Google’s Chrome development team has pushed a pre-release version of Chrome 8 into the dev channel for those that would like an early look at the next version of the Chrome web browser. While far from complete, Chrome 8 adds some welcome new features, including more hardware acceleration and the arrival Google’s new “Instant search” right inside the URL bar of Chrome.

Chrome has several “channels” — the Canary and Developer channels are where you get the earliest pre-release versions of Chrome, the beta channel releases are a little more stable, and the regular channel (which the majority of Chrome users run) is where fully-baked code ships. There’s also a build called Chromium, the open source, non-Google version of Chrome which has almost all of the same features of Google’s browser.

You can grab Chrome 8 by subscribing to the dev channel. Mac users will need to download a Chromium nightly build, as Chrome 8 for Mac hasn’t made it to the dev channel yet.

Once Chrome 8 is installed, head to the Labs page (just type about:labs in the URL bar) to see all of the experimental options. Turn on the Instant feature to get the search-as-you-type functionality in the Chrome URL bar.

You’ll also notice a couple other new options on the Labs page, including an early form of GPU acceleration for HTML5 Canvas elements. The hardware acceleration feature was also in the Chrome 7 dev build, but turning it on required starting Chrome from the command line. The Chrome 8 update makes it much easier to turn on hardware acceleration. For now the acceleration is limited to 2D animations that use the HTML5 canvas tag, but, provided you have a capable graphics card, Chrome should be able to offload that rendering to your GPU, speeding up page load times.

Also new in Chrome 8 is partial support for Google’s Cloud Printing effort. Designed to let you to print to your home PC from anywhere, Google’s Cloud Printing project is little more than an idea at this point. But we can see the beginnings of Chrome integration in this release with a new sign-in option in Chrome’s settings page (at the bottom of the Under the Hood tab). Unfortunately, signing in is about all you can do at this stage.

This early build of Chrome 8 also contains a number of bug fixes and smaller changes, which you can browse through on the Chromium project’s SVN page.

Keep in mind that Chrome 8 is very much an experimental build and there may be some bugs lurking in this early build, but if you’d like to give it a try, you can head over the Chrome channel page and grab a copy today.

See Also:

• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’
• Chrome 6 Beta Boasts New Look, Better Sync
• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

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Google’s controversial Chrome Frame browser plug-in is now out of beta and ready for prime time.

Chrome Frame is an Internet Explorer plug-in that replaces the default IE rendering engine, which is lacking in support for web standards, with the more modern and capable engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser. It essentially embeds Google’s browser inside any tab or window within Microsoft’s browser, giving even the older, antiquated versions of IE the gift of enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like embedded audio and video.

So if you’re stuck using IE6 or IE7 at work and would like to see what the latest and greatest on the web actually looks like, you can grab the official release of Chrome Frame from Google. If you’ve been using the Chrome Frame beta, you’ll automatically be updated to the latest version.

According the Chrome blog, the latest release of Chrome Frame is three times faster on Windows Vista and Windows 7, and the most common conflicts with other IE plug-ins have been solved.

While it sounds like a good idea — improving the web by bootstrapping older, less capable versions of IE — Chrome Frame has proven to be quite controversial. In the past, Mozilla Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver has quite convincingly argued that Chrome Frame for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit.

Still, whether or not it’s a good idea, Chrome Frame appears to be here to stay. The Google Chromium blog reports that sites like DeviantART and Github have already added support for Chrome Frame. Google Docs and YouTube are also on board, and Gmail and Google Calendar will soon support Chrome Frame as both services begin to drop support for older browsers.

The next version of Internet Explorer will have expanded support for HTML5 and a much better JavaScript engine. It’s in beta now, but the final release of IE9 is still several months away. Our estimate on its arrival is early 2011.

If you’d like users to see your site via Chrome Frame — provided they have it installed — all you need to do is add a head tag to your pages:

<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

Alternately, you can had an HTTP header using your Apache (or similar) webserver configuration. See the video below for more info on making sure your site triggers Google Chrome Frame when it’s available.

See Also:

• New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives
• Mozilla VP on Why Google Chrome Frame Is a Bad Idea
• Google Updates Chrome Frame Add-On for Internet Explorer
• Google Drops Support for IE6, Firefox Goes Mobile

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Google has updated the stable and beta branches of its Chrome web browser with several important bug fixes and stability improvements, including a rather serious security bug in Mac OS X.

If you’re using either the beta or stable versions of Chrome, you should receive the update automatically and be prompted to restart the browser.

As is typical of more serious security bugs, Google hasn’t released any details about the critical Mac OS X bug, lest it be exploited before everyone has the fix in place.

Less serious fixes in this Chrome update include squashing a bug in the Geolocation features and some memory corruption bugs that had been dogging Linux users. There’s also a small fix for a rather obscure bug the would sometimes crash Chrome when using an ad-blocking add-on. If you’ve experienced any of these problems with Chrome 6 (or the beta channel), the update should make your day.

See Also:

• Leaked Screenshot Shows a Cleaner, Simpler IE9
• Chrome 6 Arrives, Just in Time for Cake
• Google Chrome 6 Beta Is Right Around the Corner
• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’

View full post on Webmonkey

One of the most useful browser extensions for web development is coming to Chrome.

Google is working on a Chrome version of its Page Speed add-on. Page Speed is an essential tool for testing sites in Firefox. It breaks down all the stuff on your page and shows you how long everything is taking to download, execute and render. It’s also fully open source and it has its own SDK.

Matthew D. Steele, one of the key engineers at Google responsible for Page Speed, has confirmed that a Chrome version is “already in the works,” and will be ready within a couple of months.

Page Speed currently runs inside of Firebug on Firefox, and there is already Firebug Lite for Chrome. There’s no word yet on whether Page Speed will remain dependent on Firebug (Lite) once it moves into Chrome, or if it will be a stand-alone add-on, but we’ll find out more details soon. In the meantime, if you have an answer to that mystery, let us know in the comments.

If you are curious about using Page Speed to speed up your website, check out Scott’s recent post on using Page Speed and YSlow together.

