Tag: CHROMIUM

If there's one thing all the recent Firesheep shenanigans have taught us, it's that we all need to take Web security and privacy a bit more seriously. Though you might not be aware, Google Chrome includes a number of privacy-minded features out-of-the-box. From blocking plug-ins, JavaScript, and the transmission of your location via its content settings to disabling prefetching, custom error ...

Google Chrome's (and Chromium's) about:flags page is becoming quite the playground for intrepid feature testers. In a recent Chromium snapshot build, another handy new feature has appeared: user-specified DNS servers. Being able to specify custom servers right in the browser might not be a big deal on other operating systems -- where you can already do that in your network settings. On Chrome ...

Google made it pretty clear that Chrome's new, faster release schedule was going to lead to a rather steep incline on the version number chart, but I'm starting to side with the sticklers here. Last night, Chromium hit version 9. If you weren't keeping tabs, Chromium 8 was only released two weeks ago. Yep, two weeks. There have been a couple small visual tweaks that you'll notice right off the ...

Google Chrome's app-related features have been playing whac-a-mole with us for a number of months now. One day, a new feature peaks its head out, and the next day, it scampers back into hiding. As launch day approaches for the Chrome Web Store, however, expect to see those changes stick around once they appear. Among the more recent additions is support for background apps, which have ...

Just days ago, I wrote about an upcoming change Google had planned for the about:labs page. The goal: to make the page less inviting and clarify the fact that experimental features listed on the page could very well cause users problems. Today, the change has landed in Chromium and will no doubt be pushed to Canary shortly. Now called about:flags, the page sports the trefoil (internationally ...

Bleeding-edge Chrome users -- especially those using Macs -- have at least one very good reason to like Chrome's recently-added about:labs page. First and foremost, it provides an easier way to enable and disable features that were previously buried behind command line switches. In a posting on the Chromium-dev board, Google's Ben Goodger has some encouraging news for about:labs fans. Goodger ...

Hardware acceleration is a hot topic in the current browser market, as competitors attempt to differentiate themselves through speed. Somewhat surprisingly it's actually Internet Explorer 9 leading the way, with its decidedly Windows 7 biased approach. Google's Chrome browser has also flirted with hardware acceleration for many facets of its rendering engine, mainly targeted towards WebGL. But ...

There's been plenty of yawning about Chrome v7 -- which Google themselves admit isn't necessarily much for user-facing changes. In reality, though, there have been quite a few important additions and tweaks. The about:labs page, for example, now includes features like side tabs, instant, tabbed settings, and outdated plug-in blocking. Two not-quite-ready-for-primetime features are there as ...

It's been a little while since we last heard anything significant about Cloud Print -- Google's effort to modernize and webify print queues. We know that HP has plans to deliver compatible printers and that bits of Cloud Print were visible in Chromium back in August, but there haven't been many visible changes since. Until last night -- when the Cloud Print Proxy service appeared as an option ...

It's been almost a month since Google gave us a good, hard look at the Chrome Web Store and Google Chrome's dev channel build has supported apps be default since early August. For the last few days, I've been hearing reports from a number of people about 500 errors when trying to reach the Chrome Extensions Gallery. The Gallery, you might recall, is due to be re-launched as the Web Store -- at ...

Internet Explorer 9 isn't the only pony in the hardware accelerated rendering race. Just about everyone is getting in on the GPU action, and Google's offering up some new partner-created demos to show what Chrome can do. The WebGL-powered demos include a wall of photos by CoolIris, virtual aquarium, an animated grassy field, and a slick little paint-your-own-figurine -- on which I wasted far ...

Chromium -- Google Chrome's open source cousin -- recently debuted the new about:labs page which brings easier access to bleeding-edge features. The Labs page provides a simpler, GUI-based system for enabling things like side tabs which you previously had to activate via command line switches. In the latest Chrome Canary update, Labs has arrived. That means Mac users can now enable tab ...

There are a lot of great extensions in the Chrome Gallery. However, as the Chrome APIs round out and extensions have increased access to things like your history, cookies, and file system you may want to take a closer look at what a particular extension can do before you install it. Fortunately there's a new extension which can do just that. What?! An extension to peek under the hood of ...

One of the most talked about features in Safari 5 has been its Reader function -- Apple's built-in implementation of the Readability bookmarklet. Both are nice ways to reformat articles on blog or news sites for distraction-free reading. If you like the look of Safari Reader but would rather not change from Google Chrome or Firefox, don't worry. The iReader extension brings the same ...

I'm not sure when the changes actually landed, but Google has announced that an early implementation of hardware acceleration is now available in developer versions of Chrome 7. Early testing suggests that performance is still worse than Internet Explorer 9, but the gap has definitely been closed a bit. The '1000 fish test' now clocks in at about 10 frames per second, which is definitely an ...