Thursday, September 4, 2008

Google Chrome Tips and Pointers

Chrome is Google's newly released browser. It's currently available for Windows only. Following are a couple of FAQ's and bits of interest.

Where's the search history button?

In Chrome's interface the search history has been integrated into the back button – just hold down the mouse button when you're clicking on the back arrow. After a short delay, a menu pops up showing your recently visited pages. You can also access the full (searchable) history from that menu.

Where's the home button? Where's the favorites bar?

By default Chrome has no home button. You can enable it by opening the options dialog – click the wrench icon in the top right and then "Options" – and checking the box labeled "Show Home button...".

As for the bookmarks bar, whether it shows for you by default depends on your previous browser settings. To show it or hide it, hit Ctrl+B.

Does Chrome work together especially well with Google services like Gmail, Google Maps, or Google Docs?

Google argue they improved the speed of JavaScript, which is heavily used in Google's web apps. Some others offer a more nuanced viewing saying it's not always the fastest.

With all these JavaScript speed tests, it's important to understand they're only one part of the equation. A lot of the times, the bottleneck of the application is not the script but the data that's still being downloaded. If you're on a very slow connection, or you're using a site with very heavy downloads, switching to a faster JavaScript engine won't really help.

Additionally, Chrome ships with the Google Gears plug-in, which is used in some Google (and some non-Google) apps to deliver offline functionality for web pages and more. But don't expect Chrome to work much better, or even work at all, in all of Google services – take a look at the following screenshot from Google Groups, visited with Chrome:

Is Chrome more secure than other browsers? Does it respect my privacy?

Chrome is likely not 100% secure, even when you'd get that impression from parts of the comic book Google put forth – but no popular browser is ever completely secure. For instance, it has been mentioned that there are ways to automatically drop a file on your desktop (edit: or whichever place is defined as download directory) when browsing a page with Chrome. E.g. any webmaster can add an executable called "Windows Explorer" with an icon of their choosing to your desktop via the following HTML included in their page... using the Chrome default settings you won't even be asked for confirmation, which opposes Google's statements that a Chrome tab is like a "jail":

<iframe src="Windows%20Explorer.exe" style="border: 0"> </iframe>

As for Google respecting your privacy, well, there are some ways the browser communicates with Google's server through its address bar auto-completion – the "omnibox" – that got some people worried. To disable some of the omnibox-server communication, right-click the Chrome address bar, select "Edit search engines" from the context menu that appears, and uncheck the box labeled "Use a suggestion service...".

As a bonus, Chrome has an "incognito" mode – press Ctrl+Shift+N – which makes your browsing more private.

What does that Chrome logo remind me of...?

I don't know, but here's a guess...

I missed the Google webcast where they talked about Chrome...

The webcast is archived on YouTube. (Not all slides are showing in the video, I've uploaded the first 10 as a zip file.) Larry Page appears near the end. Note the Q&A at the end of the session is not included in that video.

How can I optimize my website for Chrome?

Chrome is based on the existing Webkit rendering, which mostly adheres to web standards, and is also used in similar form by the Safari browser. So your first best bet is to work within the official standards of HTML (or XHTML) and CSS. Beyond that you should do some testing as not all things will display the same in every browser.

One other thing you can do with Chrome is to utilize the features of the Google Gears component it ships with. For instance, this lets you create a persistent client-side database which you can query using JavaScript. (Note that this won't automatically make the data available on all computers the user may visit your site with; you need to handle synchronization for that and rely on all browsers on the different computers having Gears installed.)

Something else you can do is to use some of the Webkit-specific Cascading StyleSheet properties. For instance, the following will add a ticker effect to an element (in case you really would want it... as it can be obtrusive):

    white-space: nowrap;
    overflow: hidden;
    overflow-x:-webkit-marquee;
    -webkit-marquee-direction: backwards;
    -webkit-marquee-style: alternate;
    -webkit-marquee-speed: normal;
    -webkit-marquee-increment: small;
    -webkit-marquee-repetition: 4;

Not all CSS that works with Safari works with Chrome, though. For instance, the following does not seem to show the special font "Abduction" in Chrome, even when it does in Windows Safari:

@font-face {
    font-family: Abduction;
    font-style: normal;
    src: url(http://blogoscoped.com/temp/Abduction.ttf);
}

.someClass {
    font-family: Abduction, arial;
}

Will there be a Linux or Mac version of Chrome? Will there be a mobile version?

