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Google Releases Chrome 12

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the shiny-and-new dept.

An anonymous reader noted something that will be of interest to the 26% of Slashdot readers who have switched to Chrome: "Google has released Chrome 12, adding plenty of new features to its minimalist web browser and fixing a number of security vulnerabilities. Google software engineer Adrienne Walker said of the safe browsing mode, 'We've carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download.'"

28 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Version numbers by gizmod · · Score: 5, Informative

    Sheesh, these browser version numbers are climbing quickly. Quick release cycles these days. Firefox 5 is allready in beta.

    1. Re:Version numbers by Lunaritian · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I have Chromium 12.0.742.91 on my computer. Have they really made hundreds of beta releases?

    2. Re:Version numbers by Lunaritian · · Score: 3, Informative

      Mozilla has already changed to "Chrome numbering", they're currently developing versions 5, 6 and 7...

    3. Re:Version numbers by Bloodwine77 · · Score: 2

      I understand Linux going to Linux 3.0.0, though. I have moved to a release-early-release-often model and it has made it where every release I do is either a minor release or a maintenance/patch release. So what I have started doing is incrementing the major version number after I the software has become much more advanced and updated than it was compared to the previous major version number.

      So if I am at version 6.47.10 and compared to 6.0.0 it is a greatly different and improved product, I go ahead and up the next release to 7.0.0 even though it is a minor release.

      In the release early-and-often model, you really don't spend a lot of time between releases working on major upgrades. You do all the major upgrades slowly and incrementally across several minor updates.

      Chrome and Firefox, however, are just playing the version number padding game. Opera and IE have slowly built up to their major version numbers.

      I understand some people do not care about version numbers, but when you develop against software and libraries they become important. Whether you prefer X.Y.Z or YYYY.MM.DD or YYYY.X as your versioning scheme, that is just personal preference. Personally if you are going to increment major version numbers just for the sake of it then I'd go with a YYYY.X version model (e.g.: 2011.1, 2011.2, 2011.3).

    4. Re:Version numbers by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Depends on how much of the release-churn is purely internal, and how much involves ever-climbing demands on the version numbers of dependencies...

      For applications that are relatively self-contained, and make few, or very conservative, demands about their environment, it really isn't a big deal. Where things get ugly, for users of debian stable or other slow-moving distributions(some of the enterprise desktop stuff can get rather long in the tooth as well...), is the applications that expect their environment to be as bleeding-edge as they are.

      Having apt report that Foo N+1 is available every damn time it runs is a minor nuisance. Having to maintain an entire parallel universe of libraries and stuff grabbed from testing or unstable just to update your browser is a major nuisance.

    5. Re:Version numbers by WrongSizeGlass · · Score: 4, Informative

      I have Chromium 12.0.742.91 on my computer. Have they really made hundreds of beta releases?

      Not betas, but builds.

      I wonder how many versions of Chrome will ever have a minor version number greater than '0'? I don't recall seeing one recently (at least since Chrome 4).

    6. Re:Version numbers by jitterman · · Score: 2

      And today (maybe yesterday) they released 13.0.782.11, which replaced 13.0.782.10, which (I kid you not) replaced 13.0.782.1 (no zero at the end, otherwise, same number). I draw the conclusion that they are happy to make an install available every time they push the "compile" button.

      You can see the build history (and get any of them that you want to) at Filehippo

      --
      For conscience is the wound, and there's naught to staunch it
    7. Re:Version numbers by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      For applications that are relatively self-contained, and make few, or very conservative, demands about their environment, it really isn't a big deal.

      This cuts both ways. Google has grabbed a bunch of open source libraries, sometimes respecting the license, hacked on them, and rolled them into Chrom*.

      So, with Chrome you've got a bunch of bloat and dead-end forks on your machine. Tom Callaway, Fedora contributor, has a Chromium repo that factors this all back out, using the upstream libraries directly. So, when there's a security fix in an upstream library, you get it before Google does a rev. or two.

