Tag Archives: Chrome Canary
New Chrome Canary Build Features User Profiles
Posted on 14. Jul, 2011 by Nicholas Greene. 
3 Comments
I’ll start off by saying I am currently very, very excited. Why, you may ask? Well, it has to do with the latest build of Chrome Canary. See, Google’s added an interesting experimental feature to their untested Chrome build- user profiles. In the upper right hand side of the browser, those who’ve downloaded Canary will see a small beaker icon. Clicking on this will show your your Chrome profile. Basically, it’s your web browsing identity. Your Chrome profile contains your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords, and themes. Pretty simple, right?
Now, the profiles feature is pretty rudimentary for the time being. Kind of understandable, given that it’s still technically in the ‘experimental’ stages. Once you’ve created a new profile and set the name and icon, that’s pretty much it. All you can do beyond that is change your sync options- and as anyone already savvy with Chrome will know, bookmark/session syncing in Chrome is pretty old news. So, a lot of you are probably thinking “what’s the big deal, then? All Google’s done is add an unnecessary account sign in. I mean, our Google Accounts work fine, don’t they?”
See, the thing about syncing in the current builds of Chrome is that it’s not only optional, it doesn’t really do a whole lot to change your browsing experience. You can choose to either enable or disable sync; and any stuff you’ve synced will be accessible on other systems once you sign in with your Google account. With Chrome accounts, it seems as though the browser will work more like the operating system- that is, you’ll sign in to your Chrome account before you start browsing. Any browsing or application data will be saved to that account, and not accessible to someone else who uses the system once you sign off. Technically, you could have several people signed onto the same system, in different instances of the browser.
It’d be a fully logged in browsing experience. Basically….it’ll almost be like running Google’s Chrome OS from your desktop. I dunno about you, but I think that’s downright awesome.
And now we come to why I’m so damn excited about this news.
Chrome Canary is Coming to a Mac Near You
Posted on 02. May, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments
As I have recently mentioned in a previous post, you can get a near-Chromium build of Google’s browser on Windows with Google Chrome Canary. In addition to having a Stable, Beta and Dev Channel, Microsoft lovers have been able to get almost-daily builds of Chrome automatically with Chrome’s auto-update. It’s not always pretty (expect some funkiness) but it’s been very much bleeding-edge.
Now, several outlets are reporting that Canary is on its way to the Mac platform. In fact, if you review this Google App Engine utility that reports the version of every Channel of Chrome on the planet you can now see that there’s a Chrome Canary available for Mac. You can also see picture evidence at the Chromium projects site (image down below).
I for one am excited. I’ve recently become a Mac user and don’t really like having to constantly download new builds of Chromium. It’s not that I’m particularly lazy – I just like having things down automatically. Heck, we are dealing with computers here, aren’t we?
There’s one small detail that I’ve left out here. For some reason, you still can’t download Canary for Mac. But there’s no direct link to get the browser yet. It’s got to be coming soon – we’ll update this post when we get a link to it.
It was reported some time ago that Google doesn’t really condone Windows machines for its employees any more for a number of reasons. Because of this, one has to expect that Mac would arrive with Canary at some point. Really, although in the past I have heard gripes about Chrome on Mac being a step behind, since I’ve had an Apple laptop I haven’t really noticed any big differences other than few different things in the “about:flags” section.
Will you be test piloting Chrome’s super-new features in Canary on Mac when it is released?
UPDATE: Get Chrome Canary for Mac here.
via Peter Beverloo, TechCrunch
The Lazy Person’s Guide to Getting the Latest and Greatest Chrome Features
Posted on 13. Apr, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey. 11 Comments
I’m not a lazy person. Of course, when certain situations require it I can certainly go into lazy mode just like everyone can. But there are times that this way of thinking can actually help you get things done faster. It’s amazing when the most efficient method actually seems like the laziest option, but who’s to say you’re in the wrong if they are one and the same?
This can be said for seeing what’s new with Chrome. I download the Chromium open source browser on a daily basis so that I can see the latest and greatest changes that are happening to the browser. Sometimes I will download it several times in a 24 hour period. There’s a drawback to that, however, in that this version does not come with plugins such as Flash and does not autoupdate.
You can automate this process to some degree by using the Chromium updater tool. But if you really want to get the best of both worlds it’s best to just get the Canary version of Chrome. Many of people have never heard of it, but it’s the first release out of Chromium that becomes Chrome, meaning that it will autoupdate for you and come with Flash as well as the integrated PDF reader.
