Tag Archives: Bookmark Sync
From Zero to Almost Ten Percent: How Chrome Surpassed Safari
Posted on 30. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
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It has been big news recently that Chrome has overtaken Safari as the third most used browser in the U.S. While this statistic is one that’s skewed towards the United States since Chrome and Safari have been neck and neck, the reality is that Chrome took third place worldwide over Safari back in September.
The main reason that America has lagged in this regard is probably the fact that Apple sells so many computers in the United States, coming with the well regarded WebKit-based Safari.
But the point of this post is to understand how Chrome got this far in a period of two years. When I first tried Chrome as an early adopter-type in the beginning of 2009, I liked the design interface and the idea of “sandboxing” where every tab was its own process. The problem with Chrome at that time was one of compatibility: there were sites that did not function correctly with Chrome, a surprise to me because of its WebKit roots.
Over time, which really isn’t long by Google’s measurement, Chrome evolved. Many sites needed to adapt some functionality to Chrome, but for the most part it was the folks at Google working fervently to make the best browser available. Perhaps they knew that they were making the foundations of an operating system at the time, who knows?
Extensions
In December 2009, Google launched the Chrome Extensions web site, an opportunity for the company to better compete with Firefox’s vaunted library of add-ins. Not only did they take an existing idea, they improved on it by putting security limits around extensions at their site, making sure that proper measures are taken to make sure that personal data and important computer processes cannot be compromised through the browser. Clicking around at the Extensions site the other day it appears that there are over five thousand now available.
Translate
In the beginning, Google offered an extension that you could install into Chrome and translate different languages of the web. Then they started adding it into the development Chromium builds, and finally it was released with the launch Chrome 5 to users a few months ago embedded in the browser itself. This feature is so easy to use, and it unlocks the web for everyone to read no matter their language. Google took an existing service they had and put it right into the browser where it’s the most useful.
No Messing With Flash
Maybe Google sees something in Flash that Apple doesn’t, but they decided to take a very different approach to handling Adobe Flash than Cupertino. Instead of eschewing it completely, Google has embraced the technology. Flash is used in YouTube videos, for some streaming music sites and I’ve recently noticed it needs to be installed to use Google Analytics. So, unlike other browsers that require you to install it and then update to newer revisions manually, Google preempts any inconvienence and risk by making it a part of Chrome.
In the End
Relentless innovation has gotten Chrome browser this far. This is due to Chromium as an open source resource as well as the amount of manpower that Google has thrown towards it in anticipation of Chrome OS. I didn’t even get to talk here about interesting features like the omnibox, bookmark sync and geolocation, but they are an aside to these three major developments that are propelling this browser’s growth. How much market share can this browser take from Internet Explorer and Firefox in the months and years to come?
Mac Users Can Now Enjoy Bookmark Sync, Extensions in Chrome
Posted on 11. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
Google has announced today that the Chrome Beta 5 browser for Mac now has support for Bookmark Sync and Extensions. Bookmark Sync allows users to have access to their bookmarks from whatever computer they can access their Google account from. Extensions are small applications that allow for additional functionality mo found in the standard release of the browser application, and are created by independent developers outside of Google.
You can check out the official directory for Google Extensions right here. With thousands of extensions already available, it can be a bit overwhelming to decide which ones to install without feeling like you are overloading your browser with bloat. If you’re interested, I have written an article about some useful extensions you might be interested in trying out that I have found to be useful to my browsing experience.
The task manager has also been integrated into this new version. Since tabs in Chrome are running as separate processes, this can be helpful in casa a page or application within the tab becomes unstable and/or is buggy. There also now is Cookie Manager in Tools as well.
Google has posted a video for users who are interested in trying out the browser for themselves:
For users who already have Chrome – don’t worry about updating, as the browser will do so itself. You can always go to your tools menu (wrench icon) and go to About Google Chrome to see if you have the latest beta release, which is 5.0.307. Remember, this is for beta users of Chrome 5, not the stable release of Chrome 4.
You can get Chrome 5 Beta here if you don’t have it already. Users who are interested in checking out the entire release information put out by Google themselves can check out the entire post right here.
Chrome Browser Now at Version 4
Posted on 25. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments
Coming out of beta, Chrome browser is now at version 4 stable. What does this mean? Well, the most recent version before today that was being run was a beta of version 4, and now Google has declared it a “stable release”. Some of the features that have been enhanced in this version include support for extensions, which are pretty much like Firefox’s add-ins. Also, Chrome 4 has a host of newer application programming interfaces (APIs) for web development that will provide better performance as well as increased support for features such as offline storage. Unfortunately, this is only a new stable release for Windows. The Linux and Mac versions are still in beta for now.
So where do you get it? Don’t worry, as this is part of the Chromium project: automatic updates for major releases.
With version 4 moving to stable, Chrome browser’s bookmark sync is also coming out of beta. What bookmark sync does for users is allow them to keep the same links with them as they move from computer to computer as long as the are using the internet with Chrome. It’s accessed through the tools menu, and you’ll need to sign into your Google account in order to allow your bookmarks to be properly saved. You can check out more about bookmark sync here.
