Google has dropped offline Gmail support in several operating systems until this summer, when HTML5 upgrade is released.

Macworld

It seems we’ve hit the Verizon Wireless rumor motherload with info one of the hottest sequels you could imagine. Listen up folks, this stuff is hot off the presses from one of our trusted sources.

HTC Droid Incredible 2 with Global 3G

The first HTC Incredible has been one of the most successful Android Phones to date. It’s incredibly versatile and can be considered top of the line with nearly every target market – I found myself recommending it to men, women, teens and everyone in between. Now I’ll be recommending the HTC Incredible 2 (codenamed Vevo) to world travelers as the Incredible 2 comes with Global 3G Connectivity. This could be thanks to a new Qualcomm chip that supports both HSPA and CDMA.

But that’s not all… apparently the Droid Incredible 2 will be white with a white chrome rim and contoured back. Tell me that won’t make for a bad ass sequel to the original DINC!

We’ll keep you posted as we get more details and hopefully pictures to boot. These are still rumors as of now… but we have very good reason to believe their absolutely true and we’re eager to bring you evidence. Stay tuned!

View full post on Android Phone Fans

Google has updated the stable channel of its Chrome web browser. This release is technically labeled Chrome 9, though Google ceased focusing on version numbers some time ago, opting for a rolling, every-six-weeks update schedule.

If you’d like to take the latest version of Chrome for a spin, head over to the Chrome downloads page. If you’re already using Chrome, the update will arrive automatically.

If you’ve tested the beta release of Chrome 9, there won’t be anything new to see in this update. But for those that prefer to stick with the stable channel, Chrome 9 brings several features from the beta channel to prime time — notably, support for 3-D WebGL hardware acceleration. This release also adds support for the new Chrome Web Store, and Chrome Instant, a tool that loads web pages as soon as you start typing in the URL bar.

WebGL, which was originally developed by Mozilla, acts as a bridge between the browser and the desktop hardware acceleration tool OpenGL. The WebGL project gives web developers a way to connect the HTML 5 Canvas tool, which can be used to display complex graphics in the browser without plug-ins like Flash, to the operating system’s native, hardware accelerated graphics engine — in this case, OpenGL. The result is much improved performance for 3-D apps on the web. Google notes a couple of demos you can try out, the Google Body experiment in particular does a nice job of showcasing the power of WebGL.

This release is also notable for being the first stable version of Chrome to include access to the new Chrome Web App Store (U.S. users only). To check it out, just click the new link on the New Tab page.

Chrome Instant mimics Google’s instant search feature when you type a search in the URL bar. If you type a web address, Chrome Instant will start loading the page as you type, which makes getting to your favorite sites a bit faster. The only catch is that Chrome Instant is disabled by default. To turn it on, head to the “basic” tab on Chrome’s preferences page and check the “Enable Instant” option under Search.

See Also:

• Chrome Add-on Kills Tracking Cookies
• Chrome 10 ‘Obliterates’ Your Browsing History
• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Chrome Gets New ‘Crankshaft’ Engine, Syncing, WebGL Support
• Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web

View full post on Webmonkey

That’s right $20,000 to any hacker that can successfully comprise a windows 7 machine running it’s Chrome Browser via a security vulnerability written in Google-written code and  sandbox escape.

CanSecWest’s Pwn2Own Contest is an annual event pitting some of the world’s best security analyst and exploit writers against the most popular web browsers and mobile devices. After last years contest, Google’s Chrome Browser was the only browser left unscathed. Given the money and prizes being offered and obvious publicity involved with successfully comprising the Chrome Browser, chances are good that the cross-hairs are already being lined up on this web browser.

Contest sponsor Tippingpoint ZDI says a successful Chrome hack “must include a sandbox escape”,  and be in Google-written code,  in order to win the $20,000. On day 2 and 3 if competitors are unsuccessful, they will be allowed to use exploits written in non-Google code to potentially comprise the browser. If they succeed on days 2 and 3 ZDI will offer $10000 for a sandbox escape and Google will offer $10000 for the Chrome bug.  In order to fully utilize a sandbox escape the exploit may have to be combined with another vulnerability for full system compromise.

On day 1, Google will offer $20,000 USD and the CR-48 if a contestant can pop the browser and escape the sandbox using vulnerabilities purely present in Google-written code. If competitors are unsuccessful, on day 2 and 3 the ZDI will offer $10,000 USD for a sandbox escape in non-Google code and Google will offer $10,000 USD for the Chrome bug. Either way, plugins other than the built-in PDF support are out of scope.

CanSecWest is also offering cash prizes for anyone using unpublished browser security holes to remotely launch code on Windows 7 or Mac OS X machines.

Browser Targets for this Year:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Apple Safari
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome

Each browser will be installed on a 64-bit system running the latest version of Windows 7 or Mac OS X.

For mobile devices the attack surface has been increased to allow attack against the cell phones basebands.

Mobile Targets for this Year:

• Dell Venue Pro – Windows 7
• IPhone 4 – iOS
• Blackberry Torch 9800 – Blackberry 6 OS
• Nexus S – Android

A successful attack against these devices must require less to no user interaction and must comprimise useful data from the phone. Anything that would cost the owner of the device money, ie: silently calling long-distance numbers, eavesdropping on conversations, etc, is within scope.

The contest is being held the 9th, 10th, and 11th of March, 2011 in Vancouver, BC during the CanSecWest Conference. For more information, registration, or to follow the contest visit TippingPoint ZDI’s website.

Source: TippingPoint ZDI

View full post on AndroidSPIN

Microsoft has announced a plug-in for Google’s Chrome web browser that allows Chrome on Windows to play H.264 web video through the HTML5 <video> tag. The new plug-in comes on the heels of Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome and focus on the company’s competing WebM video codec.

