Adobe Flash remains a popular attack vector for malware authors. In addition to a seemingly never-ending supply of security flaws, bad guys know that people who use Flash often ignore the updater's prompts. That leaves users in an even more tenuous position, since they're still vulnerable to attacks Adobe has already patched.

That's one big advantage to Google Chrome's internal Flash plug-in. Since updates are delivered silently in the background to users, the internal plug-in is always up-to-date. This keeps everyone as safe as possible, but Chrome offers one more way to protect its users: sandboxing. By running unfamiliar Web code in its isolated sandbox, Chrome can execute that code in a safe environment -- where it can't harm your operating system.

Back when Google first announced internal Flash, one of their stated goals was "to further protect users by extending Chrome's 'sandbox' to web pages with Flash content." According to revision 66022, Google is making good on their promise. Sandboxed Flash is now supported in the Chromium source code, and should be available to Windows users of Canary and Chrome Dev very soon. A quick look through the source code seems to indicate that Chrome can sandbox not only its own internal Flash plug-in, but also the traditional Adobe version -- as long as it's version 10.1.103.19 or better.

This is great news for Chrome users. It was already an incredibly difficult browser to exploit, and sandboxing Flash will add another layer of armor to its defenses.

With support for four different operating systems, three official build channels (four on Windows) and the Chromium open source browser all being worked on feverishly by Google, there's a chance that some updates aren't going to make much difference to you. The Chrome Beta 8.0.552.200 likely falls into that category. While the new build does include several fixes for other platforms (like mitigating a bug with NetNanny on Windows), the release is jam-packed with tweaks to Chrome OS.

Network and wireless-related code has received a lot of attention -- from retrieving your data plan from your cellular provider to 3G activation. Revision 65021 also mentions chrome:mobilesetup, from where you'll be able to activate and deactivate your connection. You can't, of course, fire up a Beta version of Chrome OS yet, but if you could you'd notice several minor interface tweaks and changes to wording. Missing icons have been added, the log-in screen now tells new users "Let's get started!" and "Shutdown" text has been changed to "Shut Down." These are the kind of granular changes you'd expect to see being applied just before taking the wraps off something, so maybe we're finally getting close to either the launch of the Chrome Web Store or Chrome OS itself -- or both!

As for changes that affect the rest of us, there aren't many. Among them: the Hunspell dictionary has been updated to the most recent version, and app tabs should now come to the foreground after you launch one from the apps section of your New Tab page.

There are many, many extensions currently available for Google Chrome in the Chrome Extension Gallery -- over 8,000 in fact -- from both third-party developers and from Google themselves. Yesterday, Google announced the addition of official Chrome extensions for Google Calendar, Docs, and YouTube.

The Google Calendar extension adds quick access to your upcoming events and lets you add new events directly from websites like Facebook. A green plus sign will pop up indicating that it's found an event, allowing you to quickly insert it into your Calendar with location information if it's detected.

Google Docs gets a Web Clipboard extension that allows you to copy and paste text and images to and from the Google Docs online clipboard, for use across multiple browser windows. Handy if you're a heavy Docs user, as Matthew mentioned in his previous coverage.

Last but not least, Google's got a YouTube Feed extension that keeps an eye on your favorite videos and notifies you when new videos are available in your YouTube homepage feed. It also brings the social elements of ratings, likes and uploads from your friends to Chrome with direct access straight from the extension. Great for avid YouTube users.

These official Chrome extensions and many more are available, of course, from the Chrome Extensions Gallery.

If you're old enough, you probably remember what a RAM disk is. Back in the olden days, to squeeze every last bit of juice out of your computer (usually for the purpose of playing Doom), you could load a program into a RAM disk -- a virtual drive made out of spare RAM. As I'm sure you know, RAM is a lot faster than your hard drive

Fast forward to today, and most computers have a lot of spare RAM. Unless you're editing large multimedia files, you're probably using only a fraction of your RAM. Why don't we use a little bit of it to speed up our surfing of the Web?

Browsers save a lot of data to the hard drive. Every image, so that you don't have to download it every time you visit a page, is saved to the hard drive. That's when you experience the 'grind' of loading (or reloading) a tab that you haven't looked at recently -- the browser is loading data from the hard drive.

With a RAM disk, you can make the browser always load from memory. This speeds up the entire browsing experience by a significant margin. The browser starts in a flash, switching between tabs feels faster, and page load times can be reduced by 20% or more!
To get started, you need Dataram's excellent RAMDisk software. It's free, unless you want to create RAM disks over 4GB in size (which you really don't need to do).

Once that's installed, you need to configure your RAM disk. Size-wise, 500MB should be fine -- and make it a FAT32 partition. Click 'Start RAMDisk' at the bottom.

Click through to the Load and Save tab and enable Load Disk Image at Startup and Save Disk Image on Shutdown; the default filenames are fine. You don't need to enable Autosave. If any warnings are generated, don't worry about it -- just click OK.

Now, head over to My Computer (Start > Computer) and note the drive letter of the new RAM disk. Double click it and create a new folder called BrowserCache -- in other words, you are creating E:\BrowserCache (where 'E' might be another letter).

Finally, it's time to move your Firefox or Chrome cache onto the new RAM drive.

