Google Chrome managed to close in on Opera which is currently available as Opera 11, and surpass Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (version 9 is currently in development) and Mozilla Firefox (which is developing version 4). All version wise of course.

The latest Google Chrome Canary build has just hit version 11. Canary builds are the bleeding edge version of the Chrome browser, followed by Google Chrome Dev, Google Chrome Beta and Google Chrome Stable builds.

It usually does not take long until the dev version switches to the version of the Canary build, followed later by the beta and stable releases.

Anything new in Google Chrome 11? The only thing that caught my attention was a select your search engine screen on first run which I personally had not seen before. This may have been in there for a longer time though, since I installed Chrome year’s ago.

I’m not sure if Google posts release notes. The Google Chrome releases blog for instance only posts releases notes of beta, stable and dev channel updates, and that only sporadically and often without essential information included.

Google recently announced that they would speed up the development cycle from releasing a major version quarterly to releasing a new version of the browser every six weeks. Expect Google Chrome 12 to hit the web in six weeks (thanks Hal9000 for the tip)

Google Chrome users on the other hand have to press F11 once again to leave fullscreen mode to enter a new url in the address bar before they can enter fullscreen mode again. That’s not a practicable solution especially in situations where screen estate is scarce and every pixel counts (think netbooks and other devices with small computer screens).

The Chrome extension Toolstrip Address Bar provides an interesting solution to the fullscreen problem that Chrome users are facing. Once installed it will display a small arrow icon in the Google Chrome status bar. A click on that arrow will display an alternative address bar which can be used to load websites without leaving fullscreen mode in the Google browser (Ctrl left-click closes the address bar in the status bar of the browser again).

The address bar can also be displayed in normal mode where it becomes an alternative option to open new websites in the Internet browser. The extension can only be added to Google Chrome versions that support extensions which are currently only the developer builds of the Google browser. Google Chrome users can download and install the extension directly by visiting the forum page where it was announced.

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.

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.

If you remember the comic that introduced Google Chrome or the article on Ghacks or at other websites you might remember that Google Chrome uses tabs that are independent from each other. If you analyze the computer memory usage of the browser you need to check all instances of chrome.exe that are visible in the Windows Task Manager which is one instance of chrome.exe for the browser itself and another instance for every open tab that displays a website on the Internet. The interesting fact about this method is that the browser will never use more memory than it needs and that the memory will be cleared completely when the user closes a tab. This principle works extremely well during the tests.

Websites are loading faster than in other browsers which can be attributed to the new Javascript rendering engine and the browser engine. Everything about Google Chrome feels faster than in the other browsers.

Speed is one of the major factors of each browser but what about other features and compatibility? Google Chrome is displaying all websites that I tested perfectly fine. I went to flash video game websites, blogs, websites from corporations and some social news websites and everything seemed to display correctly.

The new tab feature which displays the most visited websites plus the last closed websites plus the last websites that have been added to the favorites and a search function works extremely well and is time saving most of the time.

The Google Chrome Task Manager was another feature that sounded pretty exciting. It displays a Task Manager that is displaying the memory usage, cpu and network stats for the browser, all open tabs and plugins. This makes it easy to identify a process that is using lots of memory and end it right away in the interface. It also contains a Stats For Nerds link which opens the about:memory configuration in the browser which displays detailed statistics about the memory usage.

Google Chrome basically uses the same keyboard shortcuts that all browser share. CTRL T opens a new tab, CTRL N a new windows and so on. The Task Manager can be opened with SHIFT Escape. There is a handy shortcut to perform a search on the default search engine. Pressing CTRL E puts a “?” in the address bar and a search will be loaded for the phrase that the user enters afterwards. This is focusing the address bar automatically. CTRL Shift N opens a window in incognito mode, the mode where no data is saved on the computer.

The Google Chrome beta version is impressive. It lacks a few features that are very important to users like an adblocker or the option to disable scripts but it’s pretty good for a beta version. The part of the url that starts behind the domain extension is not that readable, some options to change those colors would be welcome.

The browser is showing lots of promise already. It would be nice if Google Chrome would offer more options to customize the interface and settings.