thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Resources

New Chrome Ads Highlight Extensions, Translate

Posted on 21. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

These videos continue to be enjoyable, simply because they are all so different and while Chrome is the singular product promoted, there really is no underlying theme that ties them together other than the similar motif. I think this is a smart move, as consumers are pretty sophisticated about products theses days.

It’s no wonder that people have to be when you think about how many marketing messages a person is exposed to day in and day  out. At the same time, the presentation here is simplistic, not trying to alienate those who may not be into the technical side of computers:

Here is a previous ad that the same agency, BBH, did a while back:

Check out this clip on how they made the ad above. It’s pretty cool how they are using their creativity to make these effects instead of just using a PC. It really stretches your abilities while at the same time enables one to make something truly unique:

Reports of Trojan as a Chrome Extension Emerge

Posted on 20. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

There is a reason why Google has set up their own extension site, where they make sure that they do a security review of each “plug-in” that is submitted for their browser to check potential security problems. As more people use Chrome browser, the threat of malicious software increases. Think of the problems that Internet Explorer has had to deal with in the past. Because of those headaches, Google has tried really hard to start initiatives to thwart security issues in their own browser ecosystem before it gets too big.

The easiest way to obtain access to Chrome? One is through Flash, but Google has decided to add that as an integrated feature. Another way is through extensions. That’s why it’s a big deal when the Romanian antivirus company BitDefender reports that an extension now exists that has intentions on exploiting a user’s system, typical of a trojan virus.

The Malware City blog by BitDefender describes the situation whereby a user gets an email to download a Chrome extension that has not-so-good intentions. The user is led to a site that looks the same as the official Google extension site, but the URL is not the same, something akin to phishing. They also talk about the fact that some of the more savvy users will know that an extension will come as an install file with a .crx extension, as opposed to this malicious extension that has an .exe extension.

Herein lays the problem with extensions. Everyone must realize that the only place to install an extension is from Google’s official extension site. At the beginning of 2010, McAfee released a report that reiterated this point: the problem is that now the Chrome platform is reaching a stage of major adoption – starting with the browser. Fortunately Google has set up an extension site where we know we can get added functions to our browser without the worry that they will totally screw up our system.

Optimizing Chrome Browser for Speed

Posted on 19. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Everyone wants their browser to move as fast as possible. This is most likely due to the fact that no matter the speed of an application, it still seems to lag behind human performance in terms of user interface. While Chrome has certainly achieved a level of browser performance that I have not seen before, there are still some settings that slow it down a bit:

Hopefully this helps you out. No one wants to use something that is slower than it has to be.

Video: Spotlight on WebKit

Posted on 15. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Check out this clip about WebKit, which has recently been in the news:

What Does Your Browser Say About You? Find Out With BrowserSpy

Posted on 13. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

Your browser is very telling. And I don’t mean just what type of browser you use, but also your screen resolution, what version of Adobe Reader you have installed, whether you have Java installed and if so what version, what CPU you are running and CSS information that can show what sites you usually frequent:

All thanks to BrowserSpy. With this little website you can see just how much of you PC’s information is leaking all over the internet like a water balloon with a slight tear in it. Many people don’t realize this, and that’s why BrowserSpy’s founder, Henrik Gemal, set out to start a site that offers this information to the world. He keeps it updated, and keeps adding things that he finds which you may not know is available just by surfing the web.

Concerned about your privacy on the web? Chrome has options that allow you to turn off JavaScript, go into what’s know as Incognito Mode and there are also variations of Chromium open source builds that are built with privacy in mind. When I went to the BrowserSpy site with one of such browsers, known as Comodo Dragon, a few things were left undetected as I went through the list of tests on the left hand site of the site – but not everything.

At the same time, using Chrome with no privacy settings turned on, BrowserSpy pinpointed my IP address to somewhere north of Wichita Kansas on a Google Map. Which is highly incorrect. Maybe they don’t know that much about me.

Using the Task Manager in Chrome Browser

Posted on 28. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

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.

HTML5 Will Replace Google Gears – But Not Without On2

Posted on 22. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments

It certainly was a big deal a few years ago when Google first announced their Gears platform for web browsing. But the truth is that it was only a stopgap for what is to be the future: HTML5. Well, finally the time has come for HTML5 to shine, as recent developments have pushed it into the forefront for a more interactive web experience.

Basically Gears is a bridge between the browser and the native computing system. With HTML5, this type of flexibility is coded right in with web development. That benefits users because it provides for simplicity along with more flexibility in terms of development. Some things that you may use Gears for today, such as offline storage to all for a faster experience or just to have files when you’re not connected, can be done even easier with HTML5. Plus, the majority of browsers now support HTML5 unlike when Gears was announced back in 2007.

