Google Chrome 32 Is Out: Noisy Tabs Indicators, Supervised Users

An anonymous reader writes "Google today released Chrome version 32 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes tab noise indicators, a new look for Windows 8 Metro mode, and automatic blocking of malware downloads. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome."

Comments

Make mine block all 3

[tompaulco]

I'd like it to block noisy tabs, block metro 8 and block malware. Maybe I should just go back to lynx.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[ackthpt]

I'd like it to block noisy tabs, block metro 8 and block malware. Maybe I should just go back to lynx.

Or go back to Gopher.

and the glory which was telnet

Re:Make mine block all 3

[noh8rz10]

Google is the panopticon. This is why I don't use chrome and I won't have a nest product.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[icebike]

I'd like it to block noisy tabs, block metro 8 and block malware. Maybe I should just go back to lynx.

This noisy tabs indicator has been running here for weeks.

But basically I agree. I don't want to just Know about noisy tabs, I want the noise blocked by default
until I decide I want to listen.

So close, Google, but you are still protecting the advertisers at the expense of the users.
Shut them UP.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[Taco Cowboy]

Google is the panopticon. This is why I don't use chrome and I won't have a nest product.

As if Apple and Microsoft are better ...

Re:Make mine block all 3

[dresgarcia]

Its called adblock plus. Familiarize yourself and never go back.
All this cry-baby complaining had me wondering why I don't notice "noisy ads" or, well, ads at all. I realized its because I never see them.

https://adblockplus.org/

Re:Make mine block all 3

[ahabswhale]

Sure buddy...

http://www.theverge.com/2013/10/10/4823944/microsoft-reportedly-working-to-replace-cookies-ad-tracking

Re:Make mine block all 3

[noh8rz10]

two questions - who has the capability and who has the desire?

Google has the desire. The only way they make money is by tracking everything about you and selling that info. They have the capability - their search is #1, with double-click they can track you on all different sites. Their browser is huge too. Their phone is huge. now they're getting into home equipment too!

MS has some capability too. They have the browser, although that is trending down. they have the search engine, although that is 2nd and smaller. They have the phone, but it is an also ran. They own the living room with xbox. but I'm not sure they have the desire. Ultimately they make money by selling software, and to a small extent hardware. but they don't seem to know what they want to do these days, so I wouldn't be surprised if they're throwing everything against the wall.

apple has amazing capability in mobile but they have zero desire. They know that they make %% through hardware sales, to the extent that they're now giving away OS X, iOS, iLife, and iWork.

I trust apple the most here, because where there's a will there's a way.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[reub2000]

Blocking flash (or simply not installing it) achieves that goal.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[reub2000]

Chrome/Chromium allows you to create a whitelist of sites that are allowed to use plugins. Flashblock for firefox does the same thing. Since very few ads use the audio or video tags, blocking flash effectively blocks noise.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[borl]

About the noisy tab indicator... It would be an far more useful if clicking the indicator presented a volume slider or at least muted the tab. As it is, if you want to continue reading the page sans noise, your options are exactly the same as they were before.

Re:Make mine block all 3

[AmiMoJo]

Google has the desire. The only way they make money is by tracking everything about you and selling that info.

I'm pretty sure they have other revenue streams. They can make money from advertising because they have so many users seeing them, so it stands to reason that their number one priority must be retaining those users by not pissing them off. Of course they are incompetent sometimes, but they certainly don't sell all your private info to advertisers.

MS has some capability too.

You missed the fact that they have the number one OS in the world, on 90% of computers. Obviously any large company is going to be schizophrenic, but aside from the XBOX division they generally seem to be the least privacy invading of the three.

apple has amazing capability in mobile but they have zero desire.

Sure they do. They are years behind in mapping, for example, so have a strong desire to collect data from users and car mounted cameras in the same way that Google does. They were already caught logging location data on their phones, deleting your Apple account is impossible (I tried), and they have an active and profitable advertising program that relies on user data the same way that Google's and Microsoft's do.

to the extent that they're now giving away OS X, iOS, iLife, and iWork.

Google gives all its software away for free too, including operating systems and productivity software. In fact Google's is often open source. I don't think this really means anything.

I trust apple the most here

I trust them the least because they are so secretive, but Google and Microsoft are not much better.