See Also:

• Chrome 6 Arrives, Just in Time for Cake
• How to Speed Up Your Site With YSlow and Page Speed
• Apple Updates Safari, Turns on Extensions

View full post on Webmonkey

Google is celebrating the second birthday of its Chrome web browser with the release of a new, improved version.

Chrome 6 arrives with an updated user interface, better syncing tools that include support for web form data and extensions, and — as should be expected with every new browser release these days — increased speed and numerous bug fixes.

If you don’t want to wait for Chrome to automatically update, head over to the download page and grab Chrome 6 for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Google’s browser is in an enviable position right now. It recently passed Safari in user share — new data from August shows the lead it snagged in June is stretching — and it’s gaining on Firefox and IE. Also, in a market where raw speed is the most important metric, Chrome is enjoying a solid reputation as the one of the fastest — if not the fastest — browser on the scene.

Chrome has also had considerable impact on how other browsers in the market look and behave since it arrived in September, 2008. It kickstarted a shift toward minimal interfaces that Firefox and Internet Explorer are mimicking. Chrome also started the trend of tightly sandboxing web browsers to improve stability and security.

If you’ve been using early builds of Chrome 6, there isn’t much here that’s new, but if you’re upgrading from the older, stable release of Chrome 5 there are quite a few changes.

Perhaps the most noticeable thing about Chrome 6 is what’s missing — almost all the toolbar buttons. Chrome has consolidated nearly everything into a new menu button to the right of the URL bar. Click it and you’ll find the browser’s most-used menu functions.

Other nice touches include a new green padlock icon in the URL bar to indicate you’re on a secure HTTPS connection, and a less-cluttered new tab page that serves as your starting point for new browsing windows.

Chrome 6 isn’t just a visual update — new features like form auto-fill make for faster checkouts at e-commerce sites and faster sign-ups on new services. Chrome can now also sync both your autofill form data and any installed extensions across all your computers.

Chrome may be celebrating its second birthday, but it isn’t resting on its laurels. The Chrome dev channel already contains an embryonic version of Chrome 7 with hardware acceleration and the new “Tabpose” feature for quickly switching between your open tabs.

Browser data from NetMarketShare, chart from Google. Browsers with less than 2 percent share have been omitted.

See Also:

• Leaked Screenshot Shows a Cleaner, Simpler IE9
• Google Chrome 6 Beta Is Right Around the Corner
• Chrome 6 Beta Boasts New Look, Better Sync
• Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’

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Google’s Chrome web browser will soon gain hardware-accelerated graphics — the latest trend for web browsers that has already shown up in early builds of Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4.

Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC’s graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC’s main processor and speeding up page load times.

Today’s faster graphics cards have created a new playing field for hardware acceleration. Microsoft has been trumpeting IE9’s accelerated capabilities since the first developer preview was released, and Firefox 4 will also take advantage of the new technology. Both of those browsers should be released before the end of this year.

Chrome 7, which is currently available in developer build form, is the latest browser to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Chrome’s tightly sandboxed rendering model — which prevents web pages from interacting directly with the OS — means that hardware acceleration is a little more difficult for Google than it is for IE or Firefox.

Of course it may be some time before any of these features make it to the stable release of Chrome. Chrome 5 is currently the shipping version and Chrome 6 — which features a considerably revamped interface — is currently in the beta channel. Thus far Google has not confirmed any release dates for Chrome 6, nor when Chrome 7 will move to beta status.

But If you’d like to test the early builds of Chrome with hardware acceleration, you can do so now. Grab the latest developer build of Chrome 7 and launch it from the command line with the new --enable-accelerated-compositing flag.

As with Firefox, the hardware acceleration features in Chrome are only available in the Windows version.

Hardware acceleration isn’t the only new trick up Chrome’s sleeve. The Mac version of the browser is also experimenting with something Google calls “Tab Overview” or Tabpose. Tabpose is similar to Mac OS X’s Expose; it allows you to visually pull back and see all your tabs as thumbnails and quickly switch between them.

Some early reports have compared Tabpose to Firefox 4’s new Panorama tab organizer, but Firefox’s version is considerably more sophisticated, with extra features like drag-and-drop organization and the ability to group tabs and switch between groups. If you’ve used both Panorama and Tabpose, the differences are obvious.

In fact, in the build we tested Tabpose was pretty bare bones, lacking even rendered thumbnails of the pages, let alone info bars, bookmark tools or other planned features.

Tabpose showcases another new feature in the development builds of Chrome: the ability to turn on Google Labs experiments. Just like in Gmail, the Labs experiments are interesting features created within Google that are meant more for niche tasks or hardcore geeks than the general audience. Some of them will eventually become real features, but for now they are just for testing.

So far, Tab Overview is the only experiment available for Mac, but the new about:labs page sets the stage for Chrome to add more experimental features in the future, and it sure beats launching Chrome from the terminal with loads of flags (which still works if you happen to prefer that method). Given that there are some 100 flags (or switches, as Google calls them) that you can throw at Chrome as it’s starting up, eventually the About:Labs page could become a very crowded place.

Windows users can head to About:Labs to activate a tabs-on-left experiment, which, as the name implies, shifts your tabs to a column view on the left side of your browser window, much like what Opera has offered for some time.

See Also:

• Google Chrome 6 Beta Is Right Around the Corner
• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• Fourth Firefox 4 Beta Adds ‘Panorama,’ Hardware Acceleration
• 
  New Hardware-Accelerated IE9 Preview Arrives

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Google has launched a developer’s preview of its Chrome Web Store — the company’s directory where users can browse and install Chrome extensions, web apps and downloadable apps that run in the browser.

There are no listings available yet in Thursday’s preview, but you can start creating apps and uploading them to the store so they’ll be available as soon as it opens later this year. All the tools you’ll need to publish apps are available there, as well as instructions on how to use the Licensing API so you can charge for your apps if you wish.

