New Chrome Beta Adds Themes, Speed, & HTML 5 Video

adeelarshad82 writes "Google developers are always working on and updating Chrome in three channels — Stable, Beta, and Developer — in increasing positions on the bleeding-edge scale. Today the company thought changes to the Beta channel warranted a post on the main Google Blog. The advances range from the superficial addition of themes for customizing the browser's window borders to even faster speed under the hood to internal support for HTML 5 tags such as <video> and 'web workers,' which allows the browser to divvy processing work among sub-threads."

Comments

Still no Adblock though

[Anonymous Coward]

When will google learn that plugins, especially something like adblock, is the killer feature they need to attract the "willing to switch" audience, a lot of whom are using firefox right now. I personally love Chrome for its speed and stability, used it for a week or so, but then switched right back to Firefox because I just didn't realise how it is to do many things in Firefox with extensions such as adblock, no script, autopager, del.icio.us integration etc.

Re:Still no Adblock though

[Bashae]

Maybe you're asking a little too much from Google. Remember that a significant share of their revenue comes from web advertising...

Re:Still no Adblock though

[Seth Kriticos]

Adblock is needed because of all those blinking and colourful flash ads that are all around. Googles ads are quite moderate and most people would not mind to see them, so your statement is false.

This would give a lot of people the motivation to switch to Chrome, which would be a gain for Google while not having big add revenue losses (actually they would gain add revenues, as the js cross site google ads would not be blocked any-more).

They're problem is probably, that this would raise anti-competitive questions they want to avoid, so this could only be done with an open plugin system (via trusted third party plugins).

Re:Still no Adblock though

[markkezner]

While plugins would be useful, I think you have the wrong idea about Google's motives with Chrome. Chrome is Google's bid to change the browser market to make it a better platform for their core business, web applications.

Google isn't as concerned with making Firefox users switch to chrome, because they are already using a (mostly) standards compliant browser. IE is the real target. This seems to explain why, if I browse to google.com in IE7, I'm greeted with an ad banner that invites me to give Chrome a try. Google does not do this if I browse with Firefox or Safari.

Does it install in the right place?

[Midnight Thunder]

Has Google managed to get Chrome install in the "program files" director yet? The fact that it installs in "application settings" is the number one reason I can't install it.

Re:Does it install in the right place?

[mrak_attack]

Installation to the "App Data" folder makes it possible to instill Chrome by users without Admin rights. For installation into Program Files you need admin rights or special permissions tweaking.

Re:Does it install in the right place?

[TJamieson]

It also enables the seamless autoupdating for non-Admin users.

Re:Does it install in the right place?

[The Moof]

I imagine trying to circumvent IT policies isn't winning anyone over in a corporate setting. It's probably doing the opposite. Crazy as it sounds, those IT restrictions are there for a reason, and we don't want people installing and running their own software.

Re:Does it install in the right place?

[shutdown -p now]

It's not a circumvention of IT policies. Google is actually playing nice, and using the standard mechanisms provided by Windows to install per-user - which is also something that's encouraged (not as a sole way of installation, though). In any case, I'm not an admin, but I'd be surprised if you couldn't disable this via group policies or something similar.

Still not a Chrome user

[BadAnalogyGuy]

The first thing that really got me about Chrome was how well it seemed to learn my browsing habits. At least, that was my first impression when I booted it up. The first view you get in Chrome is the "most visited websites" page or something like that. As a incognito porn site surfer, I was really taken aback and worried about privacy issues.

It took a long time in Firefox to fix the URL history functionality. It used to keep the URLs in some cache so that it could be called up right away when you started entering a URL into the address bar. Now, the URLs at least seem like they are gone forever when you delete them from your History.

IE still has this problem (in addition to completely retarded address bar behavior). In fact, if you delete the entire browsing history at once, the URLs themselves can never be deleted except by completely clearing the cache, but then that also deletes the "cover" sites that I visit to make it seem like my surfing is just innocuous browsing and not the hardcore porn viewing which it ostensibly is.

So if Chrome wants my patronage, I think the first thing it needs to do is convince me that my personal privacy is safe. That my URLs aren't going to be cached and exposed at some inopportune time, and that it isn't tracking them for me to helpfully find other related websites.