You can grab the new Chrome plugin from Microsoft. Microsoft previously released a similar H.264 plugin for Firefox, which also only supports WebM video.

The video move is the latest sign of a collision between the two tech giants, who now compete directly in search, courtesy of Microsoft’s Bing initiative and mobile, where Google’s Android is taking market share and the new Windows Phone 7 is struggling for a foothold. Google has also launched various cloud-based applications that take aim at Office. This week, the two threw punches over search, with Google claiming Microsoft copies its results, and Microsoft complaining the Google perpetrated a sting worthy of a spy novel.

Now the two are sparing over web video. Google has thrown its weight behind the WebM codec, which the company owns, while Microsoft supports H.264. However, Microsoft says that, provided Google makes some changes, it may be willing to support the WebM codec as well.

While HTML5’s video tag promises a native way to watch video in your browser, video codec support among browsers is divided. Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the WebM codec while Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE9 support H.264. As it stands there is no “it just works” solution, which means most websites still use Flash video players.

Microsoft’s H.264 plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome are part of the company’s attempt to be pragmatic — since Windows includes native support for H.264, users should be able to watch H.264 video even if the browser doesn’t support it. On the other side of the coin, Internet Explorer 9 will be able to play WebM video through a similar third-party plug-in.

However, while Microsoft isn’t including native support for WebM in the next version of IE, it doesn’t appear to totally rule out the idea. As part of the plugin announcement, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, outlines some of Microsoft’s problems with the WebM codec. The main problem is that Microsoft is concerned about WebM’s potential patent risks.

Google insists that it owns all of the patents covering WebM and the VP8 video codec. But the company offers no indemnification for costs incurred should a patent lawsuit arise. That means that anyone distributing WebM/VP8 could be on the hook for any patent-related fees that might come up.

Some have dismissed Microsoft’s patent worries as an example of Microsoft spreading “fear, uncertainty and doubt” about WebM, but Microsoft does have history on its side in this case. As Hachamovitch points out, such patent lawsuits often don’t arise until a technology is in widespread use. So just because no one is suing over WebM now, doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Hachamovitch cites the JPEG photo compression format, pointing out that JPEG was around for ten years before the first patent lawsuits appeared. Eventually the patents in question were ruled invalid, but not before millions of dollars were spent defending and licensing JPEG.

Of course the same patent threats potentially hang over H.264, but the MPEG-LA consortium — the governing body that oversees the patents surrounding H.264 — provides a kind of legal buffer between H.264 licensees and any lawsuit.

Surprisingly, Hachamovitch says that, if Google is willing to indemnify WebM users against patent lawsuits, “Microsoft is willing to commit that we will never assert any patents on VP8.” Of course that doesn’t mean other companies won’t, but it would be a huge step forward for WebM if Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon. Google did not respond to a request to comment in time for this story.

For now at least Microsoft has chosen a pragmatic approach — plugins. There will be a WebM plugin for Internet Explorer and H.264 plugins for Firefox and Chrome. In the end, Windows users will be able to watch just about any video on the web regardless of which browser they’re using. It might not be an ideal solution, but it is one that, from the user’s point of view, just works.

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264

View full post on Webmonkey

Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari posted record numbers in January while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer lost ground for the sixth month running, Net Applications says.

View full post on Macworld

Not to be outdone by Mozilla, Google has released a new add-on for its Chrome web browser that allows users to opt-out of online advertising tracking. While Mozilla’s privacy tool is still just a proposal, and involves a new HTTP header, Google’s add-on uses the more practical, cookie-based approach and works today.

The Keep My Opt-Outs add-on works like a very persistant cookie, but this one is working in your favor. The add-on uses Chrome’s internal cookie APIs to set the opt-out flag for each advertising network that participates in the opt-out program created by the ad industry. Not only is it easier than setting those cookies yourself, the add-on ensures that, even if you clear the rest of your cookies, the opt-out cookies remain intact.

While it works, Google’s approach is something of a hack. The add-on intercepts and rewrites cookies, which is not exactly an ideal solution. Still, if you’re a Chrome user and you’ve been looking for a way to stop advertising cookies today, the Keep My Opt-Outs add-on has you covered.

Keep My Opt-Outs also makes a viable alternative to ad-blockers, particularly for those concerned that ad-blocking add-ons are denying their favorite sites much needed revenue. Provided you don’t mind a few advertisements here and there, using the new add-on in conjunction with some smart cookie settings, you can support your favorite sites without forfeiting your privacy. And for those that do use ad blockers, keep in mind that just because the ad is not shown, doesn’t always mean it can’t set cookies.

In the long term, Mozilla’s header-based approach to stopping cookie-based tracking is a better solution, and we expect, if the idea catches on, Chrome and other browsers will support it as well. For those who want something that works today, Google’s new add-on fits the bill.

Footprints photo by Vinoth Chandar/Flickr/CC

See Also:

• Mozilla Plans ‘Do-Not-Track’ Privacy Tools for Firefox
• New Privacy Icons Aim to Save You From Yourself
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data
• Chrome 10 ‘Obliterates’ Your Browsing History

View full post on Webmonkey

Version 10 of Google’s Chrome web browser has entered the dev channel, available to those who enjoy living on the edge. This release features an update to the V8 rendering engine that powers Chrome, a more refined preferences dialog and print and save options for any PDF files you view in Chrome.

If you’re already subscribed to the dev release channel you should be automatically updated. If you’d like to take the dev channel for a spin, Google has instructions on how to switch Chrome channels.

Of course the dev channel releases often have bugs and Chrome 10 is no exception. Commenters on the Google Chrome blog report that Google Sync no longer works with this release. If that happens to you, you might try disabling any startup flags you might have been using with previous releases, which reportedly solves the problem.

