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New Chrome Beta Adds Privacy Controls, Translation Option
billandad writes "Anyone would think the timing was deliberate; just as Microsoft is forced into giving users the option to switch from IE via the browser ballot screen, so Google introduces a new Chrome beta with enhanced privacy features to chisel away at Microsoft's market share. '... you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites.' The new beta also adds language detection, and will prompt the user to translate a page if it's written in a foreign tongue."
And Opera 10.50 has just been released too, the first version of Opera with <Video> tag support.
With Chrome, Safari and Firefox all evolving quickly, the future of the web is looking good. I just wish they would all support an open, royalty-free codec.
Struggling to find a day everyone can make? WhenShallWe.com
I really don't trust Google with privacy. I really wouldn't trust their browser for that. That being said, I like Chrome for the way it can applicationize a website. The only thing I use Chrome for is to run slacker radio as an app in linux.
"He's lost in a 'floyd hole"
This translation option is particularly interesting to me and begs the question: can anyone recommend a good extension with similar functions (automatic detection, etc) for firefox?
I am glad to see Chrome coming along so well, it's nice having 5 legitimate choices to use (IE, Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Safari). The competition is driving improvements, and it's the users that are benefiting. There are still some WebApps that I have to use IE or Firefox for, but now that Chrome has extensions (delicious bookmarks, IEtab, etc.) it has been my browser of choice.
..where some websites have allowed cookies that don't get deleted on browser exit [firefox]
I have the clearing history enabled (for cookies and logins only), but every time not only the "untrusted cookies" are deleted, but also the "trusted" ones. Default rule is to store cookies until I close Firefox.
I searched for extensions, but no luck.
A whitelist based on some cookies criteria (regexp or such) would be the icing on the cake.
They passed 1.0 a long while ago. Chromium is up at 5.0 and Chrome is already beyond 4.0!
I'm sure those are nice and good features, but could you fix http://dl.google.com it basically hungs up my apt-get update everyday and it's quite annoying.
It seems no browser offers the functionality to wipe those out, and yet they can contain malicious code (there was a recent infection at the office).
*praying for the demise of flash*
Honestly, machine translation is OK if you want a quick look into a website. Actual meaning is not aviable.
just saw that there's an Adblock for chrome too! definitely have a reason to try the new browser now...curious to see how it compares to firefox.
sigs suck
.
Opera has had this ability for years, FireFox nearly as long.
The headline should be more along the lines of, " Chrome finally starting to catch up to the competition "
I'm guessing that the "enhanced privacy features" doesn't yet extend to being able to turn off the RLZ identifier?
(Good job we have SRWare Iron instead)
Avantslash - View Slashdot cleanly on your mobile phone.
Sounds a lot like Omni Web
You don't have to "trust" their browser at all. The source code for Chrome is freely available. If you find any features that are unfriendly towards privacy, you're free to modify the source.
If - and only if - you can read and understand the source.
If - and only if - you have the programming skills - and the time - to produce a well-behaved modification.
I am tempted to argue that when a program reaches a certain size or complexity the difference between closed and open source becomes academic.
Once the new chrome beta offers true blocking support - where plugins can prevent undesired material from loading - then I'll give it another try. (If I can give up my "live bookmarks" in ff, that is.) Currently, plugins can prevent it from *displaying* - but the material still loads.
Security features are nice, but they aren't a selling point. I won't change browsers to prevent tracking cookies. I don't know that much about javascript, and I don't mind most of the ads that I see. Ad block plus has been doing just fine with the pop-ups, and I don't care about those other things.
Translating foreign pages? That is interesting. I run into a fair amount of Chinese datasheets.
Just give me the web page as fast as possible, and keep my videos as smooth as possible. After that, I don't really care.
Hmm, doesn't IE already have site-specific blocking using trusted and restricted (etc) zones. In the settings you can choose between a lot of options what you want to allow, disallow or prompt. It may not be the best user-interface around, but it does the job. Basically I only use it to restrict google cookies and scripts, so it would be kind of ironic to start using chrome for blocking Google :)
Soon. This isn't like the usual google product. The beta is 4.1.x.x. The stable version I think is 3.x. And the daily developer version is at 5.x.
Sent from my desktop computer
lawl flamebait fail. Troll elsewhere scrub.
Yes, lets create a browser that is EXACTLY THE SAME AS THE REST! That'll win us the browser war for sure!
It's news because there are people like me who've been waiting for this functionality before switching.
The Firefox developers basically refused to make an interface for per-site permissions part of the core product, forcing everyone to use CS Lite and NoScript or similar. They do the job, but every time there's a new version you have compatibility problems.
As soon as these new functions hit the Linux and Mac versions of Chrome, I'm saying goodbye to Firefox. It's slow, bloated and crashy, and I've only been sticking with it because of the lack of CS Lite and NoScript on other browsers. I suspect Firefox is going to pay the price for valuing advertisers at the expense of users.