Interestingly, Google is recommending developers pursue a freemium model for paid apps. “A freshly installed app should always provide something useful or interesting, even if the user hasn’t paid yet,” the documentation says. “If the first page the user sees is useless — nothing but a payment wall, for example — the user is likely to uninstall your app, and you might get some scathing reviews.”

According to a report on TechCrunch, Google will take a five percent cut of sales revenue.

What’s up with installable web apps, you ask? Don’t web apps get served to a client from a web server? Well, yes, there’s that kind, and then there’s the kind you download and install. Google describes an installable web app as “a normal website with a bit of extra metadata.” The app is packaged, then downloaded and installed by the user, where it runs in the browser (online or off) and can access local storage.

Here’s a video that covers the details of Thursday’s developer preview:

See Also:

• Chrome 6 Beta Boasts New Look, Better Sync
• Gmail Adds More Drag and Drop Features, But Only in Chrome
• Is Your Browser Ready for HTML5?

View full post on Webmonkey

Some big news came out today in the ever-expanding world of tablet machines. Apparently HTC, Verizon, and Google are teaming up to release a Chrome OS tablet on Black Friday. For those of you who have been living under a rock, Black Friday is the day after Thanksgiving and it’s the biggest shopping day of the year. This year it will be on November 26th. With all the buzz Android has been getting lately it’s been easy to forget about Google’s other OS. Though if this proves to be true that won’t be the case for long.

HTC and Google famously hooked up to bring us the Google Nexus One, an incredibly capable phone that didn’t achieve the sales results many thought it deserved. Since then Google CEO Eric Schmidt has said that they won’t be releasing a second Google phone, but apparently they still do want to get Google branded hardware out there.  As of right now details are few but here’s what we think we know:

Read More…

Chrome OS Tablet to be released on Black Friday

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

An often overlooked addition to Android 2.2 is Cloud to Device Messaging (C2DM), which enables developers to push small data messages to the phone.  This is the brains behind Chrome to Phone, a Chrome extension which allows the user to send links and other information to their Android device right from their browser.  The process works as follows:

1. The Android Application registers with the C2DM service and gets a device registration ID for the user. It sends this registration ID along with the user’s account name to the AppEngine server.
2. The AppEngine server authenticates the user account and stores the mapping from account name to device registration ID.
3. The Chrome Extension accesses the URL and page title for the current tab, and POSTs it to the AppEngine server.
4. The AppEngine server authenticates the user and looks up the corresponding device registration ID for the user account name. It then HTTP POSTs the URL and title to Google’s C2DM servers, which subsequently route the message to the device, resulting in an Intent broadcast.
5. The Android application is woken by its Intent receiver. The Android application then routes the URL to the appropriate application via a new Intent (e.g. browser, dialer, or Google Maps).

Again, this requires Android 2.2, so for all of you who are officially/unofficially running Froyo, you can download both the Chrome extension and the Android APK here.

Chrome to Phone powered by Android Cloud to Device Messaging

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Chrome 6 beta on the Mac

The next version of Google’s browser has been promoted to beta status. You can now download Chrome 6 beta and start testing it out on multiple platforms.

The biggest new features? There’s a simplified user interface in Chrome 6, a new autofill feature for completing web forms, and better syncing, including support for autofill data and extensions. If you’ve been using the dev channel or canary releases of Chrome, you’ve seen these features showing up one by one over the last few weeks.

Chrome 6 beta gets the performance bump that’s standard for each new browser release. It also comes hot on the heels of the latest pre-release versions of Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9, both of which arrived within the last week showing off faster and more capable HTML and JavaScript engines.

The browser’s skin has been tweaked slightly to streamline the tab and button layouts, and there’s a new unified button that marries the old Tools and Menu buttons found in previous versions of Chrome. The new menu button holds all the most popular controls, as well as some oddly placed buttons for zooming pages, launching fullscreen mode, and performing copy/paste tasks. I don’t think any of us are going to be abandoning keyboard shortcuts for these options any time soon.

The autofill feature is integrated with the sync feature in Chrome 6 beta, so all of your instances of Chrome (home, work, laptop) will be able to share not only preferences, extensions, browsing data and themes, but also form data. You can autofill forms with the same information — provided you’re logged into Google using the same account in each location. Chrome can remember, store and sync any set of common information you’d normally put into a web form (names, e-mail, mailing addresses, phone numbers). You can simply select which data set to choose from when the autofill feature takes over.

Chrome can also remember credit card numbers, but you have to explicitly add them in the autofill feature’s preferences.

This version of Chrome will likely move from beta to a general stable release in a few weeks. We should expect the next version of Chrome to follow along only six weeks after that, as Google has sped up its release cycle to put a new version of its browser out every month and a half.

See Also:

• Gmail Adds More Drag and Drop Features, But Only in Chrome
• Is Your Browser Ready for HTML5?
• Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

View full post on Webmonkey

Have you ever been checking out a really cool website on your phone and then realized some cool feature would just be way better on a computer? If you have then you probably also realized how much of a pain it is to try and get to that same page from your computer. Sure you can email yourself the link, or something similar, but really there is no excuse for such clunky functionality. Well worry no longer. Android2cloud is an app that fixes this problem quickly and elegantly; once you install the app and the Google Chrome extension and verify both clients, you can simply ’share’ the page from your phone to the app and it opens the tab on your computer! Pretty slick huh? Let us know what you think in the comments!

[via Lifehacker]

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Instantly Open URL’s From Your Phone in Chrome

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Gmail users can now drag e-mail attachments out of the browser window and drop them onto the desktop — if they’re using Google Chrome.

Back in April, Gmail added the ability to drag attachments from the desktop onto open e-mails in the browser. This feature works on most modern browsers, like Firefox and Safari. Now, the same feature works in reverse, so you can grab an attachment and just drag it to the desktop without having to click the “Download” link.

This enhancement is only available to users of Google’s Chrome browser. This is an indication that it’s using some Google-specific sauce to power the interaction. Chrome uses the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari, but a different chunk of code to execute JavaScript, and the new feature doesn’t work in Safari. It does work on the Mac version of Chrome (in the Beta and Canary channels, at least) so it’s not limited to Windows users.

