Google two days ago made an announcement over at the Chromium Blog where they showcased part of their vision to make the process faster, their answer: SPDY, “an application-layer protocol for transporting content over the web”.

SPDY is “designed specifically for minimizing latency through features such as multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression”. Initial tests in a “lab-environment” have shown speed increases of up to 55% over standard connections while downloading pages from the top 25 websites.

The SPDY project defines and implements an application-layer protocol for the web which greatly reduces latency. The high-level goals for SPDY are:

• To target a 50% reduction in page load time. Our preliminary results have come close to this target (see below).
• To minimize deployment complexity. SPDY uses TCP as the underlying transport layer, so requires no changes to existing networking infrastructure.
• To avoid the need for any changes to content by website authors. The only changes required to support SPDY are in the client user agent and web server applications.
• To bring together like-minded parties interested in exploring protocols as a way of solving the latency problem. We hope to develop this new protocol in partnership with the open-source community and industry specialists.

A whitepaper goes into further detail. Users who are interested in the project should start there and follow the discussion over at the Chromium blog.

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Chromium users who want to install a userscript simply visit the website where the userscript is offered, e.g. userscripts.org, and click on the install link offered there.

The process after clicking on the link is similar to the process of installing extensions in the Google browser. It begins with a warning at the bottom of the screen that explains that extensions can be dangerous. It gives the user the choice to continue or discard. The installation dialog will appear if the user selects the continue option. Here it is again possible to install the extension or to cancel the process.

Installed userscripts will appear in the extensions manager of the web browser from where they can be disabled, uninstalled or reloaded.

Support for this new userscript behavior is only provided in the latest Chromium builds with the promise that it will soon be added to the Google Chrome web browser as well. The only thing left do to for the Google Chrome developers is to release a public version of the web browser with this new feature set (extensions and userscripts) enabled.

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These five features add mouse gestures, super drag, IE tabs, download tool support in context menus and double-click functionality to close pages to the web browser.

All options are accessible from the Chrome option’s page that has been expanded and is now offering access to Chrome Plus options in an extra tab.

Super Drag is an interesting new option to open links by dragging them. These links can either be opened in the foreground or background.

Mouse gestures and double-clicking tabs to close them are pretty self-explanatory. Available mouse gestures include navigating back and forward, switching to tabs, closing tabs or launching a page up or down command. Holding the right-mouse button and dragging the mouse in available directions will trigger the commands.

Custom builds often offer improvements in performance or functionality. Their main downside on the other hand is the time it takes to “follow” the builds of the official developers. It usually takes additional time to react on the latest builds that are provided by the Chrome developers which can sometimes be problematic (e.g. when security updates are issues).

Chrome Plus (via Download Squad) can be downloaded from the developer’s website.

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The development team adds a serious warning to the announcement that both builds are considered incomplete meaning that they are missing features but also support for various web services and websites. It is for example not possible to play videos on the Youtube website with the builds.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.

The Chrome team keeps track of so called issues that are encountered in both web browsers. The current list contains 440 issues of which several are considered important including missing plugin support which means no Flash yet, no full screen browsing, no favicons, partial preference access, no web print, no bookmarks bar and lack of input methods for some languages.

The developers are aiming for a beta release as soon as possible without going into detail when the release is expected. The public release on the other hand is a good sign that we are soon going to see stable well supported builds of the Google browser for both Mac and Linux.

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The new version of the Google browser is still lacking several features of the Windows counterpart. Some of the most important features that are still missing are plugin support, printing, complex tab dragging, complex text and Google Gears support. The release notification contains a notice that additional parts of the web browser are incomplete and that users should keep this in mind before installation.

Interested users find information on how to add the Chromium builds to their Linux distribution at the official Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds website. Let us know your opinion on the new version of the web browser if you are a Linux user and installing the Chromium build on your operating system.

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The Google Chrome developers have promised to add extension support to the Google browser for some time. Lee over at the Download Squad noticed that the current developer build of the Google Browser as well as the nightly builds of Chromium contained basic extension support. It seems to be in a very early stage as the support has to be activated with the launch parameter –enable-extensions.

The three example extensions that are currently available will not blow away the minds of the spoiled Firefox user base but give interested users a first glimpse of things to come. The first extension displays the unread message count in Gmail, the second a quick link to subscribe to a web feed in Google Reader and the third the status of the Chromium Build Bot.

Installation of extensions is more comfortable than in Firefox as no restart of the web browser is required to use them. Uninstallation on the other hand requires some Windows Explorer skills as the only way to uninstall is to delete a cryptic folder in the Google Chrome user data directory.

It is definitely a first step in the right direction and likely something that many users have been waiting for.