The official Gears blog had an update last week, explaining why there has been a lack of posts lately. No more updates to Gears, however until everything is completely moved over to HTML5 (which could be a while) support will continue. It’s also no coincidence that on the same day of that post it was announced that Google was finalizing its purchase of On2 Media for $124.6 million.

That’s because the video technology that On2 has developed fits well within what Google is trying to do with YouTube. Although some people like to complain about the lack of innovation sine Google purchased YouTube, they just recently have started a HTML5 beta on the site, and I’m sure that you can expect to see more interesting developments now that On2 is in the fold. That is unless Google bought On2 just to kill it, which seems doubtful.

One of the big things to watch for: video compression standards. On2 has a variety of these proprietary formats, and so it is not a stretch to expect HTML5 paired with one of them, namely called V8  VP8, to become the standard for Chrome and especially on YouTube, which currently uses a licensed technology called H.264 that works with Adobe’s Flash Player. There has been a call for On2 to make VP8 open source by some developers, and we’ll see what happens with that.

So what is the underlying problem with H.264 and Flash? Well, both of them have been around for a while with little relative progress in their technology. That’s not going to work too well in the near future with devices becoming ever smaller and portable running ARM processors.

You can check out a video comparison between H264 and VP8 from On2′s website right here if you’re interested.

Comodo Dragon Browser Offers a Secure Browsing Experience

Posted on 21. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 4 Comments

Comodo, a mid-sized security company based in the United States, has decided to release it’s own version of Chrome browser that puts a particular focus on security aspects. It’s Comodo Dragon Internet Browser, and the purpose, according to the company, is to offer a safer and more protected web browsing experience. Their website notes that there are millions of potential malware and privacy threats that are out there, and that this browser is built to protect from these vulnerabilities.

I went ahead and downloaded Comodo, and while you can tell that the Chrome UI has largely stayed the same, they have added their own skin to Comodo that make it their own. Like Chrome, when you install the browser, it allows you to import your things from whatever browser you have been using, which is helpful.

One of the first things I realized about this browser is that I was unable to install extensions. This would lead me to believe that Comodo Internet Browser is based on an earlier version of Chromium browser that did not support extensions, but I’m not entirely sure of that after reading their technical documents and forum. You are able to install your own theme – but for some reason you’re not be able to install extensions. That could be an issue for some people, especially since you aren’t even able to use Google’s own approved extensions from their official site.

It appears that the main benefit of using Comodo right now is to restrict Google themselves from accessing the information that is normally sent back to them while you surf. Features that are inherent to Chrome browser have been stripped out. This include things such as reporting back to Google’s servers of the version number of the browser, the GoogleUpdate auto-updater, usage statistics and RLZ-tracking, which sends to Google information about where you downloaded Chrome from.

Comodo claims to offer a faster experience than other browsers, but in a test between Chrome 5, Firefox 3.6 and Dragon using Sunspider Javascript benchmarking, they came in second after Chrome 5. Hopefully they can continue to develop their own flavor of Chrome, but I would be hard pressed to expect that they will be able to surpass the most recent Chromium browser source in terms of rendering speeds.

I surfed around with Comodo Dragon, and the experience wasn’t any different from using the latest Chrome version, which is 5 Beta right now. Although Comodo’s website says there are added security features, I could not find any located within the options menu. In fact Chrome 5 has more content setting options than Comodo Dragon, so my guess is that they plan on adding more features with a security focus soon.

You can download Comodo Dragon Internet Explorer right here. Unfortunately, it only runs on Windows for now – from XP and up.

Video: Using HTML5 with YouTube

Posted on 11. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

As many already know, YouTube is attempting to get away from using the proprietary Adobe Flash standard for video playback. In mobile devices such as the iPhone and soon the iPad, you cannot use Flash, supposedly because Apple CEO Steve Jobs deems it “buggy” – causing applications that use it to crash. There is another valid argument for not using Flash, and it is because now that it is installed in so many devices it could be a security threat according to McAfee.

As previously reported here, there is a beta for using HTML5 while on YouTube. This allows anyone using a HTML5-compliant browser to use it. But that means using a compliant browser such as Safari, Chrome, Firefox or IE when coupled with Chrome Frame to use it. The current version does have its quirks, but eventually it will result in a a faster and overall better user expeience when looking at any type of media over the web.

You can take a look at how to use HTML5 and its early performance on the YouTube site right here:

It’s pretty clear from the clip that the video loads pretty fast. Instead of using Flash as the go-between, HTML5 allows web developers to directly  embed compressed video files such as MPEG right into the code itself so that it can be called from a server. Not to mention that Flash can take up a lot of resources on your machine if you’re trying to load up a couple of videos. The only intermediary is the application that you use, further evidencing the fact that personal computing is becoming more centralized around the internet browser and the standard application that we use to view it.