In this way, I've found Firefox to be the most accommodating browser on the market today. It does what I want and doesn't try to be smart about it. Funny how so many things in life work better that way.

Re:Still not a Chrome user

[ethebubbeth]

Just put chrome into Incognito Mode (ctrl+shift+n, or do it from the menu). That accomplishes the same thing as Mozilla Firefox in Private Browsing mode and should prevent it from storing history while you porn surf.

Re:Still not a Chrome user

[mumb0.jumb0]

As a incognito porn site surfer, I was really taken aback and worried about privacy issues.

Interesting choice of words. Chrome has an "incognito mode". From the blurb shown when you open the browser in that mode:

Pages that you view in this window won't appear in your browser history or search history, and they won't leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window. Any files that you download or bookmarks that you create will be preserved, however.

Re:Still not a Chrome user

[mdm-adph]

Then load up one window in Incognito mode, and another window that's not. I really don't know what you're complaining about. :\

If you're looking for absolute privacy, don't use the web. Otherwise, Incognito-mode is about as good as it gets (just remember to clear out your Flash cookies from time to time, the browser doesn't control those).

Smooth scrolling yet?

[psymastr]

Does it have smooth scrolling and adblock yet? If not then I can't move. Especially after the huge speedup in FF 3.5.

I refuse to use a browser that phones home..

[KlaasVaak]

I'm just not going to give google more info about me by using their browser.

NoScript and Adblock

[pzs]

I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.

However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.

Re:NoScript and Adblock

[imakemusic]

Two slashdot pages at once.

Re:NoScript and Adblock

[pmontra]

Oh I see. I'm running Firefox 3.5 like this (I'm on Linux too):

1213m 272m 43m R

and this is not a problem. The first figure 1213 MB includes also libraries shared with other programs. 272 MB is how much memory Firefox is using on its own. 639 MB for you, which is quite a lot but if you have a lot of tabs and windows it should be expected.

AdSweep != AdBlock+

[rshol]

Downloaded the latest Chrome Beta (3.0.195.4), installed AdSweep, failed to be impressed. AdSweep loads ads the first time you visit a page in a session then erases them, highly annoying. The biggest problem I had was that I failed to notice any speed difference between Chrome and Firefox 3.5.2 on the sites I visit. If anything my non-scientific observation was that with AdSweep loaded, Chrome was significantly slower than Firefox.

I am willing to accept unobstrusice ads

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

I hate the flashing banners, pop ups, pop unders, and distracting flash animations etc as much as anyone. But I do not mind the content providers making a little money selling my eye ball time, if the ads are not distracting and if the ad load is not too much.

In the non-cyber world, we all accept ads in the magazines and newspapers, realizing the subsidy they provide to the mags and papers. Same way here.

I wish there is a way to set my browser agent to tell the websites something like:

Will accept text ads.

Will reject all animations gif, flash or javascript.

Will allow 20% of screen real estate to ads.

Content load time not less than 0.33 times ad load time.

Currently looking for ads with keywords : digital camera, DVD cases/sleeves, air tickets to India

Re:I am willing to accept unobstrusice ads

[nine-times]

Yeah, I'd like to set something like that in my browser, not just for my own ad-blocking, but I almost want to notify the websites: I am blocking your ads because they're big, slow-loading flash ads. Give me static images or text and I won't block them.

Or what I almost, not really but *almost* want to be able to do is do it on a per-site basis. To be able to send the message to one website, "I'll accept animated GIFs because your site is awesome, but I won't load Flash files for any reason," and tell another website, "Meh, you kind of rot but I just happened across your site by accident. No ad revenue for you." Of course, it would require a lot of work to set that up, even if I had the opportunity to do it.

And yes, I suppose I could send website emails, but I'd just be one nutjob sending an email, and I wouldn't think it'd do much. What I mean is, it'd be nice if we could all register our frustration in a simple, quick way that would be quantifiable to webmasters, maybe it would improve the situation. Like if someone could look at a set of numbers and say, "Look, if we use Flash, then 40% of our visitors will just block all of our ads, but if we use static images that only take up 14% of the display area, then only 20% will block those images," then maybe websites would actually be less annoying about ads.

Sorry if I'm just pushing us off-topic.

Re:I want a Mac beta of that

[Goaway]

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/eula_dev.html?dl=mac