Along with the update to the underlying V8 rendering engine, this release features a number of bug fixes (particularly on the Mac platform) and some welcome refinements to the new tabbed preferences dialog. In addition to a better looking UI, the new settings page now has a search box to quickly find the preference setting you’re looking for.

Chrome 10 also features an updated message for the “clear browsing data” option on the preferences page. Instead of just deleting your browsing history and other items, you can now “obliterate the following items from the beginning of time.” We doubt that bit of linguistic whimsy will make it all the way to the stable release of Chrome 10, but it’s certainly more entertaining than the old “clear browsing data” message.

Provided Google sticks with its six week update schedule, Chrome 10 should arrive as a stable release in April 2011.

See Also:

• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’
• Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

View full post on Webmonkey

Google’s Chromium Blog states they are changing Chrome’s HTML5 <video> support to make it consistent with the codecs already supported by the open Chromium project.

Most Web video today uses Adobe’s Flash plug-in, which uses H.264 or other codecs. HTML5 has built-in support for video. Google is supporting the “open” WebM (VP8) and Theora video codecs, and will consider adding support for other high-quality open codecs in the future.

TechCrunch wonders how Google get away with dropping support for H-264 under the guise of “open” when baked into their browser is Flash, an un-open plug-in?

H.264/AVC is widely supported in video cameras, Blu-ray players, and many other devices. But it comes with significant royalty licensing fees, explains C/Net. MPEG LA made H.264 free to use for video that’s streamed for free, but other fees exist for those using the technology in products.

Trend Micro Chairman Steve Chang says “open” is less secure. Speaking to Bloomberg yesterday he said, “Android is open-source, which means the hacker can also understand the underlying architecture and source code.” Apple, he said, has been “very careful about it. It’s impossible for certain types of viruses” to run on the company’s iPhone.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Google has rather nonchalantly dropped a bombshell on the web — future versions of the Chrome browser will no longer support the popular H.264 video codec. Instead Google is throwing its hat in with Firefox and Opera, choosing to support the open, royalty-free WebM codec.

Google says the move is meant to “enable open innovation” on the web by ensuring that web video remains royalty-free. While H.264 is widely supported and free for consumers, sites encoding videos — like YouTube — must pay licensing fees to the MPEG Licensing Association, which holds patents on AVC/H.264

Prior to Google’s announcement, the web video codec battle was evenly split — Firefox and Opera supported the open Ogg and WebM codecs, while Safari and Internet Explorer supported H.264. Google took the egalitarian path and supported all three codecs.

Google’s move away from H.264 makes sense given that Google is already heavily invested in WebM. In fact, the only reason the WebM codec exists is because Google purchased On2, the creators of the VP8 codec. Once Google acquired the underlying code it turned around and released VP8 as the open source WebM project.

There’s been considerable outcry from developers concerned that they now need to support two video codecs to get HTML5 video working on their sites. However, given that Firefox — which has a significantly greater market share than Google’s Chrome browser — was never planning to support the H.264 codec, developers were always going to need to support both codes for their sites to work across browsers.

Google’s decision to drop H.264 from Chrome does raise some questions though. For instance, Android also ships with H.264 and so far Google hasn’t made any announcement regarding the future of H.264 on the Android platform. One of the reasons H.264 has become so popular is that the codec enjoys robust hardware support across devices — whether it’s desktop PCs, mobile devices or set top boxes. While WebM has made some strides in hardware acceleration since it was originally released, it still lags well behind H.264. At least for now it seems that Android most likely needs to continue supporting H.264.

The move also raises questions about YouTube, still the largest video site on the web. Currently the site serves H.264 videos to most browsers, whether through the HTML5 version of the site or using the Flash Player. It seems obvious that Google must be hard at work converting the site to use WebM, but will it continue to support H.264 for those browsers and devices that don’t support the WebM codec? So far Google hasn’t made any announcements regarding YouTube and H.264.

Critics of Google’s decision to drop H.264 support in Chrome point out that Chrome ships with Flash, which, like H.264, is not really an open web technology. Indeed it would seem hypocritical for Google to dump some closed tools while keeping others, but, in Chrome’s defense, Flash is well entrenched in the web and ditching it really isn’t practical. Rather Google’s decision seems to be pragmatic — the company is in a position to take a stand on video codecs and it is doing so before H.264 becomes as entrenched as Flash.

[Google did not respond to a request for comment on this article. A Google Spokesperson tells Webmonkey that the announcement is related to "Chrome only and does not affect Android or YouTube." Presumably both will continue to offer H.264 support. As for Flash, the Spokeperson says, the Chrome announcement "is about the importance we place on open technologies being the foundation of the emerging web platform moving forward." In other words, dropping Flash support isn't practical.]

See Also:

• MPEG LA Extends Web Video Licensing Moratorium Until the End of Time
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• On Web Video Support, Safari Now Stands Alone
• Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox

View full post on Webmonkey

Google has begun distributing test units of its first Chrome OS netbook, the CR-48, and contributor Joel Mathis got his hands on one.

View full post on Macworld

I just received my CR-48 from Google.  After I installed the typical suite of apps that I need to survive (Gmail, Calendar, Tweet Deck, HootSuite, etc).  I went looking for apps that would work well with my phones.  Fiabee caught my attention as soon as I saw that it offered the ability to sync across all my Android devices as well as Chrome.  I downloaded the app onto my phones and installed the web app onto the CR-48.  Fiabee gives an option to sign up for a fiabee account, or through a number of OpenID sites, including Gmail.  I chose the Gmail route.  It was a rather painless experience.  Then I went to the Android market and downloaded the Android version.  After that it was testing time.

