Google Chrome 7 stable version has been released and it is already available for Windows, Mac and Linux. The latest version is Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 to be precise.

Google Chrome Stable Hits Version 7
Sticking to its promise of 6 month release cycle, Google Chrome has released Google Chrome 7 for Windows, Mac and Linux users a day ago. The latest release brings in hundreds of bug fixes and other improvements. There is a major boost to speed as well.

According to Google, the latest Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 comes with a number of bug fixes, an updated HTML5 parser, and file API and directory upload via input tag and a number of new features. Apart from these enhancements, the new Google Chrome 7 closed a number of major security holes as well. You can find more information at Chromium Security page.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer(IE) is going down and fast. According to a recent study, Internet Explorer market share is below 50% for the first time in 11 years. And the major beneficiaries of this downward spiral of IE are obviously Mozilla Firefox, which got a speed boost recently through its new JaegerMonkey javascript engine, and Google Chrome, which is growing from strength to strength with every new release.

Download Google Chrome 7
If you are already using Google Chrome in your Ubuntu, all you need to do is a "sudo apt-get upgrade". As you all should know already, Google Chrome automatically installs Google repository in Ubuntu and hence you get the latest Google Chrome updates without doing anything new. Otherwise you could simply download the latest Google Chrome 7 from here.

Browser wars has never been so intense and it seems the real winners are going to be the open source browsers. I have been using Chromium and Firefox for years now and it's really heartening to see them winning against the much bigger rival. On a final note, you may also want to learn how Chromium is different from Google Chrome.

Bleeding-edge Chrome users -- especially those using Macs -- have at least one very good reason to like Chrome's recently-added about:labs page. First and foremost, it provides an easier way to enable and disable features that were previously buried behind command line switches.

In a posting on the Chromium-dev board, Google's Ben Goodger has some encouraging news for about:labs fans. Goodger wants Chrome developers to get their experimental features added to Labs, so expect to see plenty of future additions as Googlers tinker.

At the same time, Goodger wants to make it more clear that Labs features are experiments -- meaning users could very well mix the "chemicals" improperly and have Chrome blow up in their faces. That's certainly the case with Chrome's accelerated 2D canvas switch in the current Dev channel build.

As such, there's a re-name coming so that the page sounds a bit less friendly. Perhaps about:danger? about:itsatrap? Maybe they should also change the background color to red or slap a sign on the page...

A month ago, when Google unveiled Instant, their new search-as-you-type feature, I thought it sounded great except for one little thing: I don’t use google.com that often to search anymore. That doesn’t mean I don’t use Google — I do — I just use it in Chrome’s Omnibox (the URL/Search box that’s baked into the browser). And I’m hardly alone there. When asked when Instant would be making it to browsers search boxes, Google stated that it would come “in the next few months“. Luckily for Chrome, that’s happening much quicker.

As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.

To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted a very lightweight container based on RIFF. While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes per image, it is extensible to allow authors to save meta-data they would like to store.

While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image.

To help you assess WebP’s performance with other formats, we have shared a selection of open-source and classic images along with file sizes so you can visually compare them on this site. We are also releasing a conversion tool that you can use to convert images to the WebP format. We’re looking forward to working with the browser and web developer community on the WebP spec and on adding native support for WebP. While WebP images can’t be viewed until browsers support the format, we are developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. We plan to add support for a transparency layer, also known as alpha channel in a future update.

We’re excited to hear feedback from the developer community on our discussion group, so download the conversion tool, try it out on your favorite set of images, and let us know what you think.

We’re excited to see developer interest in the upcoming Chrome Web Store, particularly around installable web apps. Many of you have also asked about how extensions and apps differ, and how apps can leverage extension behavior.

To answer these questions and more, we’ve published a new article to help you decide between building extensions and building apps. In the article, you’ll read about how apps and extensions vary from the user’s perspective and how they compare in their internal architecture and capabilities. We’ve also included a deep dive on the concept of packaged apps as a blend of app and extension behaviour.

We hope this article helps clarify the distinction between pure extensions, packaged apps, and hosted apps so that you can choose the approach that makes the most sense for your work and your users. To learn more about installable webs apps and ask questions to our team, check out our discussion group. We look forward to getting your feedback!