Browser-specific features are considered by some to be a no-no in the world of open web development. Some developers feel that new web features should work in all browsers equally to create a unified user experience. But there is an argument to be made that developers should be encouraged to innovate wherever they can as often as they can. It’s a way to accelerate the growth of web apps and to nudge other browser vendors into adopting new features. Besides, the standards upon which these new capabilities are based — HTML5 and its related technologies — are moving targets that are still being drafted, and if developers were to wait for all browsers to adopt all aspects of an unfinished standard, they wouldn’t be able to freely experiment new features.

Gmail continues to roll out new features steadily, and has become an exemplar of the iterative model for web app development. New features appear every few weeks, sometimes in one or two browsers at a time. The mobile version of Gmail is also being updated frequently to take advantage of new capabilities in the Android and Mobile Safari browsers as well as the iPad’s larger screen size.

The new drag-and-drop feature in Gmail was made available Wednesday for Chrome users. When you open an e-mail and hover over the attachment, you’ll see a little tooltip that says “Click to view OR drag to your desktop to save.” If you drag it to your desktop, the file appears on your desktop. If you click the link, it gets dumped into whatever you’ve chosen as your standard downloads folder.

It also works with Gmail’s auto-archive feature — if somebody sends you a bunch of photos, Gmail gives you the option of downloading all of them as a single Zip archive. You can drag that “Download all” link to the desktop and Gmail will Zip everything for you on the fly.

See Also:

• Gmail Mobile Is Always on the Move
• Making Contact With Mr. Gmail
• Google Turns to HTML5 for Gmail’s New Drag-and-Drop Attachments

View full post on Webmonkey

People who like to run pre-release versions of browsers in order to access the latest features have a new choice: Google Chrome Canary.

Canary has all the bleeding-edge features found in the developer and beta releases of Google Chrome. But unlike the other channel releases, Chrome Canary allows you to run the pre-release browser without overwriting other installations of Chrome on the same system. So, you can now run a regular version of Chrome and a pre-release, auto-updating version of Chrome on the same computer at the same time.

You can download Chrome Canary today, but it is a Windows-only release for now. We expect Google to follow with canaries for other operating systems soon.

Early adopters — mostly curious geeks and developers working with the latest web standards — prefer to run beta versions of browsers. Beta testing allows them to gain intimate first-hand knowledge of the new capabilities that will be found in the next versions of each browser. But beta versions and regular versions of the same browsers both access the same file resources on your computer, a restriction that prevents you from running two different versions side-by-side. Try launching a Firefox 4 beta while Firefox 3.x is open. You’ll see an error: “Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.”

On the fence about running an unstable pre-release browser? Canary can help you take the plunge safely.

Chrome Canary side-steps this issue. As Google engineer Huan Ren explains on the Chromium-dev list, “the installer will install Google Chrome canary build to a separate directory with different default user profile, short cuts, and icons, i.e. everything should be separate from existing Google Chrome installation.”

With this release, there are now four versions of Chrome available. The others are “dev,” the least stable build intended for developers, “beta,” which is more stable than dev but not fully baked, and the regular Chrome release, the rigorously-tested version that’s the default option for the public.

On the same developer’s e-mail list, Google’s Mark Larson says Canary will be the most bleeding-edge of all Chrome builds. It will auto-update more frequently than any of the other versions available to developers.

“The canary usually updates more frequently than the Dev channel (higher risk of bustage), and we’re working on making it update as often as we have successful nightly builds. When something doesn’t work on the canary, I can just fall back to my Beta Google Chrome,” he writes.

Hence the name “Canary” — a reference to the canary in the coal mine. Google recently announced it would be speeding up the Chrome development cycle to push major milestone releases more often. This increased velocity means it will need to begin testing new features in the wild sooner and collecting feedback more quickly.

“The data we get back from canary users — especially crash statistics — helps us find and fix regressions faster,” Larson says.

Chrome Canary running on 64-bit Windows 7

Giving users the option to run a more advanced version of Chrome without having to fully commit to the dangerous lifestyle of an alpha tester should help increase the number of people willing to test the new browser.

Chrome Canary also has a different, all-yellow icon — instead of the multi-colored Chrome icon or the all-blue Chromium icon — so it’s easy to spot on your desktop. The beta, dev and stable channel builds of Chrome all use the same familiar rainbow icon. Also, the skin of the browser is blue, helping you tell it apart from other versions of Chrome, which use the same gray skin.

Canary photo: Haplochromis/Wikimedia/CC

See Also:

• Chrome Team Sets Six-Week Cadence for New Major Versions
• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• Chrome Gains More Converts, Edges Out Safari

View full post on Webmonkey

Google announced via the Chromium Blog that it plans to release new stable versions of Chrome every six weeks. Though the team has managed to ship five major revisions in less than two years, the new accelerated pace means we could see Chrome 9.0 by the end of this year.

According to program manager Anthony Laforge, the increased pace is designed to address three main goals. One is to get new features out to users faster. The second is make the release schedule predictable and therefore easier to plan which features will be included and which features will be targeted for later releases. Third, and most counterintuitive, is to cut the level of stress for Chrome developers.

Laforge explains that the shorter, predictable time periods between releases are more like “trains leaving Grand Central Station.” New features that are ready don’t have to wait for others that are taking longer to complete—they can just hop on the current release “train.” This can in turn take the pressure off developers to rush to get other features done, since another release train will be coming in six weeks. And they can rest easy knowing their work isn’t holding the train from leaving the station.

Mass transit metaphors aside, Chrome will be revving the major version number with each stable release, with 6.0 expected pretty soon, and then shortly followed by 7.0. 8.0. and 9.0. However, warns Laforge, “please don’t read too much into the pace of version number changes—they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands!”

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news. For more from Ars Technica, follow the links below.

More from Ars Technica:

• Chrome 5 Released, Browser Exits Beta for Mac and Linux

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The beta version of Google’s next browser is expected to ship soon, as the developer-channel release of Chrome 6 has just seen a code freeze. This is the point at which new features stop being added, and everything that’s already in the browser gets inspected, tested and tightened. We should expect Chrome 6 Beta within a few weeks.

