Filed under: Browsers
It’s the beginning of the month again, and that means it’s time for the big analytics guns to release their browsing snapshots once again. While there’s not a lot of movement to report on for August of 2010, Google is no doubt pleased with the way things played out.
Android made a fairly major jump last month, climbing more than a full point — from 7.91 to 9.22%. That gain came mostly at the expense of iOS and Symbian, both of which slid about half a point. Blackberry OS also continued to rise, finishing August up .5%.
On the desktop, Google surged ahead almost a full point to finish at 10.76%. That’s nearly three times Chrome’s user base from this time last year, and it’s the first time Chrome has crossed the 10% mark.
And yes, Internet Explorer slipped yet again. IE is still dominant, yet it’s also now dangerously close to slipping below 50% share for the first time ever. Perhaps the IE9 beta will help stem the tide — it’s due to arrive in less than two weeks.
August browser stats show Android, Chrome on the rise originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google – Google Chrome – Internet Explorer – Download Squad – Web browser
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Filed under: Google, Browsers
It’s Chrome’s second birthday today, and in addition to posting some fancy-schmancy images to celebrate Google Chrome’s stable channel has been bumped to version 6. For those of you still keeping tabs on version changes, it’s only been four months since Chrome 5 went stable.
The update means that all Chrome users can now take advantage of extension and autofill sync — both important parts of Google’s desire to keep your ‘browsing platform’ uniform across all the computers you use.
Version 6 also brings the new consolidated menu, richer content settings (JavaScript, plug-ins, notifications, and the like), and the first-run search engine selection screen. There’s also a faster V8 JavaScript engine under the hood.
No announcement yet from the Chrome Blog, but we’ll add a link once their official post has gone live. In the meantime, the Chromium blog has a breakdown of some of the more important security updates and feature additions.
Google Chrome 6 goes stable, 2nd birthday celebration brings extension and autofill sync originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 02 Sep 2010 10:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Chrome – Google – Browsers – search – Clients
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Filed under: Google, Browsers
Chromium — Google Chrome’s open source cousin — recently debuted the new
about:labs page which brings easier access to bleeding-edge features. The Labs page provides a simpler, GUI-based system for enabling things like side tabs which you previously had to activate via command line switches.
In the latest Chrome Canary update, Labs has arrived. That means Mac users can now enable tab overview (an Expose-like feature which shows all your open tabs) and Windows users can play around with side tabs — no switches required! Just enable the feature on about:labs and restart, and you’re good to go.
Remember, this has just hit Canary — but the dev channel shouldn’t be too far behind.
Hopefully Google will begin adding other features to the page now that it’s made the jump to Chrome. First on our wish list; hardware acceleration!
Thanks for the tip, Jim!
About:labs lands in Google Chrome — brings tab overview to Mac, side tabs to Windows originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 01 Sep 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Chrome – Download Squad – Google – Browsers – Open source
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Filed under: Browsers
After yesterday’s announcement that Chrome 7 is now hardware accelerated, I instantly wanted to get the major browsers back into the ring for another screencasted deathmatch. Back when I did the 4-way speed test, only Firefox and Internet Explorer 9 featured hardware acceleration, and as a result Opera and Chrome were many orders of magnitude slower. If you watch the video, however, you’ll see that’s definitely no longer the case: Chrome is now the fastest of the three major browsers.
That speed comes at a price! As I discuss in the video, Chrome might be faster, but it uses significantly more resources than either IE9 or Firefox 4. Firefox is some 30% slower, but at the same time seems to use less CPU and GPU time. IE9 seems to utilize the same amount of CPU time as Chrome, but a little less of the GPU — and it’s marginally slower as a result.
What I don’t know is whether this is by design or not. You’ll notice that the GPU never went far above 50% — why, with three browsers open, does it not get closer to 100%? The resources are there to be used — why not use them?! Likewise, my CPU is still only half-used even when all three browsers are drawing 1000 frantic fishes at the same time. If you’re curious, the other IE9 test drive samples all provided similar results. I wanted to try Google’s ‘HTML5 rocks’ sample gallery, but they intentionally used elements of CSS and HTML5 that aren’t yet supported in Internet Explorer 9 or Firefox 4.
In the name of science, here’s some more information about my process: the screen capture does slow down each browser by a few frames per second, but relatively the figures are still accurate. I saw a small deviation in FPS when I was only running one browser at a time (probably because my CPU has multiple cores). There are a few unknown variables too, like whether the CPU core usage is defined by the app, or by the operating system (but with Chrome using more resources than IE9, you can only assume that Windows isn’t unfairly biasing its own-brand browser).
If you’d like to recreate my test, you’ll need to enable hardware acceleration in Firefox 4 and Chrome — IE9 has it turned on by default:
- Firefox 4 — grab a nightly build, navigate to about:config and add gfx.font_rendering.directwrite.enabled — set it to ‘true’
- Chrome 7 — grab a nightly build and add the following flags to the shortcut before opening it: –enable-accelerated-compositing –enable-gpu-plugin –enable-gpu-rendering –enable-accelerated-2d-canvas
3-way hardware-accelerated browser shoot-out: Chrome on top, IE9 just behind and Firefox brings up the rear (video) originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Chrome – Google – Firefox 4 – Internet Explorer – Hardware acceleration
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Filed under: Google, Browsers
There are a lot of great extensions in the Chrome Gallery. However, as the Chrome APIs round out and extensions have increased access to things like your history, cookies, and file system you may want to take a closer look at what a particular extension can do
before you install it.
Fortunately there’s a new extension which can do just that. What?! An extension to peek under the hood of other extensions? Yep. It’s called Extension Gallery Inspector, and it’s pretty slick.
Install the Inspector and head to the Chrome Extensions Gallery. When you browse an extension’s detail page, the lightning bolt icon will appear in your Omnibar. Click it, and Inspector will unpack the .CRX file and scan for API calls, permissions, and OAuth support. It also tells you the uncompressed size of the extension and whether or not it has an options page and browser action icon.
Still not enough info for you? Click the view files link and you can actually check out the extension’s source code, icons, and manifest file.
You’ll obviously need a bit of technical knowledge to benefit from Extension Gallery Inspector as it stands right now. Still, for power users who want to know what an extension has access to — or developers who are just curious how a particular extension works — Inspector is a must-have Google Chrome extension.
See what Google Chrome extensions are up to before you install them originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 31 Aug 2010 09:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Chrome – Download Squad – browser – Source code – Clients
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Filed under: Google, Browsers
I’ve asked about this before, and I’ll pose the question one more time: if you’re not going to put Chrome themes where the other Chrome themes go, shouldn’t you at least create a category, Google?
Google has introduced half a dozen new official Chrome themes, but you won’t find them if you click the get themes link on your Personal Stuff menu. No, like the scores of user-created themes out there these new themes from Google have been dropped into the Extensions Gallery.
I’m sure the plan is to list everything in the Gallery at some point (possibly once it’s re-branded as the Web Store?), but it really shouldn’t be hard to give themes their own section on the existing Gallery. Or, you know, post them on the page Chrome takes you to when you click get themes.
The new themes are called Modern, Adaptive, Vibrant, Inventive, Fresh, and Orkut_Hudson. They’re artist-created, and generally not for those of you who like Chrome’s interface to be as unobtrusive as possible — some are downright loud.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder of course — tell us what you think of the new themes in the comments.
Google adds more official themes for Chrome — to the Extensions Gallery? originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 28 Aug 2010 08:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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Google Chrome – Google – Download Squad – Searching – Search Engines
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I’m not sure when the changes actually landed, but Google has announced that an early implementation of 