We’re excited to share with you some new features that we just added to the developer preview of the Chrome Web Store:

Starting today, you can sign up for a Google Checkout merchant account via your developer dashboard. If you’re planning to use Chrome Web Store Payments to charge for apps, you’ll need to complete this setup before you can accept payments. If you already have a merchant account with Google Checkout, you’ll be able to associate it with your items in the store. Signing up for Chrome Web Store Payments is currently available to developers based in the US who have a US bank account. We’re working hard to also enable payments for international developers and will update you with a blog post once we have more details. If you have more questions about setting up your merchant account, see this help article we created.

We also added the ability to see how your app will appear in the store. When you preview an uploaded app, you’ll see our new design of the app’s landing page. As before, your apps are only visible to you during the developer preview until the store launches later this year.

We added several options to help you customize this page with your own header image and a larger icon. You can also upload promotional images for your app now, which will appear as banners whenever your app is featured in the store. To learn more about these new options, we encourage you to read our guidelines about creating good images and icons for apps in the store.

We’ll continue to work on the web store design and add polish, but with today’s launch you can get your app’s landing page ready for the launch. For questions and feedback, we invite you to join our developer discussion group and come back to the Chromium blog for more announcements about the Chrome Web Store.

Today, we’re very happy to take the Beta tag off of Google Chrome Frame and promote it to the Stable channel. This stable channel release provides our most polished version of Google Chrome Frame to date, allowing users to access modern web technologies like HTML5 on legacy browsers. You now can download the stable version of Google Chrome Frame and users of the Beta will be automatically updated to it in the days ahead. If you’re an IT administrator, we’ve also posted an MSI installer for deploying Google Chrome Frame in your network.

When Google Chrome Frame went into beta in June, the team set aggressive goals for speed and stability before delivering a stable channel release. We wanted it to start much faster and to reduce crashes by an order of magnitude. After months of polishing, Google Chrome Frame now starts three times faster on Windows Vista and Windows 7 and the most common conflicts with other plug-ins have been fixed.

Thanks in part to how simple it is to enable rendering with Google Chrome Frame, sites like DeviantART, Hootsuite, and github have added support, and Ruby on Rails is making a better-performing, more standards compliant experience the default for all users of Rails apps. Google applications like Orkut, Google Docs, and YouTube have already begun adding Google Chrome Frame support. Gmail and Google Calendar are planning to adopt Google Chrome Frame in the near future to improve performance and ease the transition for users as they drop support for legacy browsers.

A stable release is just the beginning for Google Chrome Frame. We’ve set aggressive goals for future releases: we’re working on making start-up speed even faster and removing the current requirement for administrator rights to install the plug-in. Expect more improvements and features in the near future, as we plan to release on the same schedule as Google Chrome.

We would not have made it this far without strong community support and feedback. The users and contributors to the preview versions have helped improve and shape the product in huge ways. If you’d like to get involved or just see what’s coming soon, you can subscribe to the new beta channel or if you are adventurous, try the dev channel to experience the very latest. The whole team continues to listen to your feedback through our project forum and we look forward to working with you to improve Google Chrome Frame even further.

The Google Chrome team is hitting the road. From now through October, we’re giving 21 talks about HTML5 and related Google Chrome topics at 16 events, in 16 cities and 9 countries, and on 4 continents. Phew!

Check out our schedule below. Registration for almost all these events is open, so come say hi and learn a thing or two about HTML5.

Incognito Mode or Private Browsing mode allows users of Google Chrome/Chromium to browse the web without a trace of it. Well, almost. I mean, browsing in incognito mode only keeps Google Chrome/Chromium from storing information about the websites you've visited. The websites you visit may still have records of your visit. So how do you make Incognito mode default for Google Chrome and Chromium in Ubuntu, lets explore.

Incognito Mode in Google Chrome and Chromium

• If you haven't tried incognito mode in Google Chrome yet, try it once and get a feel of it. You can activate Incognito mode by using the shortcut SHIFT+CTRL+N in Linux(while the browser is already open, ofcourse). Or you could use the Google Chrome/Chromium settings menu.

How to make incognito mode default in Google Chrome/Chromium in Ubuntu?

