thechromesource – Google Chrome and Chrome OS News and Forum

StatCounter: Chrome Increases While Competition Slips, Slightly

Posted on 01. Nov, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

It’s a new month, and StatCounter has the data on browser usage statistics for the past month. Not surprisingly, Chrome has gained while Firefox and Internet Explore have slipped, although the change is very slight. Here’s a look at the rankings in graph form. Internet Explorer comes in on top with 49.21%, Firefox in second with 31.24% and Chrome with 12.39%. Last month Chrome was at 11.54%.

Is there any hope for Internet Explorer? It sounds like the new version has not been as popular as Microsoft had hoped. I also wonder how many browser enthusiasts are now switching to Chrome now that it has so many more features than it did just six months ago.

Will People Actually Want to Move Away From Windows?

Posted on 14. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Maybe Windows is horrible, or could just be enough for people to get by. ITPro’s Simon Brew has an article talking about alternatives to using the Windows operating system. Of course, there are open source alternatives in Linux and Chrome OS was brought up, but the main question brought to mind is this: are users actually going to want to switch from Windows?

On example of this is the fact that Microsoft is still trying to get users off of Windows XP, which debuted in 2001. If a user does get off of XP, their alternative now is going to be to start using Windows 7 which to some people may not be any different than the classic XP. It starts to make one wonder how much market share Google can really take from Windows, especially since probably the only ones buying a Chrome OS system will be those who are actually seeking out the device.

So, with that logic, maybe those who actively hate Windows will go out and look for a Google alternative when it arrives, but the fact of the matter is that Microsoft holds a dominating ninety percent share of a profitable market, and they are not going to lose out very quickly to upstart operating systems.

An example of Microsoft’s stronghold is that somehow, Internet Explorer, known to be an inferior browser through technical tests, still commands a sixty percent share across its three versions. Anyone can download one of the better alternatives, but either they don’t know they can or can do what they need to with a Microsoft product. And that’s the problem.

From Zero to Almost Ten Percent: How Chrome Surpassed Safari

Posted on 30. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

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?

thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/8/10

Posted on 08. Jun, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Can Chrome OS succeed without launching a tablet device for the market?

Google released some updates for the Chrome browser today on Mac, Linux and Windows.

A new and improved way that Google does its search indexing, called Caffeine has just been launched today.

Microsoft is working on their Google Docs strategy by offering up the free Office Web Apps, a browser version of Office.

Google Chrome Frame, an extension for Internet Explorer to give it Chrome-like features, is now in beta.

thechromesource Daily: Links for 5/1/10

Posted on 01. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission may be challenging Google’s acquisition of the mobile advertising company AdMob.

Puleen Patel writes about an interesting concept for Chrome as well as the overall web: co-browsing. I think it fits well with collaboration.

An update to Google Wave now allows users to blog live, which may give the workflow service a much-needed social networking component.

The Chromium Notes blog has a post up about a bug fix (and its challenges) that makes some JavaScript in Chrome about 20%  faster.

The Internet Explorer Weblog has a post talking about how HTML5 is the future of the web. IE9 will reportedly support HTML5.

Firefox Lorentz Emulates Chrome’s Stability Features

Posted on 09. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

ReadWriteWeb is reporting that the beta of Firefox 3.6.3, dubbed Lorentz, is testing a new feature in the browser where plugins are isolated by tab in the event that it crashes. This allows for a singular unstable tab to crash instead of the whole browser. This may sound familiar to those who use Chrome, and will be a new feature in a future stable release of Firefox.

What’s funny is that rival browsers are making no bones about taking Google’s browser ideas and turning them into their own. Microsoft’s IE8 InPrivate, which is the same thing as Chrome’s Incognito mode, comes to mind. Witness the crash screen in Lorentz compared to Chrome’s:

Heading down this path is great for browsers overall, but it seems funny at times when you see competing browsers copying Chrome’s functions in order to keep up with its frenetic pace of development. Indeed, Chrome has quickly gone from version 1.0 in 2008 to 4.0 stable a few months ago.

One of the reasons for early adoption has been Google’s decision to auto-update Chrome. While initially this was heavily criticized, you can see here how fast Chrome has migrated to newer versions because of this functionality:

While Firefox also pushes updates, users are prompted to install them. This may be less obtrusive in terms of privacy than Chrome, and still allows for a regular schedule of updates to the browser:

Microsoft does not prompt for IE updates leaving some users still stuck on IE6, although that metric is slowly changing:

You can try out the new Firefox Lorentz by downloading it from here. Lorentz only isolates QuickTime, Flash, and Silverlight as their own processes. You can, however, customize it to do so for other plugins such as Adobe Reader through these instructions.