Google’s browser is in an enviable position right now. It recently passed Safari in user share (according to StatsCounter) and it’s gaining on Firefox and IE. Also, in a market where raw speed is the most important metric, Chrome is enjoying a solid reputation as the one of the fastest — if not the fastest — browser on the scene.

Let’s take a look at what’s coming in Google Chrome 6 Beta. We downloaded the most recent dev-channel release of Chrome (6.0.466.4 on a Mac) to test all these new features.

New checkboxes in the syncing panel

Syncing — Google Chrome already lets you sync bookmarks and themes across multiple installations, but it will soon also allow you to sync your browser history and form auto-fill data as well. So, you’ll have access to all the pages you visited at the office when you log in to your home machine, and vice versa. (No, Incognito browsing-session data doesn’t get synced.)

Extension syncing — Likewise, you can set up two or more instances of Chrome to run the same extensions. Read our previous coverage of this new feature.

New menu button — Chrome has consolidated the menu button to the right of the URL bar. There used to be a Tool button and a Page button, but now it’s just a Tool button, and it contains the browser’s most-used menu functions. It exhibits similarities — functionally, not visually — to Firefox 4’s new Firefox Button.

Native PDF integration — Chrome 5 added built-in support for Adobe Flash, and version 6 adds similar support for PDFs. An in-browser PDF viewer will ship with the next browser. PDFs can be viewed, searched and navigated in a tab, just like a web page. The PDF experience is also sandboxed like any other app, keeping things secure. Printing isn’t quite there yet. If you’re running the dev-channel release, type about:plugins into the URL field to enable the Chrome PDF viewer.

UI changes — Aside from the new menu button, some additional polish has been applied to Chrome’s chrome. There’s a new green padlock icon in the URL bar to indicate a secure HTTPS connection, slight changes to default skin, and a less cluttered new tab page.

New menu button

Some much-awaited features were left on the drawing board, such as full-screen HTML5 video playback and a tabs-on-the-side option.

The current dev-channel release also shows no sign of Google’s Native Client technology, or its Web App Store — the mechanisms you’ll eventually be able to use to find and install popular apps — and those created by third parties — in your browser.

Install a web app? Google explains: “An installed web app could be separated visually from other tabs, could integrate better with the OS, and could be granted increased permissions.” Installed apps would be able to discern your location, store data on your local machine and use your camera, among other things. The installed apps would sit in your tab bar at the top of Chrome, where they’d look and behave like bookmarked web pages. Firefox has seen this coming, too: The next version of Mozilla’s browser will move the tabs to the top.

This app-friendly shift is a natural progression for the browser. App stores for our iPads and smartphones are leading us towards a more app-centric world, and advances in HTML5 and JavaScript have led to web apps that look and behave more like single-serving native applications. As the internet becomes a full-blown operating system — flush with APIs, storage clouds, public databases, connected sensors and ubiquitous Wi-Fi access points– the web browser is in a position to become the desktop for that operating system.

To get an early peek at installable Google apps, you’ll have to jump through some hoops of fire. Google Operating System has some instructions for the brave.

[Hat tip to Stephen Shankland, who noted the version 6 code freeze on CNET's Deep Tech blog. There you'll also find a comprehensive list of what Google left out of this beta cycle].

See Also:

• Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs
• Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks
• Video: Google Chrome Extensions for Accessibility
• Chrome Gains More Converts, Edges Out Safari
• Google Chrome Working on Extension Syncing Feature

View full post on Webmonkey

Chrome for the Mac has lost its beta label, Google considering it ripe for primetime.

In market-share terms, the browser has also sped past Safari, largely due to its uptake on Windows. But how does the app fare on the Mac?

The answer is: very well. In fact, with one exception, Chrome hits a home run in every major area of importance for a web browser.

First and foremost, it’s stable. Total crashes are incredibly rare, because each tab is a separate process. If a tab crashes, the rest soldier on.

WebKit

The browser is also standards-compliant and very fast, since it uses WebKit – the same core as Safari.

Chrome is extensible, with many useful plug-ins available, and it’s simple to use. The interface is intuitive and efficient, notably the combined address and search bar (something we wish Apple would steal).

The browser’s ability to define keyword shortcuts for search engines is another plus over Safari.

Although more Mac-like than Firefox, Chrome nonetheless has some poor interface elements, such as its skinny, hard-to-hit title bar, tabs that are just a few pixels wide when many are open, and a status bar that can’t be made permanent and crops the address of the link you’re hovering over.

But the good far outweighs the bad in Chrome, to the point that it’s now the Mac’s best browser.

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• TechRadar Reviews Guarantee
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Google’s Chrome browser has a well-established reputation for being not only extremely fast at rendering JavaScript, but also robust in its support of cutting-edge HTML5 technologies.

Both of these capabilities are on display at Chrome Experiments, a site that Google set up to showcase some of the coolest demos on the web for JavaScript apps, intricate CSS layouts and animations done with Canvas.

Chrome Experiments now has over 100 demos on offer, and we picked out some of our favorites for this little gallery.

Interest is exploding in HTML5 and its companion technologies. The hope is that these emerging standards will be widely used to power new web apps, as well as for playing animations, songs and videos in the browser without any plug-ins. Developers and content providers continue to rely on plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight for such multimedia playback tasks for now, but they are increasingly turning to HTML5, JavaScript and other web standards as browser makers continue to build the new capabilities into their latest releases.

We tested all of these experiments in multiple browsers, and almost all of them worked in Safari and Firefox, though they performed much better in the latest beta of Firefox 4 than in the current stable Firefox 3.x builds. Some of them also work splendidly in the latest Microsoft pre-release, Internet Explorer 9 preview 3.