• The following steps should work with all GNOME desktops, but I have tried this on Ubuntu only and hence the title.

• Right click on the top left corner of your top panel on your desktop and select 'Edit Menus'.

• And then select 'Internet' from the left side pane of the new window.

• You will see the Google Chrome and Chromium entries on the right pane. To change Google Chrome settings, double click on Google Chrome.

• Now, as you could see, there is a '%U'(without quotes), include '--incognito'(without quotes) before it. Include space as in the screenshot. Thats it. If you are using Chromium browser, steps are similar. Simply include '--incognito'  before '%U'.

Done. Next time when you start Google Chrome/Chromium, it will open with private browsing mode by default. Give it a try and let me know if you find any issues.

[via ubuntu-tutorials]

Google Instant is great — but I rarely use it. Why? Because I simply don’t go to google.com that often. That’s not to say I don’t search Google a lot — I do — I just use the Omnibox is Chrome for almost all of my searches. When Google launched Instant, they noted that it would be added to browser for people like me “in the next few months“. Well, guess what? It only took them 9 days.

Granted, Google has only enabled Instant as a Chrome Labs, and they have only enabled it for Chromium, the open source browser that Chrome is based on. But most features that come to Chromium, usually find their way to Chrome in relatively short order — though they have to then travel through the different levels of Chrome itself (dev then beta then stable). Sadly, this feature is Windows-only for the time being as well.

Since our previous post, we've made good progress on 2D graphics performance: 2D canvas acceleration is now available in trunk and the canary build by using the --enable-accelerated-2d-canvas command-line switch (coming to the developer channel shortly). We’ve also been hard at work improving our 3D graphics stack. Today, we’re excited to release a set of WebGL demos to help highlight what you can do with the API.

Chromium’s 2D canvas acceleration uses the same GPU process infrastructure as the compositor, which is designed to maintain the same stability and security Chromium has always had. In addition, this system picks the best graphics API to use on each OS that Chromium supports: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux. We haven’t finished implementing accelerated 2D canvas support – there’s no Mac support and some functions are not accelerated yet – but Chromium already achieves some impressive gains on the recent IE9 Platform Preview Test Drive 2D canvas demos:

These early numbers show up to 60x speed improvement over the current version of Google Chrome. With Google Chrome’s fast release cycles, we expect to be able to get these enhancements to users quickly and add new performance improvements over time.

We’re excited to give developers fast 2D graphics, but we think truly hardware accelerating graphics on the web means giving developers access to a programmable 3D graphics pipeline with WebGL. Even with accelerated 2D canvas and SVG, it’s still not possible to achieve many graphics effects with these APIs. (To read more about the progression from dynamic 2D to CSS Transforms and WebGL, check out our recent blog post). With WebGL and 3D CSS, developers can create modern games, impressive photo galleries, 3D data visualizations, virtual environments, and whatever else they can dream up.

To give you a taste for what WebGL can do, we’ve worked with a number of talented artists and developers to create the first round of a series of demos, ranging from a realistic aquarium to a 3D wall of photos. We hope these demos help demonstrate even more immersive experiences made possible with these APIs. So check out our demo gallery with an up-to-date canary build or Chromium build and have some fun with using your GPU in the browser! For a quick peek at some of these demos, you can watch our playlist of preview videos:

Recently, we posted about the work we’re doing to re-architect Chromium’s graphics stack and use the GPU to accelerate rendering. As we mentioned last time, this work will help ensure that developers can take full advantage of emerging graphics standards like 3D CSS and WebGL in Chromium. To get more feedback about these cool new features, we’re enabling hardware compositing along with 3D CSS transforms and WebGL on the trunk (coming soon to the dev channel). These new capabilities are major additions to the web platform, so we wanted to take the time to provide some background information and explain how these new capabilities fit into the web.

SVG and canvas: dynamic 2D

Until recently, it wasn’t possible to create any dynamic (i.e. non-image) graphics on the web without a plug-in. Starting in 2005, this began to change as browsers began to add Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and HTML 2D canvas element support. Both SVG and 2D canvas allow you to compose a 2D image at run time and manipulate it to achieve animation effects, but they vary greatly in their approach to specifying how you draw an image.