Microsoft Takes Issue With Chrome Feature That Can be Turned Off

Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments

In a video that is meant to show off the security features of Internet Explorer 8, Product Manager Pete LePage takes aim at the Chrome browser, claiming that because IE8 allows users to search in a separate box rather than doing so in an all-in-one inbox box that Google is possibly compromising a user’s security by reporting every term back to Google.

“By keeping these boxes separate, your privacy is better protected and the addresses of the sites you’re visiting aren’t automatically shared with Microsoft, or anyone else,” LePage says in the video.

“As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a Web debugging proxy] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google,” LePage says. “I haven’t even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I’m visiting.”

This only partially true. You are capable of changing your search provider in Chrome, and when you do the information that you search for in the Omnibox will send it back to the engine of your choosing. Just because IE8 has two separate boxes for these functions does not make it safer.

The option for sending information back to Google when you start typing into the Omnibox can be turned off by following these instructions. I know this because I downloaded Fiddler myself and tried it to make sure.

LePage also goes on to promote the virtues of IE8′s InPrivate feature, which allows users to surf the web anonymously. Interestingly, this feature sounds eerily similar to Chrome’s Incognito mode which has been a part of Google’s browser since 2008.

Look, there’s no doubt here that Internet Explorer is facing a decline in market share. A recent graph out by Net Applications shows that Internet Explorer is dropping while Chrome is gaining. At the same time, competitors like Safari (which can be traced to Mac adoption), Firefox and Opera are filling in the space where users once had Internet Explorer as their preferred browser. If Microsoft does not go on the offensive with videos like this they risk losing even more market share.

Expect Microsoft to heavily market IE8 and eventually IE9. They will also do well if they keep copying key elements of other popular browsers if they hope to stay relevant, one of the other “industry standard” practices LePage talks about in the video.

New Version of Jolicloud Uses Chrome for Webapps

Posted on 05. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

A few months back I did a review of Jolicloud, which is a competing netbook OS that uses the Linux kernel and is made possible by venture capital-backed funding. There was some news related to the newest version of Jolicloud that while the default browser for the OS is still Firefox, webapps for its “cloud” portion of the platform will run with underlying Google Chrome architecture. This will be a change coming in its new beta version that is due out later this month.

As mentioned in my review, Jolicloud is a different animal when compared to Chrome OS. It has a mix of installed applications and webapps that will satisify both early adopters and regular computer users. However, I found that the “connect to the cloud” notifications when I first booted the system up would be confusing for regular users. I will have to take a look at the new version, but in the previous one it seemed to me that they only reason I needed to actually login to Jolicloud’s servers was to download and install new applications – of which I had to make a choice from their app directory.

But I like this concept of Chrome being the underlying engine for running applications that are web based. This shows that Chrome is really more than just a web browser even right now. A great example of this is Chrome Frame which can be paired with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer to run more intensive applications than the standalone IE can handle.

An Important Choice to Make: Your Browser

Posted on 20. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 4 Comments

So if you use Windows and you live in Europe, you’re about to make an important choice about which browser you will now use. Because since the European Union finds that Microsoft’s practices are anti-competitive, a Windows update for those with Internet Explorer will soon be deployed and will present users with alternative browser choices for them to install.

This is interesting to note, as someone commented on this blog not too long ago about seeing advertising for the Chrome browser in London. Users are going to be prompted to make a choice on a web browser in the next few weeks, and so now that piece of information comes to mind it doesn’t seem so shocking to me. What Google’s intentions are: they probably knew that Microsoft was going to be forced to push this Windows update and wanted to familiarize the public about the fact that they have their own browser.

And once one uses Chrome, they may realize that they’ve been missing out on something: an experience that is faster and more reliable than Internet Explorer. Of course, that could be said about most browsers other than IE.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the five most popular browsers will be shown in a random order, with other less popular ones being shown on another slide.

Overall, this does not help Microsoft in the browser wars. They are already losing a lot of users to Firefox and Chrome, but now this development is based not on the fact that their product isn’t very good, but because a government entity wants to make sure that people realize that they have a choice to use something that doesn’t automatically come with Windows. And there are several choices for them out there, more so than ever before.

