All posts tagged ‘Google Chrome’

File Under: Browsers, Multimedia
Dec
1
2010

Chrome Browser to Start Sandboxing Flash Player

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The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the most common paths people can use to run malicious code on an unsuspecting user’s machine. Sandboxing keeps these sensitive parts of the browser more secure while still allowing web pages and apps to access the other, less-sensitive parts of the browser.

Windows users on the dev channel should see the update arrive automatically. We should note that the sandbox does have some bugs and may break other parts of the browser — this is a developer release, after all. Once the kinks are ironed out, all of these sandboxing features will begin making their way into proper stable Chrome releases.

Google’s Chromium team has been working with Adobe to build better Flash controls into Chrome, and to utilize Chrome’s sandboxing technology for the plug-in. Google says Wednesday’s update makes Chrome the only browser on XP that sandboxes Flash. For more about sandboxing and how Chrome is implementing it, read the overview post on the Chromium blog from October. Also, Wednesday’s release comes less than a month after Chrome introduced click-to-play controls for Flash and other plug-ins.

Adobe’s Flash Player is the most widely-used browser plug-in on the web, and it’s the dominant choice for video playback and games online. Even so, the technology gets beat up for performance issues and its security shortcomings, and it’s still falling out of favor among standards enthusiasts who are pushing HTML5 as the better solution for displaying multimedia in the browser.

Adobe also released a new beta version of the Flash Player on Wednesday that improves some of its performance issues.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
4
2010

Chrome 9 Preview Looks a Lot Like Chrome 8

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Chrome logoUsers of the Chrome Dev channel may have noticed that the version number has been updated to Chrome 9. The latest release keeps with Chrome’s frantic development pace, but, so far, brings little in the way of actual changes.

If you’d like to try out the latest and greatest, you can switch the Chrome dev channel following Google’s instructions.

Chrome 9 has a few enhancements to Chrome’s JavaScript engine and improves the still not-enabled-by-default hardware acceleration for Windows. But most of the rest of the changes listed in the changelog are small enough to leave you wondering why this release deserves a full version number bump.

Of course Google has always been a bit different when it comes to releasing software. Betas are seemingly perpetual, “open” means, well, nothing really and version numbers are just something that happen on a timetable, with little or no bearing on features or improvements.

Some have suggested that Chrome is chasing IE, which will be at version 9 next year. That seems unlikely, given that most people neither know nor have any interest in their browsers’ version number (most people it seems don’t even know what a web browser is, let alone what a version number might be).

But if that were the case, then Chrome is aiming low. We want to see Chrome reach the illustrious level of Emacs — currently shipping version 23.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
20
2010

Chrome 7 Arrives With Bug Fixes, Better HTML5 Support

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chrome logoIn keeping with its recently accelerated release schedule, Google has released version 7 of its Chrome web browser for Mac, Windows and Linux. The latest release of Chrome offers hundreds of bug fixes and under-the-hood improvements like an updated HTML5 parser, but is light on the new features.

Chrome users should get the update automatically, but if you’d like to download the new version directly, you can grab the browser from the Google Chrome download page.

The big news for this release is the huge number of bug fixes — hundreds have been fixed, though hundreds are still waiting. There are a few new features, like support for the HTML5 File API, which allows sites and web apps to read the content of local files. This should be a boon to web apps that rely on that feature. Also new is the ability for Chrome 7 to upload complete folders from your PC — very handy if you’ve got a lot of files to attach to an e-mail or dozens of pictures to upload. Unfortunately, the new feature relies on the HTML5 forms, which very few sites are using at the moment.

There’s also some new AppleScript support in the Mac OS X release, which means you can script Chrome or use it with OS X’s Automator tool.

Two things you won’t find in the stable release of Chrome 7 are the Hardware Acceleration and “Tabpose” features we looked at in the developer release. Both features are currently available in the developer builds of Chrome 8, though they may not make it to the stable release category until Chrome 9.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
13
2010

Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar

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Google’s Chrome development team has pushed a pre-release version of Chrome 8 into the dev channel for those that would like an early look at the next version of the Chrome web browser. While far from complete, Chrome 8 adds some welcome new features, including more hardware acceleration and the arrival Google’s new “Instant search” right inside the URL bar of Chrome.

Chrome has several “channels” — the Canary and Developer channels are where you get the earliest pre-release versions of Chrome, the beta channel releases are a little more stable, and the regular channel (which the majority of Chrome users run) is where fully-baked code ships. There’s also a build called Chromium, the open source, non-Google version of Chrome which has almost all of the same features of Google’s browser.

You can grab Chrome 8 by subscribing to the dev channel. Mac users will need to download a Chromium nightly build, as Chrome 8 for Mac hasn’t made it to the dev channel yet.

Once Chrome 8 is installed, head to the Labs page (just type about:labs in the URL bar) to see all of the experimental options. Turn on the Instant feature to get the search-as-you-type functionality in the Chrome URL bar.

You’ll also notice a couple other new options on the Labs page, including an early form of GPU acceleration for HTML5 Canvas elements. The hardware acceleration feature was also in the Chrome 7 dev build, but turning it on required starting Chrome from the command line. The Chrome 8 update makes it much easier to turn on hardware acceleration. For now the acceleration is limited to 2D animations that use the HTML5 canvas tag, but, provided you have a capable graphics card, Chrome should be able to offload that rendering to your GPU, speeding up page load times.

Also new in Chrome 8 is partial support for Google’s Cloud Printing effort. Designed to let you to print to your home PC from anywhere, Google’s Cloud Printing project is little more than an idea at this point. But we can see the beginnings of Chrome integration in this release with a new sign-in option in Chrome’s settings page (at the bottom of the Under the Hood tab). Unfortunately, signing in is about all you can do at this stage.

This early build of Chrome 8 also contains a number of bug fixes and smaller changes, which you can browse through on the Chromium project’s SVN page.

Keep in mind that Chrome 8 is very much an experimental build and there may be some bugs lurking in this early build, but if you’d like to give it a try, you can head over the Chrome channel page and grab a copy today.

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File Under: Browsers
Sep
15
2010

Chrome Update Fixes Serious Mac OS X Bug

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Chrome logoGoogle has updated the stable and beta branches of its Chrome web browser with several important bug fixes and stability improvements, including a rather serious security bug in Mac OS X.

If you’re using either the beta or stable versions of Chrome, you should receive the update automatically and be prompted to restart the browser.

As is typical of more serious security bugs, Google hasn’t released any details about the critical Mac OS X bug, lest it be exploited before everyone has the fix in place.

Less serious fixes in this Chrome update include squashing a bug in the Geolocation features and some memory corruption bugs that had been dogging Linux users. There’s also a small fix for a rather obscure bug the would sometimes crash Chrome when using an ad-blocking add-on. If you’ve experienced any of these problems with Chrome 6 (or the beta channel), the update should make your day.

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