There's only a Windows XP/ Vista version available so far but Google say they're working on Linux and Mac versions. If you visit the Google Chrome homepage with Mac or Linux, you can click the blue button to the right to sign up for an email alert when your system's version is ready.

As for a mobile version, Google indicated they may release the browser for their Android mobile system, perhaps under a related but slightly different name.

What can Chrome's tabs do? Can I turn them off?

One specialty of Chrome's tabs is that you can drag them out of the tab area into a new window. Reversely, you can also drag a new window back into another window's tab section. You can also slide tabs around horizontally to re-order them.

As for turning off tabs, like for those who use the Windows task bar tabs instead, I didn't find a way to do that yet.

Where can I find help on Google Chrome? Where can I submit bugs or feedback?

You can find help in Google's official Chrome groups. There's one group for feature suggestions, for instance. Bugs can be submitted in the Chrome issues list (or rather, the issues list of "Chromium", which is the name of the open source project). You can also submit a bug by clicking the page icon in Chrome and selecting "Report bug or broken website" (note by default you'll be sending a screenshot of the current page to Google, but you can uncheck that option). See the known issues page to find out what Google is already working on.

Also feel free to join our discussion in this blog's forum on Chrome and other Google topics.

I'm having problems installing Chrome...

If you're can't install Chrome with Symantec, check the forum thread (please use that tip at your own risk). Also, Google says they're working to resolve Chrome problems with ZoneAlarm and Kaspersky.

How can I install an ad blocker for Chrome?

I received the following small tutorial on how to do this, but I can't guarantee it works and I don't know about potential side-effects... please use with care (quote HTML'ified):

1. Install free software Proxomitron. It stays in your system tray and only eats 3MBs of RAM.

2. In Google Chrome go to Options -> Under the Hood and click on "Change Proxy Settings".

3. A new window will open. Click on "LAN Settings", tick "Use a proxy server for your LAN". In the Address field enter "localhost" and for Port enter "8080". Also tick "Bypass proxy server for local addresses"

That's it really. It's not as effective as the Firefox Adblock extension but it works well nonetheless.

Can I see Chrome in my statistics?

Chrome sends its own user agent string so – depending on your stats program and your visitors – you should. In Google Analytics, you'll see the name "Chrome" if you go to Visitors -> Browser Capabilities -> Browsers (try expand your list to more than 10 if you don't see it).

To view the user agent string of Chrome, type "about:" in Chrome's address bar. You'll see a page with the Chrome version number and the following user agent string:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 6.0; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13

Does Google Chrome have an easter egg?

Yes. The easter egg (or perhaps one of the easter eggs, not sure) appears when you type about:internets in the address bar. Note however this only works on Windows XP, not on Vista. If you can't see it, take a look at this screenshot...

What are the special "about:" URLs I can access?

Try entering these addresses into Chrome:

about:
about:cache
about:crash
about:dns
about:hang
about:histograms
about:internets
about:memory
about:network
about:plugins
about:shorthang (careful*)
about:stats
about:version

*Don't use the "shorthang" if you have important unsaved changes in a web app, as it emulates a crash.

I've set my default search engine to a non-Google one, removed the speed dial page, and cleared all cookies. Yet when I restart Chrome, Google will drop one or two Google cookies in the browser again. What's happening?

I don't know... I asked Google and will add an update if there's more info.

I can't access Hotmail (or another site) with Chrome...

When you want to log-in to Microsoft Hotmail aka Live Mail with Chrome, you'll see the message "Upgrade your web browser" (... to Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari). However, you can click the "continue to Windows Live Hotmail" link to use Hotmail anyway, though Microsoft warns that not all things may work as usual.