But the biggest deal is the amount of extensions that are now available on the official site. There are now extensions for every platform. By Google’s count, there are over 1,500 extensions that are available. My favorite? I recommend checking out Google Translate, which allows you to surf to sites that don’t speak your native language. Pretty cool. You can also check out a video about Chrome 4 here:
Interview: Chrome OS Zero’s Hexxeh
Posted on 14. Jan, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 17 Comments
From Chrome OS Diet to Cherry and now the latest, Zero, Hexxeh has been the primary source for Chrome OS build releases ever since Google released the Chromium code to the masses in November. They’ve been popular mostly because they work with a lot of existing hardware, plus the builds are small enough to fit on any USB drive. We got a chance to ask some questions of Hexxeh, who just released Chrome OS Zero a few days ago and talks about how he got started, future job prospects and some features in his latest version.
Tell us about yourself.
Well I’m a UK college student doing AS levels, planning on doing Computer Science at uni. I do web development work here and there, worked a few cool projects. I’d say Chromium OS is one of the most interesting yet, though.
Why did you get you involved in Chrome OS?
I first heard about ChromeOS mid-2009 when the rumours were flying around about an OS from Google. When they made the announcement in November, I just saw it and thought “that looks like it’d be cool to play with”. So I downloaded a copy that night, a couple of hours and a bit of tinkering later, I had it running on my netbook, and I was happy with it. I decided to share it with a few friends who wanted to play around too, and they liked it, and shared it around. So then I just created a site to share it on, I didn’t really have any intention of keeping it up to date, it was just something fun to toy around with for a bit. But then a few tech news sites made posts about it. This killed my small home server stone dead. It was clear people wanted more. So I released Chromium OS Diet, and the same happened again. It just went from there really, two versions later we’re at Zero and I’ve no intention of stopping yet, still got lots of ideas for new features and improvements.
Has the Google Chromium team been helpful when you have had problems come up?
Yeah, they have Google Groups where you can ask questions and it’s proved really useful, it tends to be the case that if I hit a problem, someone else had to and there was a fix. Where there wasn’t, I could ask and many people would come to the rescue and help me out. All in all, they’ve been great.
Are you getting a lot of support from the open-source community? In what ways have they helped you develop this project?
Many an open-source developer has offered to help out with various things, mirroring of the files, supporting the build server by buying shares of it as VPSes and so on. The #linux and #chromium-os IRC (freenode) channels have been a great source of information too.
How much time do you spend working on this?
Too long, haha! When I get down to working on it, I’ll spend all night getting it to work, I don’t like leaving it until it works or it’s 6AM. This gets especially difficult when combined with college. But it’s totally worth it, I love reading the responses from people who’ve tried it out.
What are your goals for working on Chrome OS? There must be something that drives you to do this.
Long term goals are vastly improved hardware support. Obviously, we’ll follow the main Chromium OS source tree too, so any improvements made there will flow downstream to my builds. I hear stuff in the pipeline includes 3G modem support, multi-language support and a new login UI. Anyone interested can check out the main Chromium OS wiki, much of the stuff there will make it’s way into the open-source builds. I like to think I might be building myself the possibility of working with Google is in the cards too, but we’ll have to see about that.
What do you think are the best new features of Chrome OS Zero?
The speed increases are one of the biggest things for most people. Personally, I’m a fan of the new artwork that was added, gives the build amore unique feel and makes it indentifiable against any others. While the update system didn’t ship with Zero, it will be able to be installed separately as a feature, that’s the big one for me. Right now, if I want to release even the tiniest of updates, that means a full new build. There is a lot of work that goes into the build, and it can take a very long time to get it ready to download. The faster I can get the new stuff out to people and get feedback, the better.
Can you talk about how the auto-update capability works in Chrome OS Zero?
It’s pretty simple actually, the way I’ve designed it is so that it downloads a shell script from my server along with a payload archive, and simply executes the script so that the update is installed. After a reboot, anything changed should be available. You should get an pop-up message upon login if an update is available, with an option to install it or ignore it. There are a couple limitations, mostly the amount of disk space allocated by the image. If it becomes a problem I’ll either have to try and trim more out of the OS or just publish a larger build. I’m hoping this will please the people who’ve been asking about fixing the problem where they lose their settings upon re-imaging a new version. The biggest potential issue is that I make a change breaks something for someone else. I could maintain revert scripts, but I dunno, I think it’d be better for everyone if they just reported problems when they arise and I’ll try and get on it asap. Hopefully people can understand it’s not exactly easy to implement something like this. Updates won’t be forced, but I can’t really support old versions, so it’s best to keep up. Hopefully this’ll please those with slower connections and low download limits too, downloading an update is far less expensive in terms of bandwidth than a full new image. You will, however, need to do full updates now and then to get the latest Chromium OS code, this is very difficult to do in an update cleanly.
What’s up with Flash? Is it Adobe or what?
Heh, the amount of people who’ve asked me about this! Was a case of bad luck really, I just happened to check out the code for Chromium at a point when there were problems with Flash, they were fixed very shortly after but I’d already started the build process and didn’t know. Hoping to push a hotfix out for this via the update system beta soon, along with a fix for Bookmark Sync.
Lastly, can you talk about what’s in store in the future for you?
I don’t know yet, but I’m pretty excited to find out myself. There was talk of the possibility of something happening with a couple companies, but we’ll see how it pans out. I’ll let you know how I get on, heh.