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1. Resources Pane

Webmasters that use Firefox usually have the Firebug add-on installed which gives them access to information about a website’s source code but also about the elements on a page including their load time. Google Chrome provides these information out of the box. A simple right-click on a fully loaded website and the selection of Inspect Element will open the site inspector. The tab Resources displays the loading time and size of all elements on that specific webpage. Resources are further divided into categories like scripts, images or documents. The total loading time and transfer size is shown that is also divided by the categories. This gives an immediate overview over the elements that slow down the page loading time the most.

2. Resizing Text areas

Text areas on websites are usually placed to give visitors the means to interact with the website or its owner. Contact and comment forms make use of text areas which allow the user to enter text into them. Some websites implement rather small text boxes which makes it unnecessary difficulty to enter a comment or message. Google Chrome offers a feature to resize text areas on websites by simply clicking in the right lower corner and dragging the text are to a larger size.

3. The Task Manager

The task manager of the Google browser provides information about the memory, cpu and network usage of every open tab, the browser engine itself and plugins that have been loaded. The overview is interesting as it gives the user information about high resource sources directly in the web browser. Plugins with a high resource usage can be identified and uninstalled from the web browser or computer system. Even more interesting is the option to kill one of the web browser’s tabs from the task manager window. The tabs work independently from each other which makes it safe to delete tabs.

4. Using Incognito Mode to log into the same service twice with different accounts

Incognito Mode is already available in other web browsers. Those that do not have implemented it already have announced to (likely) add it into one of the future builds. While its primary focus is privacy it can be used to log into the same service with a different account at the same time. This is possible because the active cookies and information do not carry over when starting incognito mode. It is therefor possible to log into services like Gmail twice. First normally and then the second time by starting Incognito mode (Ctrl+Shift+N) and logging into the service again.

5. Browser History

The shortcut [Ctrl H] will open the browser history in Google Chrome. The history is sorted by date. Websites are listed with their favicon and title on the main page. The search form can be used to find terms in the history. These result terms look a bit different. Google Chrome displays dates, titles, descriptions and thumbnails while Chromium displays the same information but the thumbnails.

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Chromium Updater is a lightweight software program for the Microsoft Windows operating system that can be used to check for, download and install new versions of the Chromium web browser. The program has to be installed on the local computer system. Once started it will display the current local version of the Chromium web browser – if any – and the latest available remote version.

The download button will initiate the download of the latest Chromium version from the official build server maintained by the project.

The Settings button will open a second window that lists several preferences. The user can switch from downloading the installer to downloading an archive instead in order to save some bandwidth. It is also possible to uncheck the install and delete after checkboxes. This will prevent automatic installation and deletion of the downloaded build of the Google browser.

Other options include the selection of the download directory, file name revisions and an autostart option with the Windows operating system.

Chromium Updater is a useful application for users who use the Chromium web browser.

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The Chromium website does not list a Chromium download link on its first pages, only one for Google Chrome, the web browser that is maintained by Google and that is using the same codebase. If you want to download Google Chrome you can simply visit the Google Chrome homepage and download the latest version of the official Google browser from there.

Users who want to download Chromium on the other hand can do so by visiting the Chromium build server which is listing downloads of the latest Chromium builds for both Windows and Linux. The main advantage of Chromium is that developers can build their own web browsers. Companies like Codeweavers or SRWare have created such builds which provide enhancements like support for Apple Macintosh systems or better privacy protection.

Here is a list of all the Google browser download possibilities:

• Google Chrome (download)
• Google Chrome Portable (download)
• Chromium (download)
• Chromium Portable (download)
• SRWare Iron (download)
• CrossOver Chromium (download)

Do you know of any additional Chromium build that should be mentioned on this page?

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The pre-beta release adds several requested features to the web browser. Among the form auto-completion, full page zooms, a middle-click auto scrolling feature, user profiles and Greasemonkey support. The later still has to be activated by launching the Google Chrome browser with the -enable-user-scripts parameters. This is best done using a shortcut.

The release notes for this release contain all changes including interesting ones like the force SSL mode which will only load https sites in the browser. That’s a pretty clever method of getting rid of most phishing related dangers on the Internet.

Check out the instructions on how to download early release versions of the Google Chrome web browser.

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The latest security vulnerability was discovered by researcher Liu Die Yu of the TopsecTianRongXin research lab in Beijing who discovered a way to spoof the address that is shown in the browser’s address bar. His proof of concept demonstration makes use of a button and Javascript. A user pressing the button will see an url change in the browser’s address bar. A look in the source code however reveals that the user is still on the same site and not at the website shown in the address bar.

The flaw could be used to display a PayPal button (or Google Checkout) on a website that would lead to a fake website where the user’s login credentials could be easily fished.

Google will release an end user update soon that will fix the security vulnerability. The only safe thing to do until then is to either switch to Dev Channel builds for the time being that already have a fix included or stop using Google Chrome until the security vulnerability has been patched.