These three images are screen shots from the ChromeOS computer.  You can see that Devices, Music, and Home are all shown.  In the top left of the screen you can see that there are two choices for syncing.  First is uploading to your devices and second is upload to Chrome.  There are some limitations to this application for instance, you are limited to uploads under 7 MB.  This is not a huge problem except I was trying to upload some music and one song was too large.  Music can not be streamed from the app on either the desktop or the Android version.  The only way to listen to music is if you download it.  Transfers did not take too long, although uploading is slow even over wi-fi.

Navigation between the devices is very easy.  All devices show up immediately and without a need to configure anything.  If you want to upload something you can decide whether or not to place items in a folder or in the root menu of your Fiabee.  I can see Fiabee becoming a valuable tool in the very near future.  It is going to take some optimization with the uploading speeds, music and video should also be able to be streamed.  As time goes on the need for “Cloud” based offerings is going to grow.  If Fiabee can manage to address these issues and add a little more polish to their app design they have got a good chance at taking the lead in the ChromeOS to Android market.  If you need additional storage for either your phone or the CR-48 you can also purchase a membership to Fiabee Storage, giving you an unlimited storage solution for only 59.99 € a year.

Find Fiabee in the Chrome Web Store here (works with Chrome Browser)

Find Fiabee Android app here

Fiabee QR

View full post on AndroidSPIN

Google had a really big week this week. It started Monday evening when Google VP of Engineering in charge of mobile, Andy Rubin sat in the hot seat with Wall Street Journalist writers Kara Swisher and Walt Mossberg as part of their Allthingsdigital, D: Dive Into Mobile event in San Francisco.  While leading up to the event we were all expecting Rubin to drop both Gingerbread and the Nexus S device however Samsung issued a press release earlier in the day releasing both.

What we did get was a sneak peak at Honeycomb and a new Motorola tablet with an Nvidia Tegra 2 processor. This buttonless tablet showed off the tablet, two pane, version of gmail and the 3d version of Google Maps.  During the interview Swisher and Mossberg asked Rubin a barage of questions about Apple and the competitive landscape and for the most part Rubin either deflected or spoke positively.

One of the key points in the interview was when Rubin eluded to the fact that Android was for “early adopters”. While that was true of teh G1, The Nexus 1 and possibly the Nexus S, the ecosystem has fallen very mainstream.

Andy Rubin also made his second tweet ever reporting that Android was up to 300,000 phone activations per day.

Finally Chrome OS gets launched retail gets pushed back.
On Tuesday just down the road from the allthingdigital soiree Eric Schmidt and the Chrome OS team launched Chrome OS at a press event in San Francisco.  The announced it via a new netbook called the CR-48 which is being released soon under the brand name Google.  In addition to the press in attendance Google is sending out thousands of test netbooks across the country in hopes of creating some more buzz (But not google buzz)

Were you one of the lucky people to get on the CR-48 Beta?

Eric Schmidt Almost CEO of the Decade.
Eric Schmidt’s background is in technology, having worked at one time for Bell Labs, Xerox and Sun Micro Systems and then becoming CEO at Novell. He is also more academic and technical and less a mouthpiece. He’s definitely got the brains and strategy but unfortunately Marketwatch.com fell for Steve Jobs’ show and made Jobs CEO of the decade.

Schmidt joined the likes of Starbucks’ Howard Schultz, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, Cummins Tim Solso, and of course Steve Jobs as Marketwatch.com’s finalists for CEO of the decade.

Source: Marketwatch

Streetview Data Collection Under Fire Again

The Attorney General of Conneticut, Richard Blumenthal, is calling for the release of all of the data collected by Google’s street view teams while in the state of Conneticut.  Google came under fire earlier in the year when it was revealed that in addition to photos and GPS info, streetview information gathering teams also acquired visited URLs as well as personal email addresses.

When that original problem was brought to Google’s attention they quickly enacted better privacy policies and allowed the Federal Trade Commission to look into their data collection policies.  The FTC gave Google a clean bill of health and the problem was thought to go away.

Two sides have quickly formed in this argument the government side headed by Governors like Blumenthal, and not Google but the people. Blumenthal and other government officials want carte blanche access to the data Google collected during their street view gathering, however a group of concerned Americans feel that their personal information is actually safer if Google doesn’t turn it over to the government. We’ll keep an eye on this one…

Source: Seerpress

View full post on AndroidSPIN

PC Magazine has a Google Chrome OS Hands On.

You can install the Chrome browser on your current laptop, and get nearly the same experience, says PC Mag. With Google’s OS everything lives in the cloud.

According to PC Mag, startups take a mere 14 seconds from power off to login. Wake from sleep took less than two seconds. For comaparison, a new 11-inch MacBook Air, which also uses faster solid-state storage instead of a hard drive, takes over half a minute to cold start, and Windows 7 PCs can often take a minute to start.

Chrome OS has no overt file system and hard drive, so you can’t browse folders and files on the local hard drive or storage, but that doesn’t mean you can’t download files from a Web site. When you do, these go into a Download area, which pops up as a small window at the bottom right side of the screen.

The Chrome Web Store not only offers Web applications, but also Chrome customizations like themes and extensions. Any app that you install on the Chrome OS machine will also appear on the New Tab page of any Chrome browser on which you sign into and turn on syncing.

According to PC Magazine;

Google’s Chrome OS may be particularly useful for tablets, in that the browser is fast, runs on many different platforms, and can utilize the strengths of Google’s ad network.

Chrome OS comes with Adobe Flash baked in, says Liliputing.
But while Adobe Flash Player 10.1 provides a decent viewing experience on most Windows and OS X notebooks, users are reporting that they can’t reliably view YouTube videos with resolutions higher than 480p, and the consensus seems to be that Hulu video is watchable, but just barely.

By contrast, the Archos 101 features a 10.1 inch, 1024 x 600 pixel capacitive touchscreen display, a 1GHz ARM Cortex-A8 CPU with support for HD video playback, and runs Google Android 2.2. Prices are expected to start at $299.99 for a model with 8GB of storage.