Of course, a few of the Chrome demos on the Experiments site use Webkit-specific technologies and CSS prefixes, so those only work in Chrome and Safari. Some have poo-poohed vendor-specific prefixes, and others see them as a necessary step to force browser makers to adopt the latest behaviors being used in the wild. Regardless of that debate, it’s encouraging to see the different browsers all improving their JavaScript capabilities, which all of these demos exploit.

In short, you don’t need Chrome to view these, but they will all be more impressive in Chrome than in other browsers.

Browser Pong

Turn off your pop-up blocker and give this game a spin. It’s the console classic, Pong, but played with browser windows — talk about thinking outside the box. We also tried this one in Firefox 4 beta, and it runs great. It also seems a little easier to beat in Firefox than in Chrome for some reason. See more work from Stewart Smith at the Stewdio.

Destructive Video

This demo by Sean Christmann shows a short video. But when you click on it, the video breaks into tiny tiles that scatter across the screen. The video keeps playing inside the tiles as they tiles bounce around. After a few seconds, the tiles slide back into place so you can keep on clicking and blowing up the video to your destructive little heart’s content. This is the sort of canvas-based manipulation that HTML5’s native <video> tags allow. Canvas can do this sort of animation with other page elements, but it’s especially impressive to see with video. Sean explains how he does it on his own site. By the way, Firefox doesn’t like this demo very much.

Entanglement

Derek Detweiler’s simple solitaire game Entanglement is an addictive and fun time waster, but it’s also beautifully crafted. It uses subtle canvas animations to spin the hexagonal tiles, and JavaScript to handle the mouse and keyboard controls. Derek has a few other games on his personal site.

Ball Pool

This one will conjure memories of playing in the ball pit at the local IKEA. Ball Pool fills up a blank browser window with brightly colored balls. Drag them around, toss them and (this is extra cool) shake the browser to send them flying around. The demo uses box2d-js for all the physics. Ball Pool is one of the rare demos on Google’s site that works exceptionally well in Firefox 4.

The creator, Mr. Doob, is a busy man. Check out the lo-fi and psychedelic Plane Deformations, and the bizarre Multiuser Sketchpad, where you can watch dozens of anonymous wannabe Picassos use JavaScript to draw crude penises in your browser.

Canopy

Fun with fractals! Ryan Alexander’s experiment takes you inside a vector-graphics tree as it grows. The trees in Canopy can be zoomed in upon infinitely, and you can trigger mutations and blooming cycles, so you can watch leaves grow and fall off, and start new trees. The animation is slick and fast in Chrome, and it’s just as fast in our Firefox 4 beta. Be sure to check out Ryan’s massive JavaScript fractal zoomer on Google Code. And if you like watching computer-generated, canvas-animated trees and flowers bloom, check out PlasmaTree and FlowerPower, both from mhepekka at OpenRise.

Wavy Scrollbars

Click on the scrollbars to set them in movement. It’s called Wavy Scrollbars for a reason — the bars undulate like a desktop wave machine, smoothly growing and shrinking thanks to toxi’s verletphysics library. This one is by a Russian developer named Andrey. Check out some of his other JavaScript experiments at the389, his personal site.

Burn Canvas

The Burn Canvas experiment by Krzysztof Pasek utilizes the HTML5 canvas element to create a simple drawing app. The page will “burn” anywhere you point the mouse. If you leave it in one spot or move the mouse around slowly, the burn effect cycles through a series of bright, psychedelic colors. Things get even trippier when you hold down a mouse button, which causes the drawing to melt. Check out Pasek’s other experiments on his site, including a canvas-based Magic Eye 3D image generator. Packaged code for his various HTML5 experiments is available under the GPL free software license.

See Also:

• Conway’s Game of Life in HTML5
• Handy Guide to Detecting Support for HTML5
• Apple’s HTML5 Showcase Less About Web Standards, More About Apple

View full post on Webmonkey

Google has announced a new Chrome extension that makes it possible to ring up clients via their Android phones, using your computer. Here’s a scenario, straight from Google:

Imagine you’re selling at a market or expo and want to take credit cards. Rather than hassle with cash, you can use the new Android Payment Extension for the Google Checkout Store Gadget on your laptop to allow Checkout customers to purchase from their phones.

The way it works is this: the merchant, having a laptop, would “ring up” the client via their browser. The extension would then generate a QR code that the client could scan with their phone, taking them straight to Google Checkout with their items shown, totaled and ready for purchase.

While this payment system may sound great for on-the-go drug dealers, we prefer to think people would use it for legit reasons, such as flea markets and outside booths. This looks pretty streamlined and simple to use, which is what Google’s portfolio is built on.

For more information on Android and the current Android mobile phones, check out our Android Guides

Google announces pay on the go with Android payment Chrome extension

View full post on Google Android News Android Forums

Making websites accessible to users with disabilities — things like poor vision, blindness, limited dexterity — has been central to the mission of the web’s overseers since the dawn of the browser.

There are a few browser extensions out there to help the disabled surf the web comfortably. Google has posted this video to show us what the company is doing to improve the accessibility of its browser, Chrome. The video highlights a few of the extensions that have already been built for this purpose, like Chrome Vis and Keyboard Navigation.

There’s also some advice for extensions builders interested in accessibility, like remembering to include text color, text size and keyboard shortcuts options in your extensions. More here.

See Also:

• Google Chrome Working on Extension Syncing Feature
• Google Updates Chrome Frame Add-On for Internet Explorer
• Update Your Old Site to Use Web Standards

View full post on Webmonkey

Google’s Chrome web browser has, for the first time ever, surpassed Apple’s Safari browser in the United States according to some new browser share data released Monday by StatsCounter.

Chrome now accounts for 8.97 percent of U.S. web traffic, putting it ahead of Safari which is used by 8.88 of U.S. web surfers. In the worldwide arena, Chrome has had the lead since September, 2009.

That’s not much of margin, and it may well be that when Safari 5, released at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference earlier in June, is added to the numbers, Chrome will slip again.

But considering that Chrome has been around less than two years and Safari has over seven under its belt, even matching Safari’s numbers is impressive.

Of course the two titans of the internet have little to fear from either browser. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still lays claim to 52 percent of the market with Firefox picking up the slack at 28.5 percent.