As for other sites not working with Chrome, you can click the page icon and select "Report bug or broken website". You could also contact the webmaster to ask for Chrome support.

How do I... disable images? Add Greasemonkey scripts? Skin the Chrome theme? Directly subscribe to an RSS feed? and so on...

A whole lot of things indeed aren't supported in Chrome, at least not at the moment... the feature requests group might be good start.

Google Chrome installed in the wrong language, how can I change it?

You can switch to another language in [wrench icon] -> Options -> Minor Tweaks -> Change font and language settings -> Languages -> Google Chrome language/ Spell-checker language.

Will Google take over the browser market, hurt Firefox, and create a monopoly?

Likely too early to tell any of these, but ZDNet has an article listing "five reasons why Chrome will crash and burn" and another article listing "five reasons Chrome will take over the world".

I've heard there were some problems with Chrome's end user license agreement...?

After some protest in regards to a part of the Chrome legalese, Google said it added it in error and changed it.

I want to see a Chrome-related Lolcat...

How do I disable the default tab homepage with the thumbnails (the one similar to Opera's "speed dial")?

To disable it, click the wrench icon in Chrome and open the options dialog. In the "On startup" section, check "Open the following pages" and add a page with the address about:blank. Add the same about:blank address in the "Home page" section. Note however this will still show the speed dial when you hit Ctrl+N to open a new Chrome window...

How do I add a special site search to the "omnibox" address bar?

The omnibox learns as you go. Let's say you would like Chrome to have a site search available for the blog Google Operating System. First, visit the homepage of the blog. Then, do a site search for that blog by using the search box Google Operating System provides on the page. Now, next time you enter e.g. "googlesys..." in the address bar, you can hit the [tab] key and perform a site search from the address bar.

Furthermore, you can also add a keyword to search the given site. To continue with above example, start by right-clicking the address bar. Pick "Edit search engines" and in the dialog that opens, scroll down to where you'll see "googlesystem.blogspot.com" listed. Double-click that entry. Now in the Keyword field, enter e.g. "gos". Approve the dialog windows.

Now in the address bar, you can type e.g. "gos" + [tab] (sometimes a blank will suffice too) + "hello" + [return], and you'll immediately see the search results from the Google OS site.

What if the site you want to search across does not have its own search engine, or it doesn't have a good one? You can still make it searchable. Let's say the domain in question is example.com. Go to the "Edit search engines" dialog once more, and click the Add button. Enter a fitting name, and in the keywords field enter e.g. "example". In the URL field enter the following:

http://www.google.com/search?q=site:example.com+%s

The URL you entered means: do a site search over example.com using Google, and append the search keyword in the position of the "%s". Approve the dialog and you're ready to search through example.com over your address bar (note this will only find the pages indexed in Google, so there may be some cases where it won't work).

What if you want to search across many different sites at once? This is also possible: just create a Google Custom Search Engine, and during engine creation, provide the domains you want to search through in the "Sites to search" field. When done, add the created Custom Search Engine to the list of Chrome search engines as described above.

Random files are appearing on my desktop after browsing with Chrome, what to do?

Go to the options dialog (via the wrench icon) and in the Minor Tweaks tab check the box "Ask where to save each file before downloading".

[Hat tip to Ron, Cody, Brainhack.de, Juha-Matti Laurio, Anil, Callum Prentice, Tony, Kin, Bilal, Andy, Brinke, Ido, Lolcat builder, Sergey K., and everybody else who provided comments!]

Google Chrome Tips and Po ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (20)

Privacy Concerns Over Google Chrome’s "Omnibox"

From CNet:

The auto-suggest feature of Google’s new Chrome browser does more than just help users get where they are going. It will also give Google a wealth of information on what people are doing on the Internet besides searching.

Provided that users leave Chrome’s auto-suggest feature on and have Google as their default search provider, Google will have access to any keystrokes that are typed into the browser’s Omnibox, even before a user hits enter.