Laptop Magazine connected the Archos 101 to a large TV not just with an HDMI cable, but with the 101′s full-size USB port to use the HP Wireless HDMI accessory.

The Archos tablet, without phone support, uses the Archos AppsLib, with about 18,000 apps (and growing), about a fifth the size of Google’s Android Market.

The Viewsonic G Tablet features an NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor, 1.3MP video conferencing camera, large 10.1” display, Android 2.2 OS but sports a $529 price tag ($390 at Amazon). Because Google hasn’t certified the G Tablet as eligible for its apps, the slate doesn’t come with the official Android Market. However, it does have a shortcut that links to the Handango web site, where you can download several good apps.

Laptop Magazine reviews a variety of Tablets and likes Apple’s iPad and Samsung’s Galaxy Tab the best.

View full post on dailywireless.org

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Google has rolled out some enhancements to its Chrome web browser, adding a new JavaScript engine, more hardware acceleration, and finalizing its system that keeps all of your copies of Chrome in sync.

The enhancements were debuted as part of a press event for Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store here Tuesday.

The new JavaScript component is called Crankshaft, and it’s built on top of the open source V8 JavaScript engine that currently powers Chrome.

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says the boost makes Chrome 50 times as fast as web browsers were just two years ago when Chrome launched.

“Something that took a minute to happen in JavaScript two years ago can now happen in under a second,” he said.

We haven’t been able to verify Google’s speed claims yet (we’re still at the press event) but you can test out Crankshaft now. It’s available in the bleeding-edge Canary build of Chrome right now.

The syncing feature, which Google has had kicking around in developer and beta releases for months, offers “the same Chrome experience everywhere,” Pichai says. It syncs your bookmarks, preferences, auto-fill information and themes across all copies of Chrome, and you sync up your browsers by logging in to your Google Account. You can choose which datatypes you want to sync and which you don’t.

Also on display were the new WebGL features, which offload the most processor-intensive tasks for graphics and page rendering to the machine’s GPU. The demo featured the familiar “look at how fast the fish swim around the fish tank” method of showing off hardware acceleration, but Google added a nice touch by introducing sharks with lasers coming out of their eyes. The laser beams even refracted when they passed through the glass of the tank.

Google says Chrome 9 beta will have WebGL enabled.

Pichai also showed off some of Chrome’s other recent enhancements, like sandboxing for plug-ins.

He also said Chrome now boasts 120 million users worldwide.

See also:

• Chrome Starts Sandboxing Flash Player
• Chrome Web Store Is Now Open for Developers
• Chrome 8 Arrives
• Mozilla Shows Off Plans for an Open Web App Store

View full post on Webmonkey

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Google unveiled a beta version of its Chrome OS Tuesday morning.

The company showed off the operating system, which has been in development for over a year, during a press event here. Also making an appearance at Tuesday’s event was the Chrome Web Store, which we expected to see launch today. If you’re using the Chrome browser, you can visit the store and start installing apps now.

Chrome OS, which doesn’t go into general release until next year, relies entirely on web-based applications for basic productivity tasks like mail, document editing, photo sharing, social networking and reading news. Its inner workings are based on Google’s own Chrome browser.

To get around the connectivity problem inherent to web-based apps, Google says every Chrome OS laptop will ship with both wi-fi and cellular connections. The company has partnered with Verizon — when you buy a Chrome OS laptop, you get 100MB of free data per month for two years. There are no long-term contracts. If you want to upgrade, you only pay for what you need. Chrome OS users can buy a day pass from Verizon, or choose from a few long-term plans starting at $10 per month.

Acer and Samsung Chrome OS laptops will go on sale in mid-2011, with more OEMs to follow, the company says.

In the meantime, Google is launching a pilot program to get hardware running Chrome OS into developers’ hands. Early adopters can sign up to get a black, unbranded Chrome OS notebook, codenamed “Cr-48.”

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai held one up during the event — it’s a full-sized laptop with a 12.1″ screen, an Intel Atom processor, a world-mode 3G radio, a flash memory drive, and it has a built-in “jailbreaking” mode so you can hack it. Google is also giving away a few of the pilot laptops to its Facebook fans.

From what we’ve seen so far, Chrome OS is extremely fast (the demo we saw was running on the Cr-48 laptop) and, provided you already have a Google account, it literally takes under a minute to get up and running.

Pichai, who has been using ChromeOS for six months, continuously gushed about its speed, which was evident during the demos.

“By building an experience based totally on the web, we’ve made all of the user experiences instant,” he said.

When you launch Chrome OS for the first time, you log in with your Google account and immediately see a grid view of pre-installed web apps like Gmail, Google Reader, a text editor and apps from The New York Times and other partners. All of the apps shortcuts live inside a browser window, so if you want to start surfing, you just type into the URL bar. Chrome OS also has built-in controls for syncing, so any user can log into any Chrome OS laptop and get the desktop and the same experience they’re used to.

From the home screen, you go to the Web Store and install single-serving apps that are enhanced versions of those already available on the web. The download-and-install option gives you a few more niceties, like the ability to answer e-mail, work on your docs and play games when you don’t have a web connection.

The Web Store launched Tuesday in the U.S. with around 500 applications. Other countries and regions will follow soon, Google says.

These installable web apps square well with the cloud-based direction we’re currently heading. Whether you’re reading a book, writing e-mails, or sharing documents, cloud-based apps allow you to stay synced across your phone and all of your computers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed up at Tuesday’s event to drive home his belief the time is right to release Chrome OS.

“We finally have a viable third choice for an operating system on the desktop,” he said.