      And of course the binaries are smaller. For shared libraries, the system memory usage will be lighter as well.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    8. Re:Version numbers by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 3

      That is certainly true. There are excellent reasons why the linux-style light-binaries-that-specify-lots-of-dependencies + a good package manager to sort it all out model is desirable. And, even if you go with a gigantic static binary in the end for convenience of installation, having a source like the one you describe, where everything is neatly broken out, is highly desireable: It is comparatively simple, with the right tools, to turn a list of dependencies into a big static blob. The reverse, not so much.

      My point was narrowly addressed from the user side: Unless your environment is so slow moving that X is missing major features or such, installing a new iteration of a big static blob every week isn't a big deal, even if it is architecturally ugly. Something that nicely breaks out the dependencies, on the other hand, can involve very, very, "interesting" explorations into package-management hell and upgrading half your system with questionably compatible backports from Unstable.

      In an ideal world, you would really want something like Callaway's work to be the 'canonical' version, ready to be slotted into sufficiently new or fast moving distributions, with the option of programmatically emblobifying the whole mass into a simple-to-install lump for situations where you can't tamper with the system's shared libraries.

    9. Re:Version numbers by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

      And today (maybe yesterday) they released 13.0.782.11, which replaced 13.0.782.10, which (I kid you not) replaced 13.0.782.1 (no zero at the end, otherwise, same number). I draw the conclusion that they are happy to make an install available every time they push the "compile" button.

      A single number doesn't allow you to take branches into account. Version 13's stable branch is 782. After branching 13.0.782.0, a bug was fixed, and that build (13.0.782.1) was released. Nine more bugs were found and fixed, and 13.0.782.10 was released.

      Every build that might conceivably be released gets a unique number. This way you know exactly what code was in a user's build when they report bugs. Chromium is open source, and anyone can cut a release at any time.

      I have no idea why people get so upset over the way version numbers change. The only reason you should need to see a version number is when reporting a bug.

    10. Re:Version numbers by starofale · · Score: 2

      If you're on the dev channel what do you expect?

    11. Re:Version numbers by dmiller · · Score: 2

      Google has grabbed a bunch of open source libraries, sometimes respecting the license, hacked on them, and rolled them into Chrom*.

      If you have any cases where you think that Chrome is failing to comply with the terms of a free software license, then please file a bug at http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/list - we take license compliance very seriously. (I'm a Google engineer, though not working Chrome).

  2. Re:First post by dintech · · Score: 2

    Are you sure you remembered to upgrade?

  3. Adding features to a minimalist web browser? by JoeTalbott · · Score: 2

    Isn't this what happened to Firefox?

  4. Re:Did they add noscript yet? by Hazel+Bergeron · · Score: 3, Insightful

    But how will Google make money if you keep your information to yourself?

  5. Re:Chrome doesn't know what URLs you visit? by fuzzyfuzzyfungus · · Score: 2

    I'm assuming that the clarification lies in the bit you elided: Chrome doesn't have to report to Our Google Overlords the URLs you visit for it to work, and Chrome doesn't need to "know about" the URLs in question(ie. it doesn't have to do some AV-like "download-list-of-the-500,000-new-malicious-URLs-for-today" behavior).

    I don't know if the statement is mere fluffy hyperbole about some rather rudimentary heuristic mechanism(along the lines of the existing handy-but-not-rocket-science feature of offering to disable javascript popups for any site that has opened, and had closed by the user, a certain number of the things, which does help prevent one of the classic "trap the noob" techniques used by the malicious) or whether it is something extremely clever; but it isn't immediately incoherent or logically impossible.

  6. Re:Guys: I need to know diff. between Chromium by Lunaritian · · Score: 5, Informative

    Wikipedia lists the differences between Chrome and Chromium.

  7. Re:Guys: I need to know diff. between Chromium by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Interesting

    This should be useful:
    http://code.google.com/p/chromium/wiki/ChromiumBrowserVsGoogleChrome

    Basically, tinhat types believe Google can track all of its Chrome users. In the beginning, there were a couple of things that were questionable - for example, giving each install a unique ID - but more than likely this was just for statistical records about Chrome uptake. People complained, Google responded... all user metrics can be turned on and off by the user.