What’s more, Google has every intention of retaining some of that data even after it provides the promised suggestions. A Google representative told CNET News that the company plans to store about 2 percent of that data – and plans to store it along with the Internet Protocol address of the computer that typed it.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s Peter Eckersley said he’s concerned about this feature, CNet reports in another article.

If you like to use Chrome but want to turn off this feature, right-click the Chrome address bar, select “Edit search engines”, and uncheck the “Use a suggestion service...” box. Also, Google’s Matt Cutts mentions other ways Chrome talks to Google.

[Thanks Juha-Matti Laurio!]

Privacy Concerns Over Goo ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (8)

Wednesday, September 3, 2008

Picasa Web Albums Adds Face Recognition, Map Game

The Picasa desktop client has been released in version 3 with some changes, and Picasa Web Albums also saw a revamp with new features. For instance, there’s now an Explore tag which lets you visually discover new pics by others.

An interesting new feature is Picasa’s face recognition. Google acquired image recognition company Neven Vision a while ago, and now Picasa got some of that technology, too*. Get started by logging in to Picasa Web Albums and clicking the “Try it” button below the Name Tags headline to the right. This will trigger a job with a progress bar, and you can check back a while later. (At first, none of my test photos seemed to yield matches, but today I’m getting some results.)

Once faces are found, you can switch to the People tab and tag them with names. In my test photos I tagged Matt Cutts, Sergey Brin and others. I then uploaded more photos containing these persons. Google did not automatically tag them; what they do is find the rectangle within the photo containing a face, and then offer suggestions (sometimes correct, sometimes incorrect), so you’ll end up semi-manually identifying the remaining faces. All in all a useful feature as this lets you group and find your photos by the persons in them, but it would become even more useful if Google were able to automatically assign matches.

Another addition to Picasa Web Albums is a game called “Where in the World?”. Here your job is to try to guess where a given snapshot was taken by clicking on a world map. You’ll then see the distance to the actual location and get more points the closer your pick. The game looks neat but it would probably be more fun if they’d more often show you pictures for which there’s a realistic chance to know the location (e.g. a picture of a famous monument versus a picture of a more general shore scenery). I wonder if Google has any intentions to get back some data for their AI to mine here, but considering the game already knows the location of each given picture, I’m not so sure.

[Thanks Hebbet!]

*Since some time, Google image results can also be restricted to show just faces.

Picasa Web Albums Adds Fa ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (40+18)

Google Calculator Part 2 (Pic)

[Hat tip to Dave Shaw and SEOMoz’ 10 inexplicably weird search results for this result!]

Google Calculator Part 2 ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3+5)

Google’s "Search Options" Prototype

One of the prototype search results Google is currently testing shows a “Search options” link in the blue results bar. When you click it, a navigation bar expands to the left side, promising to limit results to pages created “anytime”, “past 24 hours”, “past week” and so on. There are also a couple of alternative result views to enable; “longer text”, “dates and places”, “images from the page”, and “publication date”. “Longer text” shows snippets beyond what Google normally displays in results. “Images from the page” includes little thumbnails, not unlike one of the views already available in the Google Experimental Labs.

If you want to enable this experiment for you as well (be aware I’m not sure whether there might be side-effects), go to Google.com and paste the following into the address bar, and hit return – then continue to browse Google as normal:

Google’s "Search Options" ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (1)

Chrome Links on Google Homepages, With an Error in Germany

Google is promoting their new browser Chrome on quite a lot of national homepages, from China to France to the US. In Germany, they temporarily advertised Chrome in the wrong place. Instead of a link below the search box mentioning the new browser, the red “New!” message was placed in the footer, the link text which led to Chrome reading “Advertising with Google”. I bet this made quite a few Germans scratch their head earlier today... (by now, it’s fixed).
[Hat tip to Yinxue!]

