t even a week ago that version 6 of Chrome hit the beta stage. While the stable build of Chrome is still stuck on version 5 (5.0.375.126, to be exact), given the rate at which Google is refreshing the beta channel (just about daily), you can probably expect 6 to go stable shortly. Once that happens, builds of version 7 should start making their way into the dev branch of Chrome.

Google has stated that they hope to ship a new version of Chrome every six weeks now.

So what’s new in Chromium version 7? Not too much as far as I can tell right now. Google continues to tweak the UI of the browser a bit, but all of the major features seem the same. That said, version 7 of Chromium does feel noticeably snappier than the latest builds of version 6 of Chrome. Both the beta and dev channel versions of Chrome 6 have seemed slightly buggy over the past week or so. Chromium 7 feels much more solid.

One thing still not enabled by default in Chromium 7 are Chrome Web Apps. While you can get them to work by enabling the appropriate flag, Google clearly doesn’t feel they’re ready for prime time yet. The promise at I/O was to have them ready for “later this year,” so here’s hoping it’s something Google does choose to turn on in version 7 eventually.

But if not, it may only be another few weeks until Chromium 8.

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