For all google's "evil" doings

[fatgraham]

Noisy tab identification makes up for killing reader. (almost)

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[sunderland56]

Why just identify the noisy background tab? Is there a setting to say "only play audio from the visible tab"?

And if you want evil: the "block malware" is presumably done by sending the name/location of the file you want to download to a google server, where it can be preserved forever and delivered to the government on request.... nice.

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[LordLimecat]

And if you want evil: the "block malware" is presumably done by sending the name/location of the file you want to download to a google server,

Thats not even a remotely safe assumption. For years now Chrome has created temporary files called "Safe Browsing Bloom" under the profile, which are presumably databases of malicious URLs. They could easily do something similar for malicious files. Either way, its something you can easily turn of with one click of a checkbox, and its something that all browsers do-- but apparently Google is the only one who gets flak for it. Nice.

where it can be preserved forever and delivered to the government on request.... nice.

I get that some people dont like Google's core business (info gathering / advertising), but this is about the stupidest reason to be anti-google ever.
They are the ONLY major search provider who fought against China's requests for data on dissident bloggers
They are the ONLY ones who arent ambiguous about their own privacy policy (Im looking at you, Bing)
And unlike almost any of the other major tech companies out there, they very frequently go to bat for user privacy and rights-- for example, refusing to provide US authorities user information without court-orders or warrants, providing info through the EFF's chilling effects pages on takedowns, and fighting lawsuits to indemnify users against patent trolls.

If this isnt "biting the hand that feeds you", I dont know what is. Have fun with Bing, just hope you arent a dissident in some authoritarian country.

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[LordLimecat]

I just did some research; No, they do not submit it to Google. From their docs:
https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/

The Safe Browsing API is an experimental API that enables applications to download an encrypted table for local, client-side lookups of URLs that you would like to check. ...
The Safe Browsing API v2 has the following advantages:
  * Better privacy: API users exchange data with the server using hashed URLs so the server never knows the actual URLs queried by the clients.

And of course, you can actually see said database tables under your profile as files beginning,..
"C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Safe Browsing*"
And if you were truly paranoid and / or wanted to stop spreading FUD, you could wireshark your connections to confirm that they do not, in fact, send those URLs to google to block malware.

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[chihowa]

But they're comparing the hash that you send with the hash that they have generated from a list of malicious sites, right? So the server certainly knows which site you are visiting if it's on the "malicious" list. Which is good, because you want a YES or NO on whether the site is malicious.

So the only thing that Google, indexer of the internet, needs in order to know all of the other sites you visit is a hash of every other URL on the internet. It is not at all unreasonable to assume that they have this, since they probably use it internally (and why would they use a different hashing algorithm for Safe Browsing than they use internally?).

The Safe Browsing API v2 has the following advantages:
    * Better privacy: API users exchange data with the server using hashed URLs so the server never knows the actual URLs queried by the clients.

The fact that the doc you quoted specifically mentions protecting your privacy from Google itself is what makes their assurance less comforting. When someone claims to have taken steps to protect you from themselves (and those steps don't seem to offer much protection on further inspection), it's natural to be suspicious.

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[zlogic]

Background sound is a big thing for online radio and music players. What would be nice is an option to disallow sites from playing music until they're approved, kind of like Chrome does with webcam access.

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[LordLimecat]

Theyre not comparing anything. Safebrowsing protocol has your computer download their database, and you do the comparison locally. The server never knows anything except that youre using safebrowsing.

That sort of makes most of your post irrelevant.

Re:For all google's "evil" doings

[chihowa]

In the post that I replied to you quote, "Better privacy: API users exchange data with the server using hashed URLs so the server never knows the actual URLs queried by the clients." This is specifically describing the Safe Browsing Lookup API, which does send hashed URLs to their servers.

The link you provided says that, "The Safe Browsing Lookup API is a new experimental API that enables applications to simply look up URLs from our Safe Browsing service and get the state of URLs (e.g. phishing, malware) directly."

So whether you send URLs to their servers depends on whether you choose to use the Lookup API or what they set as the default in Chrome in the future. It's important to actually discuss this and not just pretend that it doesn't exist.

Chrome 64

[Anonymous Coward]

How long until the 64-bit version is released?

Re:Chrome 64

[ackthpt]

How long until the 64-bit version is released?