Chrome Links on Google Ho ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (3)

Browsing With Google Chrome

After downloading and installing Google’s new Windows-based browser Chrome – Google already revealed some background info via their comic –, like many of you, I gave it a first test run. A browser is the kind of thing you’ll end up using all day long, if you do end up using it. You don’t want it to get in the way at all, and yet you wish it has all the features you really think you need. Smaller interface usability hurdles sum up throughout the day, so it’s especially important that a browser is well thought out down to the details.

On first glance, Chrome feels very light-weight. The tabs are where some other browsers might their title bar, at the top, which saves some space. The status bar is also not visible at most times; it dynamically fades in when you hover over a link, showing the link address, and the loading icon will be shown in the tab above instead. When you enter a URL you’ll see the “omnibox”, Google’s auto-completion address bar with extra functionality (like Google search, site searches, your browser history and more) become active. Alternatively, you can also navigate to some of your recent pages via the “speed dial” browser homepage, which is displayed in tabs by default.

The pages I’ve tested rendered fast – some faster than in other browsers – but only extensive comparisons would show which browser is faster on which pages. The speedy rendering did its part to make the browser feel even more light-weight, though, as did the light blue, somewhat minimalist design. Browsing pages and entering forms you’ll notice minor differences in handling to other browsers, but these things often just take time to get used to. Even when Google builds their rendering on the existing Webkit, there still will be some testing needed in Chrome for web developers though – once Chrome reaches a critical percentage in the market, anyway (we’re far from that, though Google does their part today by linking the program from their homepage).

Chrome’s “omnibox” transforms into an Amazon site search.

Sometimes a bit unusual is good, but at other times, we may also have our own browsing style which we don’t want to switch away from. In this case, for me it was the fact that I’m using the Windows task bar as my program tabs (I’m including it hidden in the left part of the desktop, expanding on hover). Whenever I open a web app or web site, it’ll be just another program in that Windows tabs bar and I can switch around easily using Alt-Tab (or by clicking on the bar’s program titles, which get more room to stack up than they would in horizontal position). Google Chrome however, in contrast to my current browser Firefox 3, didn’t offer me a good way to disable tabs. This was partly not as bad as expected because the tabs don’t take away more space than a title bar; on the other hand, in many occasions the tabs would make themselves be noticed again, like when I shift-click a link, or when hitting the Ctrl+N shortcut didn’t open a full-screen empty window (as I configured Chrome to show) but a non-full-screen speed dial.

Google Chrome’s options, which you can reach from the right-hand side buttons (Chrome does not have a menu in the traditional sense) don’t offer a lot to customize. On the upside, that makes the settings dialog uncluttered and easy to find what’s important. On the downside, some of us may also feel like we need a couple of more settings to make the browser truly ours. The lack of customization left a taste of “our way or no way” with me; perhaps Google improves this in the future (some may be reminded of the early Google Talk releases, which were also rather sparse). For a first release, the browser does already seem mature, incorporating some of the better ideas of other browsers and delivering a couple of inventions or spins of its own. There’s no complete jaw-dropping surprises yet, but it runs and works, and has very solid usability.

Right now, here are some of the things some of us have found missing: a direct way to subscribe to news feeds; a way to tell the spellchecker that a word is spelled correctly; ways to more fully customize the tabs or speed dial behavior, as mentioned; a way to zoom the full page instead of just increasing the text size (Firefox 3 has a nice way of remembering the zoom level per site); a way to save the page as screenshot; a way to add toolbars, extensions, skins (what if you’d prefer gray to light blue?) and so on. In terms of security, I’m also missing the page’s URL when I create an application shortcut (any given page can be turned into a pseudo desktop app, but that app won’t show an address bar... which seems like helping phishing attacks: the user won’t notice when an address change occurred, they don’t know which address they’re currently on, and they’re trained to ignore the address bar). The browser scroll wheel isn’t fully supported in all circumstances. Buttons don’t always show their focus when you tab through a form.

The incognito mode (from the Latin word incognitus, “unknown”, as Wikipedia explains).