“We’re now able to build web applications that are at the scale and power of desktop applications,” he said, citing the speed an security innovations made by Firefox, as well as new technologies like HTML5, as the advancements that paved the way to a web-based operating system.

In a round of demos, Amazon showed off two apps — a web app version of its Kindle reader, and a product browser called Windowshop. We saw apps from Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. They both looked like a rich news readers, with enhanced navigation heavy on HTML5 and JavaScript, all the recent headlines, photos and videos loaded dynamically. Curiously, there were no ads on display in the apps.

Many of the apps are free or available under a freemium model. Some of them, like games, cost $2 or $3 each. You buy apps from the Chrome Web Store using Google Checkout, so you need to have a Google account to buy apps.

Google has also partnered with Citrix for easy installation of enterprise apps with secure, company-only sharing features. The Citrix platform will launch during the first half of 2011, the company says.

We’ve seen hints of the Chrome OS and Web Store launch in recent weeks. In Novemeber, rumors that OEMs were prepping laptops loaded with Chrome OS surfaced. Just last week, Google debuted Chrome 8, the first version of its web browser with the built-in ability to plug into the Chrome Web Store. TechCrunch uncovered an e-mail from Google telling developers to get ready for the Web Store launch. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the company unceremoniously posted a page for getting started with its Google Cloud Print service that lets you print a page from a laptop or mobile to any printer hooked up to a Windows PC with internet access.

Google admits there is still much work to be done on Chrome OS, and the bug tracking page shows numerous stability problems and hardware shortcomings.

“We’ve made amazing progress but we still have a lot of work to do,” Pichia said.

If you want to try it out today, you can join Google’s developer program and install Chrome OS on a wide range of hardware. But as Google VP of engineering Linus Upson said Tuesday, the process is still rather hairy for non-geeks.

“The question is, how comfortable are you compiling from source,” he joked.

See also:

• Rumor: First Chrome OS Notebooks Land This Month
• Google Chrome OS: Ditch Your Hard Drives, the Future Is the Web
• Chrome Store Possibly Launching Dec. 7
• Chrome Web Store Is Now Open for Developers
• Chrome 8 Arrives
• Mozilla Shows Off Plans for an Open Web App Store

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Today is an important day for Google Chrome. Google will launch Chrome Web Store (chrome.google.com/webstore), a marketplace for web apps, and Chrome OS, the first browser-centric operating system. Here’s the live Google feed.

Speed, simplicity and security are the major themes of Google’s Chrome Browser. A lot of applications on the Chrome Web Store, such as the NY Times, work off-line as well as on-line. Games and Google Docs, too.

Google’s Chrome Browser runs on different operating systems and competes with Microsoft’s IE Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox. As of December 2010, Google’s Chrome Browser was the third most popular, with 13.35% of worldwide usage share of web browsers.

The Chromium projects include Chromium and Chromium OS, the open-source projects behind the Google Chrome browser and Google Chrome OS, respectively. Compared to the Android OS, Google’s Chrome OS can support a larger variety of hardware, and matched to a browser is more powerful, and optimized for a variety of screen sizes, resolutions and formats (such as web-based Google eBooks).

Google’s push for the Chrome Web Store, along with their open source operating system and browser is likely tied to their desire to deliver advertising on more devices, including tablets and settops. News at 11.

Meanwhile, Amazon today plans to demonstrate a new version of Kindle for the Web, one day after Google launched its Google eBooks and eBookstore strategy.

The new Kindle for the Web will “enable users to read full books in the browser and enable any Website to become a bookstore offering Kindle books.”

Amazon first launched Kindle for the Web as a beta application in September to allow customers to discover new books by sampling first chapters of the books directly through Web browsers. The new version would allow book purchases of Kindle books through various Web sites offering them. It also would also allow reading of the full book, not just samples, says ComputerWorld.

With smartphone sales set to form two thirds of mobile handset sales in the US in 2015, opportunities for mobile eCommerce are expanding significantly,” says Coda Research (above).

• Apple introduced its mobile ad platform called iAd in April. In January Apple purchased Quattro Wireless for $275 million. Quattro Wireless analyzes more than 10 billion mobile actions each month to target and optimize ad campaigns. It’s available on the Android and iPhone
• Google’s purchase of AdMob was under intense scrutiny by the FTC for anti-competitive issues, but Apple’s mobile advertising move got the FTC off its back by proving that Google is unlikely to dominate the mobile ad space.
• Engineers at Yahoo have begun to create a dynamic layout, so when the consumer reloads the home screen — which resembles a living room with couch, magazines and television — they will get a different experience.

U.S. mobile commerce sales will grow 100% this year to $2.4 billion from $1.2 billion in 2009, according to ABI Research. That’s following a 203% jump in 2009 from $396 million in 2008, the firm says.

In 2015, shoppers around the world are expected to spend about $119 billion on goods and services purchased via mobile phones. That number represents about 8% of the total e-commerce market. While the U.S. surpassed the $1 billion mark last year, Japan dwarfed the U.S. at $10 billion, ABI says.

Related Tablet stories on Dailywireless include; Google Rolls out Gingerbread & New Phone, Google eBooks: The Beginning, Kindle for the Web, Tablet Newspapers, Borders – GET PUBLISHED, Newspapers + TV = Hyperlocal Blog network, Tools for Data Journalists, M-Commerce: Huge, Apps & Mobile Websites: Gateway Drug, Google Tablet: Android or What?, Tablet Revolution!, Mobile Ads for Apple, Google & Yahoo, Kindle Announces 70% Royalty Option, Self Publishing on the iPad, Kindle App for iPad, Mobile News via Paid Apps, E-Textbooks: How Big?, Nozzl: Local News Streaming Live, The $99 Tablet, Tablet News, Mobile News via Paid Apps, Producing Olympic Multi-Media, HyperLocal: There’s an App for That, Neighborhood News: Big Time in Seattle, Coming Soon: Tablet Wars, Publishers Revolt over iPad Restrictions, Kindle App for iPad, Tablets and Three Bears and Apple Launching Pad.

