Chrome update brings longer battery life, direct website permission access
Do Not Track is not the only new feature that Google has implemented into Google Chrome 23, the latest stable version of the company's own web browser. A recent blog post at the official Google Chrome team blog highlights two additional changes that have found they way into Chrome 23.
The first promises longer battery life on Chrome for Windows thanks to GPU-accelerated video decoding that the developers have enabled in Chrome 23. The team states that the battery lasted (up to) 25% longer on devices where gpu-accelerated video decoding was enabled on. If you are watching videos on a mobile device running Chrome, you should notice an improvement in battery life, while you won't notice any improvements if you are not using the browser to watch videos.
For now, the feature is only available for Chrome on Windows, with no word from the team if it will also be made available for Mac or Linux versions of the web browser.
The second new feature improves access to website permissions. We have reviewed the feature in September when it landed in dev builds of the browser. A click on the icon in front of the url in the browser's address bar displays a new permissions menu that you can use to manage and change permissions and related data of the active website.
Chrome displays the number of cookies and site data the site has saved on the system, the number of blocked cookies, and the site permissions. The permissions can be changed easily with just a few clicks. You can for instance enable popups for a single domain where information are displayed in popups, disable plugins or images, or block location based information from being accessed by the site.
The permissions that you set here override the default permissions of the Chrome settings. They are permanent in nature, and can easily be changed again by repeating the process.
All site-specific permissions are also accessible on Chrome's content settings page. Here you can remove site-specific permissions or add individual permissions for websites.
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How is the speed and font-rendering doing in this latest Chrome 23 version ? No problems with Flash anymore ?
Never has a single problem with Flash or speed with Chrome
(always using beta versions). The only problem I still have is with
HTTPS Everywhere extension, which I disabled waiting for fix.
I use, among other extensions, Do Not Track Plus which does
a great job (report : In total, you’ve stopped 154,981 attempts to track you.)
Example : ghacks.net has 2 companies tracking users:
Google Adsense
Federated Media.
Chrome’s new website permissions displays 8 cookies stored by ghacks.net
Hope more extensions will make use of event pages, also now there are more event listeners in the chrome.runtime API.
Was I the only one who was laughing out loud about the fact that Do Not Track is implemented into Google Chrome 23? If world’s major tracking company is including something like that in their browser, there will be million backdoors and sec.holes how they will still spy on you.