Sync Browser Sessions Between Multiple Computers in Google Chrome! For the most part, Chrome’s built in syncing makes it simple to transition from one computer to another. You can save your bookmarks, extensions, apps, theme, and browser preferences to your Google Account so that they are available no matter what computer you’re using. What’s missing? Sync open tabs between multiple computers. Here’s how to do it… [Read more…]
Google Sets Sights on Skype: Bakes Video Chat Into Chrome
Watch you back Skype/Microsoft, Google is gunning for you. Alongside their social initiatives, Google is now implementing its open-source audio and video chat software into the Chrome browser, enabling users to chat in real-time without having to load up a secondary client like Skype.
Google has started to build its open-source WebRTC software into Chrome. WebRTC was introduced in May as a new open tech that allows developers to create quick HTML and Javascript APIs for building voice and video chat applications on the web. With WebRTC built into Chrome, users will be able to start video chats over Google Talk without the need for installing Google’s plug-in first. Oh and they’ve introduced this as royalty-free and are promising to work with other browsers developers(probably Mozilla and Opera initially, but then IE and Safari at some point too) to flesh out the project. This means that anyone building a site can make use of the new tech, and in theory, construct their own personal Skype battering ram. I bet someone is at MS is questioning if they should have spent that massive amount of money for Skype (then again, maybe they knew this was coming and they HAD to in order to compete?!).
The WebRTC (a la Google Talk via the browser) will certainly help the ChromeOS initiative, it’s one more piece of the “web as the OS” strategy coming into place. I also have to imagine that this will play VERY well in with Google’s new social initiative: Google+.
Google Turns IE into Chrome
People hate IE6; they’ve made that abundantly clear on the web. Unfortunately, plenty of people are still stuck using it for reasons such as their work not letting them upgrade. So Google is doing something about it.
Chrome Frame is a new browser plug-in developed by Google to give you a Chrome browsing experience inside of Internet Explorer. LOL… seriously: Chrome Frame turns IE into Chrome.
It’s freakin hilarious that Google seems to hates IE so much that it has spent its own time “improving it”. You could also read that as “spent it’s own time to destroy it”. Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, say that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers. RIGHT… whatever… if it helps kill IE6 off the web I’m all for it.
So what is this thing? It’s just a plug-in that creates a new frame inside of IE that IS the Chrome browser. The plug-in itself is only about 500K, but then it must download around 10 MB of Chrome-related data to work correctly on a machine (I assume a one time download). The look will be so seamless that a user shouldn’t realize they’re not simply browsing with their regular old version of IE… except that it’ll be hell-a-faster and standards compliant.
To target the Chrome plug-in for IE, developers simply have to insert a meta tag in their HTML code. If Chrome Frame isn’t found, the page will render just as it normally would in IE.
Chrome Frame will work with IE6, IE7, and IE8 on any Windows-based machine.
So this is obviously wicked cool, and Microsoft’s response should be just as cool as well!!!!
You can find Google Chrome Frame here. And learn more in the video below.
JSNES – NES emulator written entirely in Javascript shows off Chrome speed
Ben Firshman has ported the vNES into Javascript. Seriously… in JavaScript. While that’s pretty cool itself what it really shows is the blinding fast speed at which Google Chrome can handle JavaScript. In Google Chrome you get Full speed, 60 FPS emulation. Firefox… about 10 FPS. Now you can goof off with some cool old school NES games right from your browser… as long as your browser is Chrome (COMEON GOOGLE… GET EXTENSIONS IN THERE SO I CAN SWITCH!)
Google Chrome JavaScript Engine Is CRAZY FAST
I’ve been pretty excited about the entry of the Chrome browser into the browser wars. For starters it has the full force of Google behind it. Secondly, since they essentially launched the AJAX revolution with GMail Google is keenly aware of JavaScript performance. Let’s put it this way… very fast JavaScript only makes sites which make heavy use of JavaScript more useable. Read that as “Google wants to web-enable everything”. Back in March of this year Google released a faster beta version of Chrome that boasted some performance enhancements. However, since Chrome is not your typical stay-in-beta-forever Google product (I’m looking at you GMail!!!!) it wasn’t something most users downloaded. Well, with their 2.x release you now get their 25-35% speed increase in benchmarking tests, along with a few other pluses (most of which other browsers have had for some time now). Seriously though, the real story here is the V8 JavaScript engine and it’s performance… which in a word is… SICK!
Ok so let’s look at what else you get first:
- Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.
- Full Screen Mode: If you’ve ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.
- Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you’ve previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that’s easy to do from the Tools menu.
Cool… most of that other modern browsers already have. But how much faster is it? Well, hit up the V8 Benchmark Suite – version 4 in your favorite browsers and see. You can get the full scoop on what each of the tests mean by visiting the site, but here’s the results on my system:
Chrome 2.0.172.28:
Score: 3759
Richards: 3475
DeltaBlue: 3925
Crypto: 3112
RayTrace: 4104
EarleyBoyer: 5980
RegExp: 1342
Splay: 7590
FireFox v3.0.10
Score: 287
Richards: 257
DeltaBlue: 314
Crypto: 163
RayTrace: 253
EarleyBoyer: 352
RegExp: 197
Splay: 692
As you can see Chrome’s v2.x release spanks tha pants off FireFox v3 in raw JavaScript performance. Of course, Chrome doesn’t offer the full experience of FireFox. Namely, it’s lacked extensions. While I appreciate the speed provided (and yes… GMail IS faster in Chrome) I don’t know that I can live without Adblock or Better Gmail 2. However, if Chrome gets extensions prior to the latest beta of FireFox making out of the door then it could be a serious contenter.
Read more about Chrome on it’s features page and if you feel so inclinded grab a copy for yourself from the download site.