View full post on dailywireless.org

Staying on track with its rapid-fire, six week release cycle for its web browser, Google has pushed out the final version of Chrome 8. The latest release packs in some 800 bug and security fixes, as well as a new inline PDF viewer.

If you’re using the stable, everyday version of Chrome, you should be automatically updated to Chrome 8. If you’re using another release, or would just like to give Chrome a try, head over the Google Chrome download page.

The new, built-in PDF viewer means that when you click on a link to a PDF now, Chrome will no longer download the file to your PC. Instead, Chrome will offer a preview in the browser where you can view and search the document. Also, thanks to the sandboxing model, this decreases the chance of malicious code, malware or anything else bad being delivered through the PDF. Of course, if you then decide to download the file, Chrome won’t protect you from anything that might be lurking inside.

The PDF reader joins Flash in the list of things that Chrome manages for you. That means Google can push out updates and security fixes as needed to these components of its browser, rather than relying on users to update plug-ins themselves. You can disable the PDF viewer (or any other plug-in) by navigating to about:plugins inside Chrome.

Chrome 8 is also the first version capable of connecting to the Chrome Web Store. Although there’s nothing to see at the moment, Google is planning to release a store similar to the Android Marketplace or Apple’s App Store, but with a focus on web applications, Chrome extensions, and Chrome themes.

See Also:

• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’
• Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

View full post on Webmonkey

The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the most common paths people can use to run malicious code on an unsuspecting user’s machine. Sandboxing keeps these sensitive parts of the browser more secure while still allowing web pages and apps to access the other, less-sensitive parts of the browser.

Windows users on the dev channel should see the update arrive automatically. We should note that the sandbox does have some bugs and may break other parts of the browser — this is a developer release, after all. Once the kinks are ironed out, all of these sandboxing features will begin making their way into proper stable Chrome releases.

Google’s Chromium team has been working with Adobe to build better Flash controls into Chrome, and to utilize Chrome’s sandboxing technology for the plug-in. Google says Wednesday’s update makes Chrome the only browser on XP that sandboxes Flash. For more about sandboxing and how Chrome is implementing it, read the overview post on the Chromium blog from October. Also, Wednesday’s release comes less than a month after Chrome introduced click-to-play controls for Flash and other plug-ins.

Adobe’s Flash Player is the most widely-used browser plug-in on the web, and it’s the dominant choice for video playback and games online. Even so, the technology gets beat up for performance issues and its security shortcomings, and it’s still falling out of favor among standards enthusiasts who are pushing HTML5 as the better solution for displaying multimedia in the browser.

Adobe also released a new beta version of the Flash Player on Wednesday that improves some of its performance issues.

See also:

• New Flash Player 10.2 Goes Easy on the CPU
• Chrome Now Offers Click-to-Play Option for Flash, Other Plugins
• Chrome 7 Arrives With Bug Fixes, Better HTML5 Support

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It’s Sunday which means it’s time for another installment of The Business of Google, an exclusive feature to Androidspin.com

Quadroid = Wintel?
What’s this cool word? Well it’s a mesh of Qualcomm and Android.  Qualcomm held their annual investor day on November 17th. During this meeting they echoed the likes of HTC, Motorola, Kyocera, LG and Samsung agreeing that Android has been great for their business.  Analysts are starting to use the word “Quadroid” to describe the partnership between Qualcomm and Manufacturers as it pertains to their Android handsets.

Qualcomm has been seen as the leader in the mobile semi-conductor business for almost a decade and Android has been catching on like wildfire. Last year 3.5% of the world’s smartphones were running Android; that number is now 25% and more than three quarters of those handsets are using Qualcomm chips.

Upon the news of Qualcomm’s results and partnership with Android handset manufacturers, both Goldman Sachs and Credit Suisse gave Qualcomm stock a BUY rating. The only downside to all of this great Androidness is that analysts are speculating with the onslaught of Android devices available by multiple carriers, it’s going to hedge the margin for manufacturers from 30-35% to 10%

Source: CNN Money and The Reformed Broker

Google TV
Sony dropped the price of their Sony Internet with Google TV Blu Ray player from $399 to $299. No not just a holiday price cut by different big boxes, the actual MSRP from their website to their vendors dropped 25%. The Android naysayers were quick to speculate a signal to the end of Google TV. The reality may actually be with Blu Ray players available under $100 this holiday season putting a value of an extra $200 on the Google TV portion may be a little far fetched at retail.

Google TV has seen all four major networks block access to their internet streams.  While you can still access show and network websites and social media, the actual streaming sites are blocked.  One of the key features to a consumer (rather than a tech enthusiast) is the ability to search for a program and watch the live feed, interact with the show and watch previous or archived episodes housed on network websites. This was a seamless process at the unveiling event October 12 in New York (which we attended), however networks blocking the streaming content has put a kink in that.

Android Journalist Russell Holly, as well as others, have speculated that it’s no big deal that the networks have blocked access to the streams and that the real meat in Google TV will be the app market. Once the app market is available (Q1 2011) developers for the networks will start adding apps to view their streams which will allow for a monetization of sorts and back end data to be provided to the networks for better delivery of advertising and offers.

Source: My Brain

Chrome OS
Chrome OS did an about face late this week.  It was reported last week that Chrome OS wouldn’t make their forecasted entry into the market via laptops by OEM partners like ASUS and HP.  The news for Chrome OS may have gotten better though as several websites have reported that two Google branded netbooks will be available before the end of the year.  These two Google branded netbooks will be manufactured by a third party manufacturer and have been code named Mario and Andretti.

