Tag Archives: Chrome dev
Understanding Chrome’s Six Week Release Cycle
Posted on 10. Jan, 2011 by Daniel Cawrey. 
5 Comments
In the fall of last year, the Chrome team made a commitment to a six week release cycle for Chrome, a markedly different approach for browser development. It means that version numbers for Chrome are cranked out faster than most software applications, a possibly baffling development for some bloggers. Why have to report about a new version of the browser every month and a half?
Chrome Technical Program Manager Anthony LaForge has put together a presentation that fully explains the philosophy of the release cycle. The idea is to make Chrome as a client more like a webapp: most websites don’t denote their software with pesky version numbers, so why should Chrome?
Chrome Beta Channel Gets its Update to Version 8, Finally
Posted on 04. Nov, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 5 Comments
We were starting to wonder what the problem was.
Although the Dev Channel of Chrome has been updated to version 9, Chrome Beta was still stuck at version 7. But now that there has been an update to version 8 for Chrome Beta we can see why. It appears that the teeming masses of people working on the Chromium project can’t compare to the team over at Adobe.
Specifically, Chrome 8 Beta has included a new version of Flash that was probably just finished up and is a plugin that is integrated into every release of the browser.
Other updates in include an integrated version of the PDF viewer, which actually is based off of the Foxit reader SDK as opposed to Adobe’s own Reader software. There are of course the requisite bug fixes included in the release.
About time, since the Beta and Stable Channels were running almost identical versions the last few days. Should it be a concern that Chrome releases get held up by third party software versions?
thechromesource Daily: Links for 10/27/10
Posted on 27. Oct, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
3D acceleration has been improved through “about:flags” on Chrome Dev.
GigaOM’s Sam Dean explores the platform differences between Android and Chrome OS.
Mobile users actually prefer the browser over apps.
Some of Eric Schmidt’s quotes are pretty interesting.
Can you imagine spending seven days completely in the browser? Here’s a look.
About:Labs Now in Chrome Dev
Posted on 09. Sep, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
As mentioned in last night’s Daily post, the newest version of Chrome Dev now has the Google Chrome Labs function in the browser. In order to use it, all you need to do is type in “about:labs” in the Omnibox, and you’ll get a screen that looks like this.
For the time being, the only thing that Chrome Labs has to offer is the ability to use sidebar tabs. This may be helpful if you are using a computer that has widescreen, otherwise I’m not sure what the benefits would be. As Google has said, Chrome Labs is simply “crazy experimental stuff” which is another way of saying “we’re going to try some stuff and some of it may not be useful”.
There’s nothing wrong with a little experimentation. If you haven’t used side tabs yet, try it out. Let us know if it is useful, or if you envision it being good on tablets or some other device.
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.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 8/25/10
Posted on 25. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
The dev channel has been updated; Omnibox changes and wrench tweaks on Mac are part of the release.
Garrett Rogers of ZDNet calls Google’s new Voice rollout “disruptive”.
Google’s game developer advocate Mark DeLoura is leaving the company after only five months on the job.
Despite having a HTML5-based app, there are no plans right now for Google Voice on the iPhone or iPad.
Here’s a graphic that lays out all of the Google acquisitions over a nine year span.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 8/17/10
Posted on 17. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
EA games will be a part of the Chrome Web Store, DownloadSquad’s Lee Matthews has uncovered.
The dev channel of Chrome browser has been updated for all platforms with CSS custom cursor rendering and WebM playback fixes.
Auto-linking has come to Google Docs; simply type in a URL and it instantly becomes hyperlinked.
“Oracle Corporation opposes the patentability of software“, a quote uncovered by Fortune that was made by the company in the past.
BrowserLinux has launched a Chrome version of their browser-only operating system as an alternative to the Firefox version.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 8/13/10
Posted on 13. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
It’s official: Google has purchased social currency company Jambool.
The ability to block plugin functionality on a per page basis has been added to Chrome Dev according to CNET.
The Dev Channel of Chrome browser has been updated for all platforms; fixes include UI changes and adding AutoFill info.
It seems as though the past few years have changed Google’s stance on net neutrality.
Wordstream has a graphical timeline of Google’s past failures, it appears that they believe that Buzz is doomed.
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.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 7/30/10
Posted on 30. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
Here’s how Google plans to make $10 billion per year on the Android platform.
The dev channel of Chrome browser has been updated; a fix for PDF loading is part of the release.
Instead of Chrome dev automatically loading the PDF viewer, you now have to use a switch to activate it.
New Gmail features have been exposed via the Chromium OS bug tracking system.
The Official Google blog has a post detailing some of the major Google Apps news as of late.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 7/28/10
Posted on 28. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
One billion devices are a legitimate possibility for Android; at least that’s what Google CEO Eric Schmidt believes.
The dev channel of Chrome browser has been updated; the release includes some UI tweaks and stability fixes.
Apple has released an extensions gallery for its Safari browser creatively called – Safari extensions.
You can’t just throw out an OS like Windows because people are connected to the local applications says GigOM’s Sam Dean.
Is Facebook Questions a legitimate contender in the search market or will it just simply be an annoyance?
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.