One could think that other browsers based on Webkit are vulnerable as well. This is not the case however according to Liu Die Yu who attributed the security vulnerability to code added by Google developers.

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The suspected causes for this were either a previous installation of Google Chrome that interfered with the installation of the new version or the use of programs that would remove information from the web browser that could be used to track the user of the system.

The fix for “Installer fails with error 4″ was related to a previous install of Google Chrome. After deleting the \Documents and Settings\\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application directory on the test system the Google Chrome installation went through without problems.

The error is listed as issue 165 on the Google Chromium website. Several users reported that they received this error on a clean install which obviously means that this fix will not help them at all. There is currently no fix available for these users.

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An alternative to share bookmarks is the software Transmute. Transmute relies on the Microsoft .net Framework and comes with an installer and as a portable edition. It supports the four popular web browsers Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Google Chrome. Firefox users will be delighted to hear that both Firefox 3 and earlier versions of Firefox are supported. The same is true for the Google Chrome browser where Chromium, developer builds and the official Google version are supported.

Transmute displays a source and target area in the interface. The user can pick a browser from a drop down menu and edit the browser’s path if that is required. This is for instance mandatory for portable browsers that might be used on a computer system.

Additional options are available which can be expanded in the main interface. The bookmarks will be added in their own folder in the target browser by default. The name of the folder and the timestamp can be changed in the options. They also provide options to import the bookmarks in the root folder instead, to overwrite existing bookmarks and to create a backup before doing so.

The target browsers need to be closed for the process which is also true for some source browsers like Firefox 3 which locks the bookmark database when it is running. Transmute provides an easy way to share bookmarks across browsers. Support for Safari and an option to schedule bookmarks would be nice additions to the software program.

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One interesting addition to the latest beta builds of the Google Chrome browser was basic Greasemonkey support. Since there is no way of adding extensions to Chrome yet users have to live with some limitations. Only scripts in c:\scripts are loaded and only if the user adds the parameter –enable-greasemonkey by appending it to the program’s shortcut.

There is another serious limitation. The scripts are not limited to a domain but will work on all domains which is usually handled by the @include metadata. The metadata part is ignored which could be problematic when loading some Greasemonkey scripts.

Greasemonkey support was added in build 3499 which is available from the Chromium build ftp. Support is also included in later builds including the latest Google Chrome 3601 build.

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It is a known fact that Google is collecting a massive amount of data. The main part stems from searches conducted on the search engine but other tools like the Google Toolbar add to that. Google on the other hand did not release a software until now that became such a center of criticism. Privacy advocates focused their criticism on two aspects of the Google Chrome browser.

The first was the unique user Id that was generated which could theoretically identify a user. The second that everything that was entered in the browser’s address bar was transmitted to Google even if the user never submitted the text to the search engine.

Several minor objections have come to light in the past week and software developers started to develop solutions that would eliminate identification and data transfers unless they were necessary.

Iron (vie Download Squad) was developed from the Open Source browser Chromium. That’s something that Google did encourage and the developers were the first to provide a version of Chromium that was stripped down of all known data collection and privacy problems: The client-ID, timestamp, suggest functionality, alternate error pages, error reporting, rlz-tracking, google updater and url tracker have been removed.

The functionality on the other hand remains the same. The only problem that could arise is if developers cannot keep up with the development pace of the Chromium browser. As of now this is the recommended release for users with privacy concerns.

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Google Chrome Backup is a tool that can backup, create, restore and delete Google Chrome profiles. A profile contains all the personal information of a user like bookmarks, the browsing history and the layout of the browser.

It is actually no problem to backup Google Chrome profiles manually by copying all files stored in the Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\User Data folders to another location. Google Chrome Backup on the other hand provides an easier method of backing up the files with the click of a button in the program interface.

One interesting aspect of Google Chrome Backup is that it can also create profiles for the browser. Those profiles can be enhanced with startup parameters like starting the browser maximized, disabling the popup blocker or enabling file cookies.

Google Chrome Backup is a nice backup tool to create backups of Google Chrome profiles. For those wondering about the difference between Google Chrome and Chromium. That’s a bit confusing but it seems that Chromium is the Open Source version of Google Chrome.

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Donation Coder user Dirhael developed a simple application that checks for new nightly builds of Google Chrome and download them automatically for the user.

The nightly builds checker is a portable application that can be executed from any location. The tool provides two main buttons: The first button checks for the latest nightly build version of Google Chrome on the Google server and the download button downloads that version if the user decides to click the button. The latest version that has been downloaded using the application is listed in the application so that the user can compare the versions before downloading.

The build status is also listed in the application which provides information if the latest build did pass all unit tests. The nightly builds of Google Chrome can be run from the location that they have been unpacked into which means that no installation is required.

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