The clever names come from the fact that Chrome OS is a very efficient lightweight OS which will make it fast, really fast. One of the features of Chrome OS will be an almost instant start up skipping the minutes of waiting for a computer to boot without having it be in a “hibernate” state. This is a result of the size of the OS and that most of Chrome OS is based on the cloud.

Source: Thedroidguy

Google Wave Getting A Second Wave of Life
People that work together from different parts of the country and the world, especially lots of bloggers, are rejoicing in the news that the Google Wave project may not be dead.  It was reported earlier this fall that Google had pulled the plug on Google Wave, now it seems that the Google Wave team have submitted Google Wave to the Apache Incubator.

You may have been one of those people that were starving for a Google Wave invite or maybe you bought one on eBay, only to start using the service and saying “Now what”? Or you may be one of the hundreds of online journalists or bloggers that use the site everyday to track who’s working on what and planning out projects. Whatever your take on Wave is, it was released in 2009 without the fanfare expected. Perhaps because they took the word “Beta” off of it.

On the news of Google’s giving up on Wave, the creator of Wave and Google Maps, Lars Rasmussen, left Google for greener pastures at Facebook.  Meanwhile the rest of the Google Wave Team announced they were open-sourcing wave and calling it “Wave in a box”. Programmers from Novell and others joined the project and submitted it to the Apache Software Foundation. A vote by the foundation on the life of the project is expected in the coming weeks.

Source: Venture Beat and PC World

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We recently outlined a way to get rid of the Flash plug-in completely for a smoother, less battery-sucking web browsing experience.

But if that’s too radical of a step for you, Google’s Chrome browser has a new trick up its sleeve — a built in “click-to-Flash” feature.

As our friends at Lifehacker note, Chrome’s new content controls mean you can turn all your plug-ins — Java, Flash, QuickTime and anything else you might have installed — into an on-demand experience.

Even better, you can create a whitelist of sites where you’d like to allow auto-loading of plug-ins — for example, YouTube, Vimeo and other video sharing sites.

To get these features in Chrome, you’ll need to be running either the Dev or Canary channels. Provided you have one of the pre-release builds of Chrome, open up the Preferences panel and click the Under the Hood tab. Then click the “Content settings” button and chose the “plug-ins” option. From there you can control how plug-ins load and which, if any, sites to white or blacklist.

Of course, there were already some extensions for Chrome (and almost every other browser) that do the same thing. But now that those controls are baked in, you don’t need to track down an extension to control your plugins.

See Also:

• Going Straight: How To Ditch Flash and Embrace the Future of the Web
• Who Needs Flash?
• YouTube: HTML5 Video Is No Match for Flash

View full post on Webmonkey

There’s a convergence coming in the mobile OS market with respect to mobile technology, platforms and consumer demand. Google aims to capture the best of all 3 areas. We can see it happening right before our eyes. The popularity of Android OS on mobile devices, the announcement of Chrome OS and Google’s partnerships with manufacturers to build Chrome OS proprietary hardware.

After Chrome OS was announced last year, I’ll admit, I was pretty damn excited….in fact, I may have peed a little. That was right around the time I got an Android device and began to realize how deadly it was, especially after updating to Eclair. Now, I’m not sure that I have a real need for Chrome OS. I mean, won’t it essentially be doing what I’m doing on my smartphone already, with respect to cloud computing and application use?

Read more of this conspiracy theory below…

Chrome or Android – Will Google Merge Them?

View full post on Android News, Rumours, and Updates

Users of the Chrome Dev channel may have noticed that the version number has been updated to Chrome 9. The latest release keeps with Chrome’s frantic development pace, but, so far, brings little in the way of actual changes.

If you’d like to try out the latest and greatest, you can switch the Chrome dev channel following Google’s instructions.

Chrome 9 has a few enhancements to Chrome’s JavaScript engine and improves the still not-enabled-by-default hardware acceleration for Windows. But most of the rest of the changes listed in the changelog are small enough to leave you wondering why this release deserves a full version number bump.

Of course Google has always been a bit different when it comes to releasing software. Betas are seemingly perpetual, “open” means, well, nothing really and version numbers are just something that happen on a timetable, with little or no bearing on features or improvements.

Some have suggested that Chrome is chasing IE, which will be at version 9 next year. That seems unlikely, given that most people neither know nor have any interest in their browsers’ version number (most people it seems don’t even know what a web browser is, let alone what a version number might be).

But if that were the case, then Chrome is aiming low. We want to see Chrome reach the illustrious level of Emacs — currently shipping version 23.

See Also:

• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’
• Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

View full post on Webmonkey

In keeping with its recently accelerated release schedule, Google has released version 7 of its Chrome web browser for Mac, Windows and Linux. The latest release of Chrome offers hundreds of bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements like an updated HTML5 parser, but is light on the new features.

Chrome users should get the update automatically, but if you’d like to download the new version directly, you can grab the browser from the Google Chrome download page.

The big news for this release is the huge number of bug fixes — hundreds have been fixed, though hundreds are still waiting. There are a few new features, like support for the HTML5 File API, which allows sites and web apps to read the content of local files. This should be a boon to web apps that rely on that feature. Also new is the ability for Chrome 7 to upload complete folders from your PC — very handy if you’ve got a lot of files to attach to an e-mail or dozens of pictures to upload. Unfortunately, the new feature relies on the HTML5 forms, which very few sites are using at the moment.

There’s also some new AppleScript support in the Mac OS X release, which means you can script Chrome or use it with OS X’s Automator tool.

Two things you won’t find in the stable release of Chrome 7 are the Hardware Acceleration and “Tabpose” features we looked at in the developer release. Both features are currently available in the developer builds of Chrome 8, though they may not make it to the stable release category until Chrome 9.

See Also:

• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’
• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

View full post on Webmonkey