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
The main reason I use Chrome is because of the excellent interface. When maximized, the tabs push right against the screen edge. I've not seen any app that makes such efficient usage of screen real estate. I've tried to configure FireFox, using TinyMenu to reduce the amount of white space. But it's still not as efficient.
8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
Of course, they have some catching up to do. All browsers try to have big version numbers because user look at it like "oh, this must be more advanced than this other browser". Silly, but true. It dates back to IE/Netscape days, when Netscape completely skipped over version 5.0 because IE was already at 6.0 and they wanted to be "up to par".
will have to bookmark this site. thanks
Katavirág virágbolt - virág , virágbolt , koszorú , sírcsokor , virág képek , virágos képek , megrendelés , futár
Since everyone seems to be listing off what they think Chrome should and should not be doing for new features, here's my list:
Add an option to make it look like every other window i've got. Maybe some people like the round-cornered title bar-less window, but i find it annoying. Not only is it aesthetically annoying to have it so different from everything else, but i often have trouble finding it amidst all the other windows i've got open because i mentally locate everything by the title bar. I often have to select Chrome from the task bar just to find it when it turns out that the part which should have been the title bar was already visible.
The folder tab bar needs to be relocatable to the "normal" position just above the pages themselves. They can use whatever structural hierarchy behind the scenes that they want, but when i look at Firefox i visualize a filing cabinet full of files. When look at Chrome i can't help but visualize an entire row of filing cabinets, one cabinet for each individual file folder. In a related usability comment, i often do a google search for a term, open up multiple tabs from that search, and then do a text find on the search term on each of the pages. In Firefox this is easy because the search box is part of the browser so i can just switch pages and hit the "next" button. In Chrome the search box is (of course) part of the tab, so i have to open a new search box every time i switch to a new tab. This is not a helpful feature.
I do appreciate that unlike with Firefox i can actually reclaim memory by closing old tabs. (Despite repeated claims of memory improvements in every version of Firefox, after a couple days of use it's still sucking up a gig and a half of memory, and closing individual tabs has almost no affect on the usage.) However in the 24 hour trial i did Chrome ended up using 886 megs of private memory to Firefox's 911 megs, which is a pretty even comparison, but _5275_ megs of virtual memory to Firefox's 1038 megs!
They also need to add a drop-down menu to let you jump to a specific tab, like Firefox, and they need to add a minimum width for the tabs, like Firefox, and they need to add a scrollable tab bar, like Firefox. The Chrome developers have made a blog post explaining why those are all bad design decisions. They admit that their current system causes problems, but they don't want to implement a "bad" design choice, and they they don't want to give the user options (because that's another "bad" design choice.)
Okay guys, you made that post a YEAR ago. You STILL haven't figured out a better way to fix those problems. Perhaps you ought to let us use Firefox's "bad" solutions rather than trying to convince us to continue using an admittedly broken product while you sit around failing to think of the "right" way to do it.
And i don't care how much you value your opinions as designers or how much you think reducing options "forces you to come up with the right approach," no single system is going to be the "right" one for everyone, and giving the users options to customize software to fit their own needs is not a failure! This is the same mindset that resulted in minimizing the options for privacy in Buzz, because you were so sure you'd come up with the perfect way to handle privacy. It turns out that not everyone thinks the same as you. Of course in that case everyone had the choice between canceling their gmail account or complaining loudly until you fixed things. It's "too bad" for you that in the case of Chrome everyone who disagrees with your design choices can just quietly go back to Firefox or Safari or IE or whatever else they were using before without voicing loud complaints.
And as a final note, i'm also annoyed by the stupid behaviour of tabs getting opened right after the tab you opened them from. I read their reasons about why they did that in the above post. It doesn't fit my usage. It would have been nice if they'd made
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
Now if Google Chrome would just either add the functionality of Google's own toolbar's bookmarks I would switch to it full time.
Is buying a Harley Davidson as your first motorcycle since you were 16 at age 49 a midlife crisis issue?
How about a master password so that all of my passwords aren't stored unencrypted? Even better, add a timeout option so that it relocks the password database after a specified period of inactivity.
Opera have quite a lead, then, and Firefox aren't making big pushes to catch up from 3.x.
Or maybe it is uglyness rating: Opera scores over 10 for having a hideous default UI that looks out of place on all desktops; IE scores an 8 for...well, being IE with those stupid shiny buttons; Firefox is slowly moving up as it tries to look more like IE; Chrome perhaps over-rates itself, but it still gets points for not quite understanding that "GTK theme" shouldn't mean "pick the colours and use them in random places, then ignore parts of controls".
I can imagine me visiting my online banking and every page I hit gets sent to Google to detect my language and offer to translate my transactions and balances. Does anyone else wonder how much Google knows about my spending habits?
Again, not having used Chrome (on Linux), maybe I'm misunderstanding.
Does it also allow for control over Auto Updates?
Watch the Teaser Trailer for "The Lightning Thief" Her
We cant expect much privacy from Chrome
The settings you can see from right-click Flash object > Settings are hardware accel, master mic/camera disable, master local storage ("Flash cookies"), microphone selection and volume, and camera selection. Conspicuous by their absence are the panes under the rightmost tabs in the full settings manager: mic/camera disable per site and local storage per site. If you have a high DPI display, some of these settings are simply inaccessible.