Here are some of the niceties Chrome does ship with already though. Developers will find some interesting tools, like an element inspector when you right-click somewhere on the page and open the context menu. The source view is stable, too. There’s also a JavaScript debugger and a JavaScript console. If you like to dig deeper, you can also enter the special addresses about:stats, about:network, about:histograms, about:plugins, about:memory, about:cache, and about:dns (or, for fun, about:crash, and if you feel like risking to lose data, try about:shorthang, which will cause a tab crash).

People caring about their privacy will find the incognito mode to allow you private surfing, in which no history or cookies are saved after closing the window. The speed dial function, for those who like it, is advanced, and incorporates your bookmarks (you can click the star button for every page to add a bookmark) and more. A “Paste and go” function in the address bar’s context menu takes you straight to your clipboard URL. Textareas can be resized by via drag icon (some webmasters may not like what this does to the text box design). The domain name is highlighted in the address bar by printing it black, with other parts of the URL gray (we know this from other browsers too; though, as the subdomain is highlighted as well, this won’t help unknowing users against phishing attacks of the google.maps.com kind).

And search, perhaps somewhat to be expected given Google’s focus in their products, is handled very well to extremely well in Chrome. For one thing, sites which you visit and where you perform a search will be memorized by Google’s address search bar. Next time, you can enter the site name in the address bar – like “amazon” – and hit tab, and then enter the search keyword... after hitting return, you’ll now be taken straight to the site search results. For a dictionary search in my German to English dictionary, I can now type “leo”, followed by the tab key, followed by the word in question. Another feature is the very interesting ability to search over the full text of pages you’ve visited before. Last not least, things you enter in the address bar, you can search for in Google and other engines.

Searching Waxy.org for the word “video”.

Also, hitting Ctrl+F and searching for a keyword within the page you’re on brings up a nice highlighting of all matches (marked yellow), the currently focused match (marked orange), as well as a color indicator in the sidebar showing where in the whole document matches occur.

Now, perhaps even more than the pros and cons of the initial version of Chrome, I suppose a whole lot of the app’s success depends on how Google will integrate general user feedback, bug reports and feature wishes of different kinds into future versions. What are your impressions of Chrome, and what are your feature wishes?

Please join the discussion in the existing Google Chrome forum thread.

[Thanks Tony, Andrej, Peekay, Gerrit, Rorist, Arie, Incognito, Martyn, and everyone who commented with pointers, tips and feedback in the forum!]

Browsing With Google Chro ... by Philipp Lenssen

Tuesday, September 2, 2008

Google Chrome Screenshots

Google announced their browser Google Chrome to be available on Tuesday, but their download page and tour was already partly available at gears.google.com/chrome/ just now, as Uval in the forum noticed. While the download itself didn’t work when I tried, I was able to extract some screenshots, from the frontpage but also the YouTube videos. And while the product tour videos themselves seemed to require a special group membership at YouTube, the video still previews are public and you can paste the video identifier into a URL like this one to see more high quality stills.

The service’s logo.

Screenshots of Google Chrome from the service’s frontpage.

Expand all...

Google Chrome Screenshots by Philipp Lenssen

Monday, September 1, 2008

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Today there was a comic book in my mail, sent by Google and drawn by no less than Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics. Within the 38 pages, which I’ve scanned and put up, in very readable format Google gives the technical details into a project of theirs: an open source browser called Google Chrome. The book points to www.google.com/chrome, but I can’t see anything live there yet. In a nut-shell, here’s what the comic announces Google Chrome to be:

• Google Chrome is Google’s open source browser project. As rumored before under the name of “Google Browser”, this will be based on the existing rendering engine Webkit. Furthermore, it will include Google’s Gears project.
• The browser will include a JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8, built from scratch by a team in Denmark, and open-sourced as well so other browsers could include it. One aim of V8 was to speed up JavaScript performance in the browser, as it’s such an important component on the web today. Google also say they’re using a “multi-process design” which they say means “a bit more memory up front” but over time also “less memory bloat.” When web pages or plug-ins do use a lot of memory, you can spot them in Chrome’s task manager, “placing blame where blame belongs.”
• Google Chrome will use special tabs. Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar.
  