So, have you been prompted with this message? What did you choose to do?

Paper: Browser Extensions Have Potential Security Implications

Posted on 09. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments

In a comprehensive paper that was recently published, researchers at Berkeley’s Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science studied the possible security impact that extensions could have on a browsers’ vulnerability to exploit and/or attack a computer. It was found that of twenty-five popular Firefox Extensions, all of them had the highest level of security privileges in the browser. That’s all that would theoretically be needed to attack a machine, which could potentially result in a compromised situation.

The paper also goes on to explain that the majority of extensions don’t need to have these types of privileges in order to execute what a developer  is trying to accoplish, but that the Firefox API as it is currently is built to allow for powerful networked software development – even for extensions.

The group who wrote this paper has even worked with Google in order to better implement their own extensions directory. They proposed to Google a method whereby keys are used to help identify an extension. Developers must sign an agreement with Google to ensure that privileges for an extension do not have capabilites that allow for potential security problems before they can be listed at the official directory.

When installing extensions from the Google directory, which was launched last December, I had noticed a few times that the the URL for the location of the download was a bit unique:

This is by design, however. It’s a public key that has been set that identifies the extension with the website. The best part about this is that for the purposes of version updating, the key is identified with the extension and thus the URL that is located on the Google extension directory. This is in addition to scripts running separately from outside web sources and some other interesting features that offer a robust technical standard for these additional features of Chrome browser that independent developers are working on.

While Firefox offers a rating system that works to protect users, as well as a developmental system called Jetpack that offers narrow interfaces, I really got the impression that there was a lot of thought that was put into the extension system for Chrome. While trying to expose vulnerabilities through extensions doesn’t appear to be something that is deliberate by those who create them, there is potential for there to be problems down the line.

It’s also important to consider that if you plan on using extensions, you should probably use an official directory depending on the browser that you use. That means getting them from Mozilla.org for Firefox or the official Google extensions site for Chrome. I could not find an extension/add-in directory for Internet Explorer from Microsoft.

Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome are discussed in the paper in depth. Now that there is so much more that you can do with a browser with the speed of JavaScript performance increasing at such a huge rate over the past few years it has to be considered that browsers need to increasingly become more secure as they become more that just where you surf the web but also where you run applications. So it’s worth a read if you have time, and you can check out the abstract from here.

Interview: HTML5 Standards Author Ian Hickson

Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments

Ian Hickson has worked as a proponent of web standards for years. He is the maintainer of the Acid Tests website, which is a tool for browsers to make sure that they are fully compliant with today’s web standards. The most recent revision, Acid3, was developed to help browsers follow standards compliance with web 2.0 technologies.

Ian has been employed by Netscape, Opera Software, and now works for Google. He also was the lead on authoring the standards for HTML5. While he couldn’t talk about anything related to Chrome or Google with us, he answered our questions so that we can better understand this new web standard a bit better.

Tell us about yourself and how you got involed in HTML 5.

I was at Opera in 2003, working half in QA and half in their standards group, when the W3C called for a member vote on XForms (at that time the next generation of web forms, see here). Opera and some other companies — Apple and Mozilla in particular, though we were supported by some others also — tried to make the point that abandoning HTML wasn’t such a hot idea, and so we decided to write a proof of concept to show that it was possible to add many of the features of XForms to HTML. I happened to have some free time so I was volunteered to write it. We called it XForms Basic or something like that, and it wasn’t very popular at the W3C, so we lost the vote. However, it convinced us that it was the right direction to go in, so we worked on it a bit more, and renamed it to Web Forms 2.0 to avoid confusion with XForms.

In 2004 there was a big workshop organised by the W3C to Make a Decision about how we were going to move forward on the Web, and the W3C staff and many of the members voted for continuing down the path of XHTML2 and XForms, and said that if we wanted to work on HTML we should do so elsewhere, because the W3C had decided it was done with that.

So we opened a mailing list called the WHATWG to continue work on Web Forms 2.0 in public, and later that year started a new draft called Web Applications 1.0 into which we put many features aimed at writing Web apps, including a new version of HTML that we jokingly called HTML5, and a bunch of other features that later became Web Storage, Web Sockets, Server-Sent Events, and a variety of other specs.

Around 2005 I moved from Opera to Google, so that I could focus specifically on the spec work — Opera still wanted me to work 50% on QA, but Google were willing to let me work 100% on the specs.