The numbers come from StatsCounter, which also has global statistics that put Chrome well ahead of Safari. But, as with any market share survey, take these numbers with a grain of salt. Browser usage routinely fluctuate from month to month and it may well be to early to say Chrome is really ahead of Safari. Here’s StatsCounter’s methodology, if you’re interested.

This does possibly mean good news for Google’s WebM video codec, though. Given that Safari is now the only browser lacking support for the new open WebM video codec, Chrome’s rise may mean that early adopters of HTML5 video will treat WebM as a “works-everywhere” solution.

After all, Safari’s tiny market share is in the same range as the number of users without JavaScript, and clearly that group is routinely ignored.

Horse race photo by Paolo Camera/Flickr/CC

See Also:

• Review: New Features Bring Safari 5 Up to Speed
• On Web Video Support, Safari Now Stands Alone
• Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Simplifies the Web

View full post on Webmonkey

The all-new beta of the Flock browser is based on the same code as Google Chrome. The company ditched Firefox in favor of Chromium in this new version.

The social web browser Flock is undergoing a major change in its next release. The upcoming Flock 3.0 will move away from the Firefox backend Flock has used for years in favor of Chromium, the open source implementation of Google Chrome.

If you’d like to test a beta version of the new Flock browser, head over to Flock beta page and grab a copy. For now the new Chromium-based Flock is available for Windows 7, XP and Vista only. A Mac version is reportedly in the works.

Flock is a browser built for social web junkies. It helps you manage your identity across multiple social websites, and it brings status updates and posting widgets directly into the browser via sidebars. Ever since the browser was first introduced in 2006, it’s been based on Firefox’s open source browser code, so this new version is a drastic change of plans. Flock is a niche browser — its user base is minuscule compared to the web at large — but those who do use it are dedicated and passionate about it.

The new Flock has been radically simplified, eliminating support for all but the biggest social networks and media sharing sites, namely Facebook, Twitter, Flickr and YouTube. Sorry MySpace, you’re just not part of the social web anymore (at least according to Flock).

The Flock 3.0 beta is a totally different browser than its predecessors — about the only thing that’s the same is the name. As you would expect, Flock now looks like Google Chrome, with tabs on top and the familiar, all-in-one URL and search bar. Flock has added some of the tools from older versions, rebuilding them on top of the new Chrome foundation, namely the social networking account manager and a sidebar that displays all your friends’ updates and lets you post your own status updates.

The sidebar looks similar to previous versions, though there are some new filters. You can narrow your Twitter updates to show only mentions or direct messages, and curb Facebook noise by eliminating wall posts, pokes, event invites or whatever. Just about every type of notification can be toggled on or off for any of the supported services.

Manage your groups in Flock’s sidebar.

Perhaps the most useful addition to Flock 3.0 is the ability to create groups of friends to filter and manage your incoming updates. Out of the box, Flock offers two groups — Best Friends and Co-workers — though you can customize and create your own groups as well. Once you’ve got your groups set up, Flock makes it very simple to switch between seeing what your friends are up to, what’s going on with your work colleagues, your family, and so on. For those with hundreds of contacts and friends spread across multiple sites, and for those who apply different social standards when interacting with people from different parts of their life, this will likely be Flock 3.0’s killer feature.

Another very useful new feature is the integrated search field in the URL bar. Flock has changed the way Chromium’s URL search bar works to include your friend’s Twitter posts, Facebook updates, Flickr images and YouTube video in your searches. It makes easy to find out what your friends have said about whatever you’re searching for.

We’ve been using Flock for several years now and have to admit that we’ve never quite been able to figure our where it fits into our daily browsing tasks. Previous versions were sluggish, and the amount of setup required to interact with a bunch of different websites was overwhelming. Also, it’s an open secret that there was little Flock could do that you couldn’t accomplish by installing a few good add-ons to vanilla Firefox.

By contrast, the new Flock is a svelte, speedy browser. It immediately feels more relevant and fresh. And, in narrowing its support to only the most popular social sites, Flock is less daunting for newcomers. Getting started is in fact incredibly elegant — the browser launches with a screen that asks you to set up a Flock account, but you can skip it and just start surfing. As you log in to social sites like Twitter and Facebook, Flock begins filling out the social sidebar with updates from your friends on those sites mere seconds after you’ve logged in.

That said, you long-time Flock users may be unhappy with the new version — particularly if you rely on any Flock-compatible Firefox add-ons or use any of the many sites Flock no longer supports. While Flock 3.0 should work with any Chrome extensions, Chrome extensions do not have quite the same range of function as those in Firefox.

If you’d like to give the new Flock a try, head over the beta download page and grab a copy. Keep in mind that Flock 3.0 is still a beta and may have some bugs. If you’re on a Mac, there’s a mailing list you can sign up for to be notified when a Mac version is available.

See Also:

• Newest Flock Release Brings Twitter, Facebook Chat to the Browser
• Chrome 5 Arrives, Mac, Linux Versions Now Available
• Flock 2.0 Beta Builds On Firefox 3 Improvements

View full post on Webmonkey

Google Chrome appears to be gearing up for another web-browser first — syncing extensions among your various Chrome installations. Chrome already syncs bookmarks, preferences and themes. Adding extensions makes for a universal browsing experience no matter what computer you happen to pick up.

The feature isn’t part of Chrome just yet. In fact, Google hasn’t even mentioned it. But the eagle-eyed folks over at Download Squad noticed that someone recently checked in some extension-syncing code into the Chromium project.

Chromium is the open source project that Google’s Chrome is based on. We’ve been using Chromium nightlies for some time now, but sadly, testing last night’s build did not reveal any extension-syncing. (Download Squad also failed to get extension-sync working.)

So, while Chromium’s extension-syncing is thus far embryonic, it is nevertheless a work in progress. This means Chrome will likely beat Firefox Sync to incorporating extension-syncing: Despite being at version 1.3, Firefox Sync still does not sync extensions.