A more worthy question!

The world continues to wait.

Re:Chrome 64

[KiloByte]

How long until the 64-bit version is released?

"apt-cache show chromium-browser|grep ^Architecture:" says "amd64" for me.

Why use Mute...

[ackthpt]

When you can do a bunch of code to detect which tab has the auto-page refresh which brought up an auto-play blatherskite advertisement.

Re:Why use Mute...

[pjbgravely]

I just use flash block, nothing makes noise unless I let it.

Re:Why use Mute...

[TheGratefulNet]

this.

flashblock and the other adblockers make 'nosy tabs' 100% unnecessary.

all flash should be left dormant unless the user clicks on it. and that is exactly what flashblock does.

I never have my sound card 'connected' to my browser anyway. if I want to play music, I'll unmute the sound output and re-bind it to audio. having a few diff sound devices also helps (the default built in audio is never connected and that's the 'live' audio connection as far as linux or windows is concerned. my real audio 'card' is audio device #2 and you have to select it for any client to bind to it.)

problem solved, and no need to involve google or their spybrowsers.

Only indicators?

[StripedCow]

Besides an indicator, I'd expect a per-tab _mute_ button.

Re:Only indicators?

[gman003]

I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.

Re:Only indicators?

[TheRealMindChild]

Not really. Mute background tabs by default (with a mute icon already "clicked") on the tab, then you can click it if you want sound from that tab if it is in the background. If you don't like it on the actual tab, put it next to the bookmarks/download/home icons

Re:Wrong approach

[mythosaz]

Seems a reasonable thing to do if you, say, go a page with a song or video on it.

Scroll bar steppers are gone from Chrome

[Megawatt-hour]

You know those little arrow buttons at each end of the scroll bar? The ones that scroll the content one line at a time? Gone as of Chrome 32. Anyone else think this is a terrible idea? Bug report here.

Re:Scroll bar steppers are gone from Chrome

[ahabswhale]

You could just use the arrow keys to go up and down one line at a time...

Re:Automatic?

[LordLimecat]

Id imagine they download the file into "C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Safe Browsing Download" like theyve done with the rest of their safe-browsing features for the last 5 years.

But hey-- why be informed when you can complain about issues that dont exist?

Re:Google sure ain't an angle ...

[LordLimecat]

How about Google's close relationship with the NSA ?

They dont have a close relationship with the NSA. You have apparently been reading headlines, and skipping the articles. Heres a hint: the NSA's own documents indicated that the spying was done without the knowledge of the companies (Yahoo, Google, etc); Google responded by encrypting their intra-datacenter comms before any of the other companies did so.

Re:Google sure ain't an angle ...

[swillden]

They are the ONLY major search provider who fought against China's requests for data on dissident bloggers

How about Google's close relationship with the NSA ?

As a Googler, I'd say the best description is of Google's relationship with the NSA is "antagonistic". The news that the NSA had been tapping fiber between Google's data centers really pissed people off.

Google has publicly denied providing the NSA with any access, and there's no evidence that the denials are false. From my internal point of view (working on security infrastructure stuff), I also see zero evidence, and I think I would see it if it existed.

Re:Wrong approach

[Arker]

No, actually, it does not seem reasonable at all.

If I go to a page with a song or video on it, the browser should ideally give me a visible control that indicates the media file and gives me an *option* to start playing it, or to save it. It should under no circumstances whatsoever simply start playing the file.

Chrome Metro mode is broken

[RR]

I had been using Chrome in Metro mode, because I wanted to have experience in Metro, and I had to go back to desktop with this release.

The new Metro mode doesn't integrate well with the rest of Windows 8. It doesn't resize with Snap View, so you have to keep it full-screen. It adds an app switcher bar, but the bar only switches between Chrome apps, which I generally don't use. It has an app launcher button, but if you use a mouse then the Windows Start button appears and overlaps it.

Furthermore, the latest version of Chrome crashes more. So, I not only have to be in desktop, but I have to be in Firefox. Sometimes I wonder if the Chrome team runs their own product on Windows.

Stalking your prey

[antifoidulus]

And if you will look up for a moment, you will see the joke that sailed over your head. Beautiful isnt it, it's subtleness protects it from the clueless. Lets watch!