  
• The browser has an address bar with auto-completion features. Called ’omnibox’, Google says it offers search suggestions, top pages you’ve visited, pages you didn’t visit but which are popular amd more. The omnibox (“omni” is a prefix meaning “all”, as in “omniscient” – “all-knowing”) also lets you enter e.g. “digital camera” if the title of the page you visited was “Canon Digital Camera”. Additionally, the omnibox lets you search a website of which it captured the search box; you need to type the site’s name into the address bar, like “amazon”, and then hit the tab key and enter your search keywords.
• As a default homepage Chrome presents you with a kind of “speed dial” feature, similar to the one of Opera. On that page you will see your most visited webpages as 9 screenshot thumbnails. To the side, you will also see a couple of your recent searches and your recently bookmarked pages, as well as recently closed tabs.
  
  
• Chrome has a privacy mode; Google says you can create an “incognito” window “and nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged on your computer.” The latest version of Internet Explorer calls this InPrivate. Google’s use-case for when you might want to use the “incognito” feature is e.g. to keep a surprise gift a secret. As far as Microsoft’s InPrivate mode is concerned, people also speculated it was a “porn mode.”
• Web apps can be launched in their own browser window without address bar and toolbar. Mozilla has a project called Prism that aims to do similar (though doing so may train users into accepting non-URL windows as safe or into ignoring the URL, which could increase the effectiveness of phishing attacks).
• To fight malware and phishing attempts, Chrome is constantly downloading lists of harmful sites. Google also promises that whatever runs in a tab is sandboxed so that it won’t affect your machine and can be safely closed. Plugins the user installed may escape this security model, Google admits.

This looks like a very interesting project, and I think it can’t hurt to have more competition in the browser area. Google is playing this as nicely as possible by open-sourcing things, with perhaps part of the reason to try to defend against monopoly accusations – after all, Google already owns a lot of what’s happening inside the browser, and some may feel owning a browser too could be a little too much power for a single company (Google could, for instance, release browser features that benefit their sites more than most other sites... as can Microsoft with Internet Explorer). For now, until Chrome is released in a testable version, how much of the speed, stability and user interface promises will be fullfilled – and how much of the interface you’ll be able to configure in case you don’t like it – remains to be seen.

[Images by Google.]

Update: Google now posted on this at their blog, announcing the launch date to be tomorrow, Tuesday.

Update 3: More screenshots are available now. [Thanks again Uval!]

Update 4, Tuesday 21:00 CET: Google Chrome is available for download now.

Google Chrome, Google’s B ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (565)

Google Tech on the Toilet (Pic)

Nevon spotted above in the (men’s) toilet at the London Girl Geek Dinners 3rd anniversary event at Google London, August 28, 2008. The info is provided by Google’s Tech Stop (Tech Stop is one of Google’s internal services to provide computer help). Shown at the bottom of “Episode 1: Have You Defragged Recently?” is the intranet address http://go/techstopsurgery. A longer running series is Google’s “Testing on the Toilet”. Another flyer was called “Production on the Potty”, Google says.

[Thanks Weberence! Photo Creative Commons licensed by Nevon.]

Google Tech on the Toilet ... by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Photos of Android Phone?

Engadget has photos of what they say is going to be a mobile phone running Google-backed mobile system Android. The phone is T-Mobile-branded and produced by HTC (Taiwan-based High Tech Computer Corporation, a member of the – again Google-backed – Open Handset Alliance, as is T-Mobile), and comes with a slidable keyboard.* [Via Reto.]

*The last HTC/ T-Mobile phone I had I gave up on due to low usability, but then again, it had Windows Mobile running on it.

Photos of Android Phone? by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (5)

Friday, August 29, 2008

YouTube in 1985 (Video)

[Via Thai Tran/ Best of YouTube.]

YouTube in 1985 (Video) by Philipp Lenssen | Comments (7)

>> Older entries