Firefox Sync does, however, sync several things Chrome doesn’t, including your browsing history and currently open tabs. And to be fair, Mozilla’s extension system is quite a bit more powerful and complex than what Chrome offers, and that complexity likely makes extension-syncing somewhat more difficult to build.

Browser extensions in Chrome are especially lightweight. Developers can write extensions that alter a web page’s behavior or add buttons or other elements to the browser’s skin. All of the coding is accomplished using simple web standards — HTML, CSS and JavaScript.

By contrast, traditional extensions for other browsers are more powerful, but their file sizes are larger. The lightweight approach makes it easier to sync extensions between two installations of a browser quickly.

Mozilla is encouraging developers to experiment with its own lightweight-extensions model for Firefox called Jetpack, which also uses add-ons coded in web standards. Safari 5, released this week, is using a similar HTML-JavaScript–based model.

Although Chrome’s extension-syncing isn’t working at the moment, and there will no doubt be some wrinkles to iron out even once it is, we’re looking forward to seeing it turn up in developer builds, hopefully sooner rather than later.

See Also:

• Chrome 5 Arrives, Mac, Linux Versions Now Available
• New Chrome Beta Gets a Huge Speed Boost, Flash
• Google Chrome Beta Adds Privacy and Content Controls
• Google Chrome to Support the Web Open Font Format

View full post on Webmonkey

Google has released a significant update to its controversial Chrome Frame, an Internet Explorer plug-in that replaces the default IE rendering engine with the engine that powers Google’s Chrome browser.

Chrome Frame essentially embeds Google’s browser inside any tab or window within Internet Explorer. It forces IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like embedded audio and video.

Previously only available as a “developer preview,” the new version of Chrome Frame has been updated to beta status. Chrome Frame’s underlying code has also been updated to match the Chrome 5 browser, which means Chrome Frame can now handle more HTML5 features like better audio and video playback, Canvas animations, geolocation, Web Workers, WebSocket connections and offline databases.

Chrome Frame now also integrates with IE more closely, meaning that the add-on now works with IE’s InPrivate browsing mode, and that clearing cookies and cache in IE will now also clear out the same elements in Chrome Frame.

If you’re stuck with IE 6 at work, but you want to see the latest and greatest the web has to offer, Chrome Frame makes for a decent solution. The only downside to Chrome Frame is that it will only be triggered on websites that have explicitly enabled it using a special meta tag. Of course, all of Google’s sites are on that short list, so you can at least experience some cool cutting-edge stuff like drag-and-drop in Gmail, geolocation in Google Maps, or real-time communication in Google Wave.

Despite the fact that Chrome Frame does not just take over IE, Google’s add-on is not without some degree of controversy. Back when Chrome Frame was first announced, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, warned against the idea, arguing that the Chrome plug-in for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit.

So far those fears haven’t come to pass, but now that Chrome Frame is a beta release, it may begin to see wider use.

Shaver’s main argument — that simply telling users to switch browsers is far better strategy — is still undeniably the best solution. After all, if you’re savvy enough to know about and install Chrome Frame, you’re most likely savvy enough to just upgrade IE or switch to a better browser. But even the most recent version of Internet Explorer, version 8, doesn’t have the same level of capability as Chrome, and Chrome Frame gives IE users an opportunity to play around on the bleeding edge.

Also, there’s a subset of users who need IE 6 for legacy corporate intranets and applications, but also need to interact with today’s web. Given that several Google services — like Google Apps and Google Reader — no longer support IE 6, the day is fast approaching where Chrome Frame will be the only option for those still locked into IE 6 who want to use the newest web apps.

If you’re one of those people, head over to grab the latest version of Chrome Frame.

See Also:

• Mozilla VP on Why Google Chrome Frame Is a Bad Idea
• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9

View full post on Webmonkey

Google has updated its Chrome web browser to version 5.0, and, perhaps more importantly, given the ready-for-prime-time blessing to the Mac and Linux versions of Chrome. Previously versions of Chrome for Mac and Linux were limited to beta and developer builds.

To update to Chrome 5, head over to the Google download page and grab a copy for Windows, Mac or Linux.

Chrome 5 brings a number of new features to the table, including some major speed gains, more HTML5 features, like drag-and-drop support and the geolocation API, a much improved bookmark syncing and management tool and a new set of privacy controls.

For more details on everything that’s new in Chrome 5, see our review of the beta release earlier this year.

If you’ve been using the Chrome beta or developer builds there isn’t anything new to see in the official version, but the bugs should be gone and Chrome 5 is now ready the same across all platforms.

In a post on the official Google blog the Chrome team reports that “the Mac and Linux versions [have] caught up with the Windows version.”

One feature you won’t find in this release is the integrated Flash plugin that Google is working on. By adding Flash to Chrome Google plans to make it easier to keep users up-to-date with Flash patches, but so far that feature hasn’t made it to the official versions yet.

On the Mac side Chrome now sports a more polished UI and has a few tricks you won’t find in Apple’s Safari (Mac’s default WebKit-based browser) such as a full-screen mode, integrated bookmark syncing, and of course support for extensions.

We should also note that Mac beta users will be automatically updated to the stable version, so if you want to stick with the beta channel you’ll need to download it again after you’ve updated to stable.

Chrome’s Linux release now sports a GTK+ theme and is available as a .deb or .rpm for most Debian-based systems. The Ubuntu-centric website OMGUbuntu reports that Chrome, and its open source sibling Chromium, already account for over 36 percent of the site’s Linux visitors.

Globally Chrome’s market share hovers between 5 and 6 percent of the browser market, depending on which set of polling numbers you want to believe.

Now that Chrome is stable and has feature parity across operating systems look for that number to continue growing thanks to Chrome’s blazing speed and more mature feature-set.

See Also:

• New Chrome Beta Gets a Huge Speed Boost, Flash
• Google Chrome Beta Adds Privacy and Content Controls
• Google Chrome to Support the Web Open Font Format
• Google Turns to HTML5 for Gmail’s New Drag-and-Drop Attachments

View full post on Webmonkey