Google Chrome Says Please Update Me

I tend to leave my computer up and running with everything I am working on still running so that I can pick up where I left off later that night or the next day. Google developers have a sense of humor when asking me to restart Chrome to make sure that I am running the latest version!

Old school's not cool. Google Chrome is woefully out of date because it hasn't crashed or restarted in a while. Restart to apply update. Why can't all applications just update themselves like that!

Google Chrome: Comparison of web browsers

HTML 5 Rocks

A new website put up by Google shows off the latest things that you can do with HTML5... Make sure to check out the slideshow in chrome which demos many of the new features of HTML5.

Liking the latest Chrome UI changes

If you do not have the dev or beta channel of Chrome, I can understand. There are days when I want to smash my flat panel, but then there are days when I come in to find nice subtle changes that just make sense and enhance my day. Take a look at what is coming down the road for those on the stable release... http://blog.chromium.org/2010/06/fresh-coat-of-chrome.html

How to change to the Dev channel of Chrome

How is Google improving chrome plug-in security?

The Chromium blog details how they are improving plug-in security for Chrome.

The highlights:

• Chrome will include the flash plugin in the Chrome installer and use Google auto-update to keep the Adobe flash plug-in on the latest version
• Chrome will use Google's own PDF viewer,
• The latest API Pepper will allow Chrome to sandbox plug-ins
• Try to keep users on the latest versions of all plug-ins

Chrome OS

Thought that this was an interesting article about the Chrome OS written by an ex-employee at Google.

Ex-Googler says Chrome OS will be a vastly different OS but won’t displace Windows

I think a dual boot situation is the way to go. There are still a number of websites I frequent that still only work with IE. It is disapointing, but it is reality. I thought about it and many of the things I already do are in the 'cloud'.... Gmail & Yahoo mail, searching online, writing things in a word processor or keeping track of things in spreadsheets (Google Apps vs. Microsoft Office) many of the bells and whistles that exist in Office that I use at work, I just do not take advantage of at home because I don't need to, so I use Google Apps. The one thing that I constantly do however, is retouch photographs from my digital camera before sending them to print. So Google would need to get Picasa browser based (which they may be able to do with Google Gears)

Gmail Browser title bar tweak

A great new Gmail Labs feature, that I enabled this morning was Title Tweaks

Changes order of elements in the browser title bar from "Gmail - Inbox (20) - yourname@gmail.com" to "Inbox (20) - yourname@gmail.com - Gmail". This way you are able (most of the time) to see if a new mail has arrived even if Gmail window is minimized.

To turn on this feature, go to settings and then click on the labs tab, or if you already have a labs feature enabled, click the green beaker on the top right of your screen.

How to Get Silverlight to really work with Google Chrome

Tim Heuer tells us how to get this working with a hack he created.

http://timheuer.com/blog/archive/2009/02/11/moonlight-and-silverlight-detection-google-chrome-user-agent.aspx

Google Chrome Hangs trying to load Google Analytics

Anyone else having problems with Google Analytics being unresponsive when trying to view site reports through Google Chrome? I tried Firefox and the whole browser hangs and I can't even End Task it. On the other hand Internet Explorer brought up my information right away... Good going Microsoft! When I went to the Google Analytics Blog (http://analytics.blogspot.com/), there was nothing posted for 5 days. The backlinks are also broken on their blog. Not a good batting average Google Analytics!

I've posted a question to the Analytics Help Group. My guess is that the Analytics team released an interim build a little too early.

C.Y.A. Google

Now that Google Chrome's Terms of Service debacle has been fixed, people are finally reading the rest of the agreements that Google puts out. To cover their @$$3$ Google issued an explanation of their terms of service. To summarize, Google needs to have a license to your content in order to display it. However, browsers do not license anyones content, so there should be no reason why they would need a license for anything.

I can see how if you use one or many of the Google services where you create content (Gmail, Blogger, Docs) that they would need to have some sort of license to be able to display your content back to you, however Google Chrome shouldn't (and now doesn't) need to have that sort of license.

Google Chrome TOS - WTF

Google owns all of your content your submit or post through it. Google has just announced that they changed their TOS to correct this.:

"11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services."

to this:

11.1 You retain copyright and any other rights you already hold in Content which you submit, post or display on or through, the Services.

Additional interesting tidbits from the TOS:

Google Chrome possibly turning into a Comcast by limiting usage:

"4.5 You acknowledge and agree that while Google may not currently have set a fixed upper limit on the number of transmissions you may send or receive through the Services or on the amount of storage space used for the provision of any Service, such fixed upper limits may be set by Google at any time, at Google’s discretion."