Google Chrome

• Close all open Chrome tabs and windows
• Right click your Chrome shortcut (the one you use to open the browser), select Properties
• In the Target window, move your cursor to the end of the path, after chrome.exe
• Type --disk-cache-dir="E:\BrowserCache" (it might be D: or F: or...) Make sure there is no trailing slash
• Click OK
• Click the shortcut to launch Chrome

Mozilla Firefox

• Type about:config into the address bar, accept the warning ("I'll be careful, I promise!")
• Right click > New > String
• Type browser.cache.disk.parent_directory into the box and press OK
• Type the path of your BrowserCache directory -- E:\BrowserCache (where 'E' might be another letter); press OK
• Close all open Firefox tabs and windows
• Open the browser again

Benchmarks & conclusions

Measuring the real-world improvement of a RAM disk is tricky. Using the Chromium Benchmarking tool, I found that page load times were reduced by around 20%. Shutting down and restarting the browser is also a lot quicker.



I found it hard to measure the performance improvement of tab switching. I think tab content is still loaded from the operating system swap/page file, which is still stuck on the hard drive.

If you have any other tips for speeding up the browser cache, leave a comment!

I thought the Web had gotten over the irritating conception that omitting vowels from domain names somehow makes them sound cooler. Alas, LinkPeelr proves me wrong.

Domain name aside, this is a handy service. You feed it with a shortened URL, click Peel, and you get to see where it leads. A nice feature is the ability to easily repeat the process. This is handy in case a shortened URL points to another shortened URL, which only then points to the actual destination. In this case, all you do is simply hit Peel again, and LinkPeelr reveals the destination once more.

I took Download Squad's URL and shortened it with goo.gl, and then I took the goo.gl URL and shortened that with bit.ly, and LinkPeelr worked as advertised. It was very fast, too.

Perhaps more useful than the site itself is its Chrome extension. After installing it, you can hover over any shortened URL and get a nice-looking tooltip with its destination. I say "nice-looking" because it's not styled as a default Windows tooltip; they've applied their own formatting, and it's rather swanky. The only niggle I've experienced with the add-on is that it truncates URLs that are too long, which it really shouldn't do.

Yesterday, Google delivered a major update to Chrome Beta users, bumping the version to 8.0.552.28. The changelog for this release is a doozy, and runs down loads of security updates, UI tweaks, and plumbing for features which are still coming soon (like Cloud Print and password sync).

You'll also find plenty of new experimental features on the Chrome Beta about:flags page. The big addition, however, is the arrival of the built-in PDF viewer. Chrome's viewer currently offers a major advantage over Adobe Reader when it comes to security -- sandboxing -- which helps prevent malicious PDFs from successfully attacking your computer.

Chrome's internal Flash plug-in has also been updated, as has the V8 JavaScript engine, and a ton of sync-related code has been added (doing a ctrl+f on the SVN log for sync will turn just about your whole scrollbar yellow). Beta users can now set an encryption passphrase to secure their data and apps are now included by default. Maybe that means we'll be able to download some from the Chrome Web Store soon...

Dev channel users should also have an update ready this morning -- which brings a new version of the internal Flash plug-in.

Google Chrome 9 has arrived for Dev channel users, and while the list of changes in 9.0.570.0 is a lengthy one you're not going see any major differences. Not just yet, anyway.

A number of the updates lay the groundwork for features that will be "coming soon." There's been a lot of work focused around Cloud Print, for example. Google Instant integration has also been tweaked, and a number of small UI issues have been touched up. The extension system received a lot of attention, with tweaks being made to both the filesystem and sidebar APIs.

Among the more significant additions are things like the internal DNS resolver (which arrived in Chromium recently) and password sync. Google's V8 JavaScript engine has been bumped to v2.5, and don't forget about Chrome's hardware acceleration features -- they haven't been turned on by default just yet, but work continues. They are on the roadmap for the final release of Chrome 9.

Back in mid-October, I mused that the Chrome Web Store might be getting ready to open its doors, but according to MediaMemo's Peter Kafka the launch isn't going to happen any time soon.

Based on his discussions with developers who are building Web apps for Chrome, prevailing sentiment is that the Chrome Web Store will now open some time in early December. While some devs remain optimistic that a mid-November launch could still happen, Google has already missed launch targets -- casting severe doubts.

Interestingly, Kafka also mentions that some developers report receiving monetary "encouragement" directly from Google -- one individual acknowledged receive a $15,000 check. The Chrome Web Store remains enough of an enigma that these delays won't adversely affect it -- but we'd sure like to get a look at it.

Here's hoping the beta launch happens before the year is out.

If you're like me, you may have tried to force Google Chrome's password into action already. It's been possible to add passwords to sync for quite some time via a command line switch, though I found that Chrome would simply spin its wheels once you tried to log in to your account after adding the switch.

As of this revision on October 21, password sync was officially enabled by default -- though it didn't work for me in Chromium yesterday. Tonight, however, an update was pushed to Chrome Canary (8.0.561.0) and password sync now appears to be fully functional.

Those of you running Canary, head to your wrench menu and check your Personal Stuff tab. You should see passwords listed among the sync data choices -- and it should already be checked if you have everything set to sync.

So you just hunkered down to read a glorious thousand-word epic about why the Web loves cats -- only to find yourself staring at hundreds of comments which ruined your reading experience with their harshness. If only you'd had some sort of filter for your browser which could hide those sections so you could read in peace!

There's shutup.css, which automatically blocks comments on every site it supports -- but for Chrome users, Comment Blocker is a much more flexible option. It not only blocks comment sections on most sites, but it also allows you to whitelist or blacklist URLs -- either individually, using the black and white buttons above, or by creating filter patterns in the Comment Blocker options.