But there is one advantage of merely hiding ads: The web server treats it as an ad impression, authorizing the viewer to see premium content instead of "Please stop leeching already or buy a subscription."
Check out
http://www.google.com/intl/en/landing/chrome/google-chrome-privacy-whitepaper.pdf
It says
"Promotional tags and tokens
Installations of Google Chrome that are obtained from promotional campaigns send information regarding
the effectiveness of the campaigns to Google. Installations of Google Chrome obtained by directly visiting
www.google.com/chrome do not send this information.
This information is required for compliance with contractual obligations where Google must accurately
measure the effectiveness of promotional campaigns.
This includes a non-unique promotional tag that contains information about how Chrome was obtained
(e.g. from an online advertisement, bundled with another software product, etc.) and the week that
Chrome was installed. The tag looks similar to: 1T4ADBR_enUS236US239. This non-unique tag is
periodically sent to Google and is also appended to the URL on Google searches that originate from the
Omnibox (the tag appears as a parameter beginning with "rlz="). We use this information to help us
measure the searches driven by a particular promotion.
Installations of Google Chrome obtained via promotional campaigns also send a token when you first
launch Chrome and when you first use the Omnibox. The same token will be sent if Chrome is later
reinstalled, and is only sent at first launch and at first use of the Omnibox after reinstallation. Rather than
store the token on the computer, it is generated when necessary by using built-in system information that
is scrambled in an irreversible manner.
Again, instances of Google Chrome obtained by directly visiting www.google.com/chrome and not via
promotional campaigns do not use these tags or tokens."
So I think it's already gone, at least if you're downloading from google.com/chrome, and the Wikipedia article needs updating.
Disclaimer: I'm a chromium developer, and I used to work for Google, but I don't speak for the Chromium team or Google.
I'd rather that they work on some fundamental usability issues - like returning to the same point in a long page when you perform a back action.
That is all.
You don't have to depend on your own programming skills to understand the source.
If Chromium includes some huge privacy issue - don't you think someone who HAS gone through the source might have mentioned it?
Ok, and exactly who is it that has actually gone through the entire source and what are their credentials? Or are you just depending on the magic Source Code Fairy?
So can't use this as a serious browser - will stick with FF for now.
It's easy for them to offer all these privacy features when companies, google's advertising partners, have mostly moved on to Flash-Cookies (LSO's) anyway, which are far more insidious than browser cookies and most people still don't know about them. At least with FireFox I can install a plug-in, "BetterPrivacy" that will give me control over the Flash cookie infestation!
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6623 Newest version: for 3.5 - 3.6
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addons/versions/6623#version-1.38 Older version for 2.0+
When I first found out about these Flash cookies and installed the BetterPrivacy FireFox Add-on I was blown away by the stuff I found hiding on my computer! Now I knew how amazon and others knew what I had been looking at on the internet even with all of my privacy protections on...
Also; please remember that the open-source Chromium is not exactly the same thing as the Chrome that everyone downloads. Lot's of stuff is added that you don't have the source code for...
All that said, competition is good. I'm glad to see it. But I don't trust Google any more than I trust Microsoft when it comes to privacy, perhaps even less so.
If Chromium includes some huge privacy issue - don't you think someone who HAS gone through the source might have mentioned it?
Chromium Lines of Code
[1,000 lines of code and over]
C++ 1.8 Million
C 604 K
XML 173 K
HTML 169 K
Autoconf 115 K
JavaScript 97 K
Python 82 K
Objective-C 59 K
shell script 47 K
Perl 13 K
Make 14 K
Tcl 7 K
Automake 1 K
C# 1 K
Chromium Comment Lines [Over 30,000]
C++ 297 K
C 182 K
JavaScript 42 k
python 38 K
Chromium (Google Chrome
Opera might not have a huge user base on Windows but their Opera Mini is much better than the browser supplied by Blackberry.
On the BB, it's the browser of choice - and unlike the BB browser, it supports Wi-Fi (That's right the BB browser on the bold doesn't).
One of the earliest issues raised is for Chrome to have a warning when closing multiple tabs (http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=147) but this has been marked as "won't fix". This is because the developers feel having such a dialog will interrupt the flow of the browser. This can be a pain as the keyboard shortcut for close tab (ctrl-w) is right next to close window (ctrl-q) As many posters have pointed out, this could be made optional like other browsers and even off by default. Also the developers say the browser will reopen the closed tabs but again as people have pointed out, this does not always happen with state aware web sites or if you are in privacy mode. It is something as simple as this that can really frustrate people and is easily fixed (as was the case when they added a similar warning box when there are outstanding downloads)
Great work! I love Chrome, but no strong encryption of passwords (unlike Firefox) is what is keeping me from using this anywhere except my home computer. I need the security that if my laptop gets stolen or if I'm fired from work suddenly, that people can't get access to my passwords so easily.