    So, Chrome is now Chromium, with some more features rolled in by Google, and vetted by the Google team. It's good to keep Chromium around, to keep Google honest and keep source for an alternative out in the open (and I guess to satisfy FOSS zealots), but if you're not concerned with such things, Chrome is IMO the better choice.

  8. Re:Guys: I need to know diff. between Chromium by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have "heard tell" (no, I can't produce you a quote) that CHROMIUM doesn't store things "up in the GOOGLE CLOUD" like passwords - whereas by way of comparison, Google CHROME, does.

    Not quite. I know that Chrome has the option to set up "sync", which allows you to synchronize everything (passwords, bookmarks, etc) between Chrome installations. However, I have that disabled, and unless you can produce a quote or a link to the contrary, it seems much more likely that Chrome simply stores my passwords locally. It even integrates with local secure password stores -- in my case, since I run KDE4, Chrome stores my passwords in KWallet.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  9. Re:Did they add noscript yet? by Rogerborg · · Score: 2

    Beats me. That's a dealbreaker. Switching from IE to Chrome, OK, I can see that. But from Firefox? I just don't get it.

    Of course, I'm posting this from Lynx (for realsies) so I may not be representative even of Slashtards.

    --
    If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
  10. Is 24% enough for us to get a UI fix, Slashdot? by SanityInAnarchy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    It's getting a bit old that any click within a comment, including within the textarea while I'm trying to reply, gets interpreted as clicking on the "Parent" link, thus requiring me to open the entire thread all the way to the root.

    --
    Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
  11. Re:Did they add noscript yet? by chill · · Score: 4, Informative

    AdBlock Plus, NotScripts, and WebDeveloper are available for Chrome which are the only plugins I really would consider "must have".

    Chrome is, for me, significantly faster than Firefox 4 on 64-bit Ubuntu, Windows 7 and Windows XP. It starts up faster, uses less memory, renders pages faster -- all of it.

    Yesterday, after viewing dozens of documents in multiple tabs on the web, memory use in Firefox had climbed on my system to over 1 Gb. Closing down and opening the same set of tabs in Chrome, I proceeded to work in that for the rest of the day. Memory usage peaked at 380 Mb, and hovered around 250 Mb.

    I could feel Firefox starting to bog down as the day wore on. I did not get that feeling with Chrome.

    --
    Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
  12. Re:Did they add noscript yet? by smartaleckkill · · Score: 2

    yeah, in about version 5 actually--and as a built-in, no add-ons needed

  13. Re:master password by creativeHavoc · · Score: 2

    Does this do it for you? https://chrome.google.com/webstore/search?hl=en-US&q=master+password

    --
    insight through the mind
  14. Is this the version with Print Preview? No. by Alzheimers · · Score: 3, Insightful

    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?fid=29ea05faa34bade40004a21398e523be&hl=en

    Mid-2011 and a web browser this 'Mature' still doesn't have Print Preview. Oh well, at least you can use '3D-Accelerated CSS'.

    Which do you think I need more?

  15. Re:Is this the version with Print Preview? No. by jackbird · · Score: 2

    What's "printing"?

  16. Private Browsing Win? by psydeshow · · Score: 2

    The "Incognito Window" option in Chrome 12 is private browsing done right. Nothing is shared with other windows / tabs. Not even session cookies.

    It's not a single-site browser option, but it's as close as we may get for a while. Bravo, Google, you nailed it... EXCEPT WAIT. If you open multiple incognito windows, they all share the same set of cookies. Which is kinda fail.

    Damn! They were so close! Oh well.

  17. Re:Do they let you run it as root now? by SocPres · · Score: 2

    Not from my Chromium 12, although the workaround of using the "--user-data-dir " did allow me to use it as root. But that may not be the case for v13 Dev, if this is to be believed:

    http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome/thread?tid=7b31817f547918b2&hl=en

    Google wants to protect me? Fine. Make it a default to not allow root, but don't disable it completely. Jerks.