You’ll get a new version every day with Canary, and that means as close to the latest and greatest without having to download and run a new executable all the time. On the flip side however that means there will be bugs. If you can handle browser crashes and your scroll bar disappearing as I have had in the past few days with Canary, then you’re a perfect candidate.
One other drawback is that Mac and Linux users don’t have this option yet, since Canary is only available for Windows right now. Otherwise, you’ll need to download Chromium yourself, or that updater is always as available for you as well.
Are you using Chrome Canary? What’s your favorite Chrome Channel?
Enabling GPU Acceleration in Chrome 7
Posted on 29. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 7 Comments
Although I have already written a how-to on being able to use Native Client in Chrome 7, you can also use a command switch to be able to enable just GPU acceleration.
It’s pretty easy, so here’s how. In your shortcut for Chrome Dev or Chrome Canary, put “–enable-accelerated-compositing” into your shortcut, just like this.
So what can you do with GPU acceleration in Chrome? Right now, not a whole lot. You can check out the interactive examples that Microsoft is offering at their Internet Explorer 9 site, since they are planning to make a big push into hardware acceleration within the browser in order to retain market share.
GPU acceleration is another part of Native Client, when you enable it the GPU portion of it is turned on via a plugin process that is sandboxed. You can see more information on how it works by viewing the Chromium Blog post that refers to it.
Chrome 7 Surfaces
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
It looks like the Chromium folks are wasting no time after getting a release of Chrome 6 out in beta. The newest builds of Chromium now are at version 7.
As Softpedia points out, there really isn’t much different from previous Chromium releases that were are part of version 6, rather a part of the stratgey to get new stable versions out every six weeks.
This means that Chrome Canary builds will likely soon get the newest version, further supporting the fact that Google will start running up the numbers in terms of Chrome versions as we hurtle towards the release of Google TV and Chrome OS. That’s the two major ones among other service launches expected this year including Google Music, Google Me and the Chrome Web Store.
There sure are a lot of things on the horizon before the end of 2010.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 8/2/10
Posted on 02. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments
The Chromium Blog has officially announced the emergence of the Canary version of Chrome browser.
Google’s strategy to thwart Bing is apparently to use its best features in its own search engine.
Digitimes is reporting that many PC manufacturers are looking to ARM-Android combinations for new devices.
TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington reports that Facebook has secured copies of Google’s social strategy documents.
The market share for Google’s Mobile Search is almost at an astounding 100% according to data collected from StatCounter.
Tabbed Options Coming to Chrome
Posted on 01. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments
A while back, the Chrome browser team opted to move bookmarks to a tab. This was a generally acceptable move, since it seems more intuitive to have everything in the browser load as a tab. That’s why there’s no surprise that DownloadSquad is showing off the new tabbed Options menu that already exists in the Chromium build of the browser right now.
Every option now resides in this tab when you select it; even if you click on a button it simply moves to that menu instead of opening another tab which makes sense. You can turn this on by adding the switch “–enable-tabbed-options” to your Chrome Dev or Canary shortcut.
Tabs allow a certain degree of uniformity across builds – to some degree features are not completely the same across operating systems but there is certainly an effort to get there. Plus, I’m sure that Google wants to have everything that we see in Chrome browser to be just the same as Chrome OS where having windows for options like this seems, well, unneccesary.
You Want Sidebar Tabs in Chrome? Here’s How
Posted on 26. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 10 Comments
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.
Review: Chrome Canary – More Than One Browser Instance
Posted on 25. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 4 Comments
I had recently written a post at the Chromium-discuss Google Group about a recent problem I was having with Chrome instances.
The pace of Chrome’s development is mind blowing. So when I read the Chromium-dev Group news about Chrome Canary, I was happy that the team is allowing more instances of the browser to be run for those of us who have a keen interest in Chrome.
However, does Chrome really need to have a stable, beta, dev and now Canary release? Under normal browser conditions, it does not. But because the pace of releases are being sped up due to Chrome being implemented as an OS as well as an integral part of Google’s TV initiative, it makes sense.
The real purpose is to put a canary build out that can be frequently updated, and possibly rolled back. The Chromium team realizes that the more eyes that are on their early builds, the faster potential problems can be worked out, thus speeding up the development life cycle. Note that this build is currently only available for Windows users.
When I first installed Chrome Canary, I was surprised to see that I was given a choice for which search engine would be queried when I put a term in the omnibox. Actually since Yahoo how uses Bing for search results there’s really only two options here.
Looking at the versions of these two instances, it appears that for now the two are running the same build so there’s really nothing intriguing to report on about canary for the time being. Although canary will only be used to push the more risky features into the build, we’ll keep updating on any of the most interesting changes.