<?xml version="1.0"?>
"-//W3C//DTD SVG 1.1//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">

d="M363.73 85.73 C359.27 86.29 355.23 86.73..."/>

*note: ellipses replace many more points

d = document.getElementById("c");
c = d.getContext("2d");
...
i = 25;
while (i--) {
c.beginPath();
...
q = (R / r - 1) * t;
// create hypotrochoid from current mouse position, and setup variables (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypotrochoid)
x = (R - r) * C(t) + D * C(q) + ...
y = (R - r) * S(t) - D * S(q) + ...
if (a) {
// draw once two points are set
c.moveTo(a, b);
c.lineTo(x, y)
}
c.strokeStyle = "hsla(" + (U % 360) + ",100%,50%,0.75)";
// draw rainbow hypotrochoid
c.stroke();
...
} *note: ellipses replace code

The images above were created with SVG and canvas, but as you can see from the code, they approach graphics in a very different way: SVG allows you to provide markup that describes an image, whereas canvas allows you to describe a set of sequential steps that draw an image in JavaScript. These approaches mean that a developer changes an image that’s already been drawn, such as when animating an image, in different ways. Because the browser keeps a full representation of an SVG image, changing just a parameter in the image is enough to cause the browser to redraw the image correctly. With canvas, on the other hand, the developer must clear the image and specify all the steps to draw it again with the desired changes.

Today, modern browsers, including Firefox, Safari, Opera and Google Chrome support creating 2D graphics with these technologies, and Internet Explorer is adding support for them in the upcoming version 9 release.

CSS Transforms: easy to use 2D and 3D effects

Even today, people primarily use apps that don’t strictly require advanced graphics, but eye candy like 3D transforms, transitions and reflections still help improve the experience of everyday tasks. While canvas could be used to create many of these effects, it can’t render them efficiently, and it would be hard to integrate with the other content on the page.

CSS transforms and animations, which first appeared in WebKit in 2007, allow developers to achieve commonly used effects easily by specifying parameters in CSS that are applied to content in the DOM. In 2009, WebKit began adding 3D CSS transforms and effects, which takes flat content on the page and makes it appear as if it were in 3D space.

/* CUBE */
#transitions #cube {
-webkit-transform-style: preserve-3d;
width: 600px;
height: 400px;
position: absolute;
}
#transitions #cube.active {
-webkit-animation-duration: 1s;
-webkit-animation-iteration-count: 1;
-webkit-animation-name: cubedemo;
-webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg);
}
#transitions #cube .face {
position: absolute;
width: 600px;
height: 400px;
display: block;
overflow: hidden;
}
#transitions #cube .front {
-webkit-transform: scale3d(.835,.835,.835) translateZ(200px);
}
#transitions #cube .back {
-webkit-transform: scale3d(.835,.835,.835) rotateY(180deg) translateZ(200px);
}
#transitions #cube .top {
-webkit-transform: scale3d(.835,.835,.835) rotateX(90deg) translateZ(200px);
}

@-webkit-keyframes cubedemo {
0% {-webkit-transform: rotateX(0); -webkit-animation-timing-function: linear; }
50% {-webkit-transform: rotateX(-92deg);-webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in; }
70% {-webkit-transform: rotateX(-84deg); -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in; }
80% {-webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg); -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in; }
95% {-webkit-transform: rotateX(-88deg); -webkit-animation-timing-function: ease-in; }
100% { -webkit-transform: rotateX(-90deg); }
}

As you can see from this example, 3D CSS transforms and animations make it easy to add polished 3D effects to your app. Now that we support hardware compositing in Chromium, it’s easy to perform these transforms on the GPU and display it quickly on screen, so we’ve enabled them along with the compositor. Currently, this functionality is only available in Safari and Google Chrome but Firefox is working on an implementation as well, making it a great option to add impressive effects to your app in the future.

WebGL: Low-level dynamic 3D

While 3D CSS makes it easy to display 2D content so that it looks like it’s in a 3D space, it’s not designed for writing true 3D applications like CAD software or modern games. WebGL, on the other hand, provides access to all the functionality of OpenGL ES 2.0 from JavaScript, and is designed with exactly these types of applications in mind.