Google Chrome turns out to be add supported:

17.3 In consideration for Google granting you access to and use of the Services, you agree that Google may place such advertising on the Services.

Thoughts?

Google Chrome Vulnerability Already

ZDNet's Zero Day blog explains how... Because Google Chrome uses an outdated WebKit version... nice! Love the term "Carpet bombing"... As I have said before, all software has bugs

"Aw, Snap!" work around

Turns out that Google Chrome has issues with Symantec Endpoint Protection. See Chrome Issue #38. Well at least I know that my Symantec installation is working!

Unable to Get Google Chrome Running - "Aw, Snap!"

Installed Google Chrome on my desktop this morning via IE but I have Firefox as my default browser, and it asked if I wanted to import settings and such from Firefox (as I had envisioned). I had Firefox running and Chrome told me that I needed to have it shut down in order to pull the information. I tried clicking on the continue button but that didn't work, and I didn't want to close Firefox at the time, so I chose the option to import later. Chrome launched and then....

I got two application errors and then I see the following "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this web page. To continue, press Reload or go to another page." on each of the two pages that Chrome launched. Creating new tabs resulted in the same behavior. Closing down the application results in the same behavior as well.

After a uninstall and then reinstall, same thing happened. I then did another reinstall and tried not importing anything, didn't work. Did another uninstall. I re-installed Google Gears installation (v0.4.1500) maybe that was causing the issue, nothing. I noticed that there were a few rogue GoogleUpdate.exe processes so I killed them all and did a reinstall and still nothing..

So my primary machine does not have Google Chrome installed on it. I am a bit dissapointed to say the least. Google, please let me know what I need to do in order for this to work!

Google Chrome - Test Drive

Last night I finally got some time to take Google Chrome for a spin. Earlier in the day I came across a URL address that was supposed to be the download location (http://gears.google.com/chrome) but navigating to that location and trying to download the application, I encountered javascript errors galore and was not able to download anything. I then found the link (http://www.google.com/chrome) and I was able to download without any problems.

The installation was not painful, all you had to do was agree to the TOS agreement, and determine if you want to participate in the usage statistics and crash reporting (this option can also be turned on/off after you install). Per google enabling this option will send crash reports to them when Chrome crashes as well as usage statistics. "When you choose to accept a suggested query or URL in the address bar, the text you typed and the corresponding suggestion is sent to Google. Google Chrome doesn't send other personal information, such as name, email address, or Google Account information."

Once the application was installed I was prompted to import IE bookmarks and settings. I guess that it only asked for IE since on my laptop that is my default browser (I do have firefox installed). I will have to test this on my desktop as firefox is my default browser there.

Once the installation was through, I double-clicked the icon on my desktop and Chrome launched instantly, quicker than any other application I have ever seen. 

To see what kind of footprint Chrome had, I launched both IE and Chrome and lunched 5 tabs to websites I frequent. Under the wrench icon at the right -> Developer -> Task Manager you can see all of the tabs running as well as the memory CPU and Network that each is using. Down at the bottom of that window there is a "Stats for nerds" link that brought me to the window you see at the left (the about:memory page) Interesting enough they included IE as a process they are monitoring and put it up against Chrome. I guess the developers wanted to ensure that whatever they built knocked IE by alot. In most cases Google Chrome utilizes 2x resources but looking at its shared memory footprint - its 5x less than IE!.

Adrian from Hardware 2.0 Blog shows the benchmarks he ran against the other browsers. Spoiler: Google Chrome blows them all out of the water.

So Chrome is amazing and all, but it lacks some of the same features that firefox does and IE doesn't. Microsoft Sharepoint sites which I run in house for collaboration still require you to enter your network username and password. IE under the covers knows how to handle AD authentication.

I really would like to see Google use the WebKit engine in the next version of their Blackberry Gmail app.

What do you think about the new browser? Let me know.

Google's Latest App: Chrome (a web browser)

Google has announced they will be entering the web browser space today. In addition to a blog post announcing the BETA, they have cleverly put their reasoning behind the Chrome architecture that has been designed from the ground up in a comic strip.

From what I have seen so far, it looks like it has potential. All you web developers will now have another browser to support in addition to all the others that you now do. Google is using the WebKit browser engine which is the same engine used by Safari.

The main design points that the design team are striving to solve are the 3 S's, security, speed and stability. Google says they will address these by having each tab be it's own process, and by developing their own javascript VM called V8 written by a dedicated team in Denmark.

The jury is still out, but if the truth be told, then Chrome will gain significant market share within days of its release.