Later, around 2006 or 2007, the W3C basically realised they had made a mistake, and they asked if they could work on HTML5 as well, so we renamed Web Applications 1.0 to HTML5, and the WHATWG and the W3C started working together. Web Forms 2.0 got merged into HTML5, and most of the bits of HTML5 that weren’t really HTML got split out into separate specs.

How far along is this technology? As in, when can users expect to see this on a regular basis?

Many parts of it were done before we started, because we took existing proprietary features and just specified them. For example, XMLHttpRequest was first specified in Web Applications 1.0, years after Microsoft invented it and all the other browsers copied it. It was later spun off into its own spec at the W3C. Other parts are brand new, and haven’t been implemented anywhere yet. Some parts might never get implemented, and we’ll throw them out when that becomes clear.

People are starting to use parts of HTML5 today. It depends really on what fraction of browsers you want to target. If you only care about Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, you can use the “canvas” element today without any trouble… but IE doesn’t support it. If you only care about IE, you can use onhashchange… but the other browsers don’t support it. I would give it a few years before the majority of the features are implemented everywhere, but who knows. After all, not everything in HTML_4_ is implemented everywhere yet, and people use that without even thinking about it!

How significant is the canvas tag and svg for HTML 5? Do you know of any good examples of this on the web right now?

IE doesn’t support this either, so it’s hard to find widely deployed uses of those, but there are some. Yahoo! Pipes has used it  for some time. Dreamhost uses it in their hosting panel.

Talk a bit about how offline storage will work. Many users are concerned about being able to work offline.

The Offline Application Cache feature is actually pretty straight-forward. If you design your application such that it can work without contacting the server, then you just list all the files it uses (HTML pages, CSS, JS, images, etc) in a manifest using a simple format, and it works offline. The way it works is the first time you visit the page, it gets the manifest, downloads all the files, and the next time you visit the page, it just uses the downloaded files, regardless of whether you’re online or not – it then downloads the new files in the background, in case they have been updated. This makes things faster as well as making them work offline. If your application uses online data, though, like a Web mail application, you will have to do extra work to actually maintain an offline copy of the mail for the user, that’s not handled by the page.

Have you heard anything about 3D on the web? Will HTML 5 support this?

The Khronos Group is working on a 3D canvas context, but I don’t know much about it. Canvas is a part of HTML5.

Lastly, what is in store for the future when talking about HTML 5 on the web?

From the point of view of standards, HTML5 is old hat now! The WHATWG is already moving on to the next generation of HTML. One of the changes we’re making is that we’re no longer numbering the versions… in practice it hasn’t made much sense. Browsers started implementing HTML”5″ stuff before all the HTML”4″ stuff was implemented, and they ship whatever they have at the time they ship… it’s not like the version numbers really mean anything useful. So there’s just “HTML”, and we keep improving it.

One of the ideas we’re looking at is video-conferencing, but it needs a common codec even more than , so we’re kinda stuck with that. It’s also not clear how we should do the networking — there are lots of standards like SIP and Jingle that we could use, but they’re all really complicated, and not a good fit for what we’re doing.

On the nearer term, we’re going through all the feedback we’ve been getting on HTML5, and fixing bugs. There’s lots of work still to be done.

Google Pushing HTML5 for the Future

Posted on 04. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 3 Comments

A post on the the Chromium blog today touts the array of developer tools that are available from Google for the many open source projects that the company is working on. One campaign in particular is a touring developer conference called Google Developer Day in which some of the largest projects are presented – namely Android and Chrome, which ultimately benefits the operating system project in getting developers on board early.

A important standard that Google is working on is HTML5. Previously, complex web applications and offline storage capabilities were fueled in Chrome by Google Gears (Firefox and IE add-ins available here), but this will soon be no more. Now, Google wants to push HTML5 to the forefront, most noteably in its testing of YouTube for the eventual site- wide adoption of HTML5 instead of the current video playing technology, Adobe Flash.

Why the desire to move away from proprietary formats and use an open standard such as HTML5? Consider this web-based image uploader tool developed by Mozilla Hacks, which is developed in HTML5  and offers image editing and offline functionality within the browser:

In addition to this, HTML5 will offer the ability to directly embed video and audio onto a webpage, offer more interactivity using the canvas tag and svg files as well as simply creating a richer environment for users. To learn more about HTML5 and some code examples, I would recommend checking out this video with Brad Neuberg, who is a developer and is part of the Open Web Advocacy group with Google: