thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Resources

You Want Sidebar Tabs in Chrome? Here’s How

Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Many people have asked for the ability to move their tabs to the side in Google Chrome. This is a feature that first took off in Firefox, and fortunately the Chromium team has graciously put them into the early builds. Now, if you’re using Chrome 6 in the form of the development or canary builds, you can have sidebar tabs as well.

The first thing you need to do is add “–enable-sidebar-tabs” to your Chrome shortcut like this.

Open up Chrome again, and you can now right click on a tab and choose Use side tabs.

When I chose Use side tabs, my tabs simply disappeared, a strange sight for sure.

But when I hit Ctrl+T to open a new tab, they appeared on a sidebar to the left.

To revert to regular tabs, right click on an open tab and uncheck the Use side tabs option.

Once again, you’ll need to open a new tab to make them appear at the top – a little quirk that shows this feature still needs refinement.

I’m not sure what to think about sidebar tabs – I’ve never used them, so I am accustomed to using regular tabs on the top. I think the feature also need a bit of UI polish as well, but if you’re using Firefox just for the sidebar tabs, you might want to grab yourself the development build of Chrome and give it a shot.

More Installable Webapps for Chrome Available

Posted on 16. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Once you’ve taken the time to add in the apps that are packaged with Chrome 6/Chromium, you can also add others. These are usually built with the .crx extension file name.

Vlad Nastasiu has put on his web site a good array of these – Facebook, Youtube and Google Reader to name a few. DownloadSquad also has an extensive listing. You can follow the Chromium Apps discussion group for more ongoing information as well.

1. Make sure that you have enabled apps in Chromium/Chrome 6.

2. Download the .crx file to your computer.

3. With the enabled-apps shortcut of Chrome open, you can open up the .crx file.

You’ll get a screen like this.

Confirm, and you’re good to go! Want to know how to make your own apps in Chrome? Check out Google’s Guide to Installable Web Apps.

How to Use Chrome Webapps Right Now

Posted on 16. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Here are screen-by-screen steps on how to add the Calendar, Docs and Gmail apps to your Chrome browser. This is what this will look like when you are done.

Your tabs for the three will look like this.

Additionally, when you open a new tab, you’ll get a window that looks like this.

1. Download Chrome 6.

Firstly, you need to get the Chrome 6 development build for this to work. Here is a direct link to download it.

2. Add a Command Line Flag to your Chrome Shortcut.

This is easy, just go to your desktop and right click on your Chrome icon. Select Properties. In the Properties window, you’ll need to add a space and then the flag “–enable-apps” at the end of the Target location.

Hit OK.

3. Go into Developer Mode.

Open your shortcut of Chrome (remember, you have to use this one in order for this to work in the future). Navigate in the omnibar to chrome://extensions

Click on Developer Mode over on the far right.

4. Load the Extensions

A developer toolbar will appear; click on Load unpacked extension.

You’ll be asked to select the path of the extensions.

Windows Vista/7

\Users\[profile name]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\[version]\Resources\

Windows XP

\Documents & Settings\[profile name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\[version]\Resources\

You’ll need to open these three up using the Load unpacked extensions button. You’ll then see them in your list of extensions.

Now you have Chrome web apps in your browser, enjoy!

How to Turn Off Search Suggestions in Chrome

Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Search suggestions in the Chrome browser can be a helpful tool for those who like using the Omnibox to find what they are looking for. But there is a drawback to this feature. As you start typing into the Omnibox, Chrome is sending data back to the search provider of your choice – whether you are using Google, Bing or Yahoo as your default provider. Fortunately, there is an easy way to turn it off.

1. Go to tools
2. Select Options (Preferences for Mac Users)
3. In the Under the Hood tabs, the first section you see is privacy settings. To turn the search suggestions off, uncheck the “Use a suggestion service” option:

Now none of the information you type is being sent back to your search provider until you press Enter. Other browsers separate the search box from the URL box, but the feature being combined doesn’t change the privacy of the browser unless this particular feature is turned off.

Using Online Storage to Collaborate in Google Docs

Posted on 15. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

In my previous post, I showed an example of a company that decided to make the switch to Google Apps as an enterprise solution. I find this interesting, since for as many years as I can remember there have only been a few companies that have dominated this segment of the technology industry with Microsoft being the bellwether and IBM pulling a distant second.

It’s never a bad thing in an industry to have some competition, but the reality is that we don’t hear too often about companies that have switched over to Google as an enterprise solution. At least, not yet. Fortunately, those of us who just want to use the regular version for now can have some of the benefits of the souped-up business version.

So, all in an effort to help people further understand some of the functionality that exists in the non-enterprise version of Google Docs which is free, here is a way to use online storage to share files with others. You are able to share out 2GB at no cost, and there are some cheap options available for an upgrade. For example, you can get an additional 20GB for just $5.00 a year to share between Picasa, Gmail and Docs.

This is really a good option to use for large files that may not get to a recipient if emailed or if the file in question is one that would be picked up by a spam filter as dangerous such as an archive or a configuration file. To do so, it’s really easy, so here is how:

While in Gmail, click on the Documents link up at the top:

From here, you’ll see Google Docs open up in a new tab. Go ahead and click on “Upload” at the top left:

From here you will be in a window that allows you to upload several files at once:

Once you have chosen your files click and your files will be stored on the servers. This may take some time depending on file size. You will then be able to see the file(s) in you main Docs window. You can select a document you want to share, hit the “Share” button:

Then you can invite someone to be able to use your file from their Docs account:

Again, this is very useful for when you need a way to send files that are too big to email or read by Postini as dangerous. Plus, it’s free, integrates with existing Google Applications like Gmail and is easy to use. The business purpose of this would be valuable, and I know in the enterprise edition the feature set is even richer in terms of options available.

How to Use Geolocation in Chrome Browser

Posted on 04. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

The developer channel of Chrome has been updated today and the geolocation API is now built in. This allows developers to now work on apps and extensions that can take into account a user’s geographic coordinates. I’m not sure specifically what type of applications would incorporate this feature, but I could imagine this bringing a new tool in terms of localized social networking that could be pretty useful.

To use the geolocation feature, you must have the Google Chrome developer channel release of Chrome (version 5.0.342.1) and you must run a commnad line switch of “–enable-geolocation” when executing the chrome.exe application.

The release notes referenced that you could test this by going to http://maps.google.com and it would recognize that the feature was turned on. However, I could not get it to work at that URL. Instead I found another link in the notes to go to http://maps.google.co.uk/maps/m which must be the UK URL for the mobile maps app. When I went to this site, I was prompted with this messgae in Chrome:

I clicked the “Allow” button, and up popped my location. If you have ever used the Google Maps application on your smartphone, it is exactly like that, with the major difference being that you computer has much more processing power with which to build some useful tools and games around.

This has to be done every time you start Chrome if want this experimental API to be turned on. There are probably going to be some interesting apps that will be developed for this, and it is clear that this is a move further towards mobile computing for Chromium. Having this on the browser is only a start for where this is going in an operating system architecture. With that being said, what kind of apps do you envision there being with the geolocation API?

Using the Task Manager in Chrome Browser

Posted on 28. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

Many who use Chrome Browser do not even realize that in itself it has a Task Manager, much like the one that the future Chrome operating system will eventually use. But why would a browser have a Task Manager? Well, Chrome operates a bit differently that other browsers. Instead of occupying one process that takes a huge amount of system memory, Chrome separates tabs as single processes. This is different, yet has some ingenuity to it.

One of the reasons for this is because of security. Being able to lock down each tab as a single process ensures that malware or spyware does not have as much capability to infect the entire browser or system. Another reason is stability. Many of you have probably experienced a crash in Chrome, but that crash only affected a certain tab because it is set up as its own “sandboxed” process.

I could go on with the virtues of this, but let’s just take a look at Task Manager. While in Chrome, go ahead and hit Shift+Esc and you’ll see something like this:

I’ve expanded this out just to show everything here. It’s easy to tell that I like to have a lot of tabs open; the reality is that I do the majority of my work within the browser environment – so you can understand why I may be interested in Chrome OS. Anyways you can see here that every window I have open is in is own separate process. Should you have the desire, or are dealing with a buggy/unresponsive tab, you can kill it by highlighting one of the tabs and hitting “End Process”.

Even as a browser, Chrome is like an operating system in and of itself. If you look on the bottom left hand side you can see that I have highlighted the “Stats for nerds” link. When you click on this, you get a tab that expands upon the initial window:

Note how from here you can get detailed names for each process, whether they are a tab or and extension and the process ID. On the right hand side there are corresponding columns that give you memory information:

You can see what amount of memory a tab is using on its own, as well as what is shared, and the entire total. You can also see what kind of virtual memory a process is using. This has been well thought out with developers in mind and the fact that this is in the browser shows that the Google folks have been prepping this for the operating system environment for some time. Also, being able to drill down like this offers an element of information and security that no other browser has to offer.

One interesting thing I would like to note is the amount of memory that Flash requires to run. Sure, its being used in some of the pages I have open (YouTube), but you can see now that Google wants to go the operating system route why they want to move to open standards to replace Flash:

Compare that with the other processes I have running above and it’s clear – Flash is a resource hog. And with more media and interactivity on the way, expect to see more third party plugins as well as some Chrome extensions get scrutinized. With this task manager it is much easier to break down particular processes in a browser as opposed to the way other browsers simply lump everything into on giant memory allocation on a system.

So bust out the task manager when you get a chance. You might learn something interesting about the memory that pages you go to on a day to day basis require from your system. That goes the same for plugins and extensions as well.

Using Chrome OS with Parallels on Mac

Posted on 18. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey.

To all the Mac fans out there: have hope. This is a high-quality post from Cultofmac on using Parallels to VM Chrome OS. Parallels seems to be the virtualization software that is more focused on the Mac market than any other OS that’s out there. Many users have had concerns that they cannot run Chrome OS because they use Apple products, but this post shows that is not always the case! I don’t know if it is possible to run Chrome OS directly off of a USB drive in Mac, so please post on the forum so we know.

Anyways, you can find the tutorial right here.

Enjoy!

Try Google Chrome OS on Any PC Anywhere

Posted on 07. Dec, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey.

Got a USB stick with at least 1 gigabyte of memory? Then you can try Google’s Chrome OS on any PC anywhere. All you need to do is write an a image to a USB stick and then boot up a PC with it plugged in to try it out. It’s really easy, and I’ve got the steps here to show you how to do it.

Click here to get the latest build of Chromium. You will need to unzip this with an extractor like 7-zip Notice that the file size is under a gig.

Now, you need to get an image writer. Click here to get Image Writer for Windows.

Unzip Image Writer for Windows and open the program. Click on the blue folder to add the Chrome OS image file you downloaded earlier:

Now you need to specify what drive letter your USB drive is on the right hand drop box, and then hit Write. Be advised that if there is anything on the USB, it’s going to get formatted! Watch how quick this thing boots up.  When you get to the login screen, the username and password is facepunch. Now you can try out the OS.

To connect to your wireless network, you may need to click on the middle column indicator on the upper right hand side:

You can hit F8 to get a keyboard overlay of commands. Also, I haven’t found a way to shut the OS down other than hitting the power button. But when you start it back up, it will ask you if you want to load your previous session, and can bring back all of your unpinned tabs if you want.

Having problems? Join the forum. Let us know what you think. Comment below!

How to Install Chrome OS on Your PC as a Virtual Machine

Posted on 05. Dec, 2009 by Daniel Cawrey.

Note: for download instructions, please see the “Download Chrome OS” link at the top. This is so you can get the latest and greatest version.

Start up Virtual Box, then hit Cancel on registration (if you want). You should see a screen like this where you should hit the “New” gear icon at the top left:

Hit Next:

Create name for the VM, then select the OS Type as Linux, and the version as Ubuntu:

This is where you will decide how much memory the VM will use. This will be dependent on your machine, but be forwarned that using to much will make your system unstable!

Choose the option to use an existing disk, then use the folder button to browse in the Virtual Media Manager for the image:

In the Virtual Media Manager, choose Add:

Find where you downloaded/extracted your image and choose select at the bottom:

You’ll be back at this screen, where you can see the image is loaded, hit next:

Hit Finish:

Hit the green Start arrow, and you are on your way!

Here is the initial screen. You can login using your gmail credentials:

And you’re in! Really, it’s a lot like Chrome Browser. You can hit F8 to look at the different commands, and to shut it down, you are going to just have to close the VM, because there doesn’t seem to be a way to do that yet.