chrome browser

What I love about Google is that the company is so good at thinking of everything, while avoiding unintended consequences.

Google Search is about getting the right answer and only the right answer. Google's Nexus One is about having a perfect smartphone without offending anyone too much.

So I am grateful to the UK blogger Floyd Hayes who unearthed this ad for Google's Chrome browser on the Metro rail system in Newcastle.

Now I know there will be some of you who might be concerned that this ad suggests that Google holds more information about you than any … Read more

In its 15th month of public existence, Google's Chrome browser surpassed Safari for share of worldwide usage in December.

Chrome jumped from 3.9 percent to 4.6 percent of usage, according to statistics that analytics firm Net Applications publishes based on the 160 million monthly visitors to the network of Web sites using its services. Safari increased from 4.4 percent to 4.5 percent.

Chrome's jump came as Google released the first beta version of its browser for Mac OS X and Linux computers. Previously only a developer-preview version was available.

As of last month, Google … Read more

Those nice people at Google, engineers at heart rather than craven, money-grabbing business people, seem to have suffered a sudden attack of commercialism.

The folks at the Silicon Alley Insider alerted me to this startlingly commercial ad on the Google home page. It can't be, I thought. So I went to Google.com myself and there it still was: a dry little thing in the right-hand corner suggesting that I should download Google Chrome.

You might be wondering why Google might have taken this sudden, almost alarming step into advertising's dark hole.

You might consider that it comes … Read more

Selling isn't about telling people things. It's actually about making them feel something while you're telling them things.

I mention this because a new series of little Web videos have wafted beneath my browser. They come courtesy of Google. And they are advertising different aspects of the Chrome browser.

Now, I imagine that if I had to listen to Larry Page and Sergey Brin tell me about Chrome it might be enchanting. Well, for a couple of seconds. But it wouldn't be half as enchanting as these little works of art.

Each one centers on a … Read more

Google's browser has passed Safari in terms of worldwide browser usage--at least by one measurement.

NetApplications' measurements of browser usage share, which track which browsers individuals use based on visits to the company's network of Web sites, gave Chrome the third-place spot after No. 1 Internet Explorer and No. 2 Firefox for the week of December 6 through 12, according to a Computerworld story Tuesday. Chrome had 4.4 percent share to Safari's 4.37 percent.

Google released beta versions of Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux on December 8. Earlier, only developer channel versions had … Read more

Two key pieces of Google's effort to make Chrome a more competitive browser fell into place on Tuesday as Google released beta versions of the browser for Mac OS X and Linux.

Tuesday's software release is a version of Chrome that had previously been available only as developer preview software for Mac and Linux machines. "It took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it," product manager Brian Rakowski said in a blog post.

Macs are widely used, if not as common as Windows machines, and there's been some demand in … Read more

If you're a Mac user with a need for speed, you'll struggle to find a better browser than Mozilla's Camino. Apple's Safari will win a drag race, but it lacks the customizability that comes with an open-source browser like Camino. Unfortunately, both Safari and Camino fall incredibly short against Firefox because both are heavy on speed and light on community.

For those who want a highly optimized, lightning fast browsing experience on the Mac, you can't do much better than Camino, as TechCrunch writes. But most of us want more than that. We want Adblock … Read more

Google released an Internet Explorer plug-in Tuesday designed to let Microsoft's browser use the features and performance of Google's own Chrome browser.

The software, called Google Chrome Frame, lets IE 6, 7, or 8 use Chrome to render Web pages and execute their JavaScript programs, Google said. To use it, people must install the open-source plug-in, currently in the developer preview stage, and Web developers must insert a line of code onto their Web sites that engages Chrome Frame when a person visits the site.

"For users, installing Google Chrome Frame will allow them to seamlessly enjoy … Read more

Support for extensions to customize Chrome, the top-requested feature for Google's browser, has begun arriving for adventurous users.

Previously, extensions worked only for those who enabled the feature with a command line switch. Now the feature is enabled by default in the developer preview version of Chrome on Windows, Aaron Boodman, the Google engineer who oversees the extensions work, said in a blog post Wednesday.

"We're ready for a few more people to start using extensions--the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel," said Boodman, who earlier in his career developed the Greasemonkey tool … Read more