Posts tagged with "google chrome"

iChromy Wants To Bring The Chrome Experience To The iPad

Released earlier today for free on the App Store and developed by the same folks behind web-based bookmarking service Diigo, iChromy is a new third-party iPad browser that aims at bringing the Google Chrome experience on the tablet, obviously without using Chrome’s underlying Chromium open-source project, which can’t be implemented by developers due to Apple’s restrictions. From the name of the app to the iTunes description, the developers of iChromy don’t hide their intentions of developing a heavily Chrome-inspired browser for the iPad; while it still might not look as beautiful as this mockup, I took the app for a quick spin to see whether Chrome (which I love and use on my Mac desktop) could have a proper, unofficial, lightweight counterpart on the iPad.

iChromy is free and the developers will likely introduce a Pro version with more features and deeper Diigo integration in the future, but right now what we have is a simple iPad browser that lacks several must-have functionalities (most of them also available in Safari and not necessarily in powerful alternatives like iCab Mobile) but it’s got tabs on top, a Lion-like Reading List (with the same eyeglasses icon) and decent memory management. More importantly, iChromy has an Omnibox that allows you to search and type addresses in the same bar, like Chrome. So while tabs on top and the Omnibox make for a nice Chrome-like experience that reminded me why it’s still possible to innovate in web browsers on any device, iChromy falls short in the details: you can’t re-arrange tabs, you can’t tap on the status bar to scroll a webpage to the top, you can’t pin tabs. The Omnibox is really, really nice, but the app’s keyboard doesn’t have a .com button and there’s no way to get search suggestions or modify the default search engine. Bookmarks and history are displayed in the Omnibox, but the lack of the .com button on the iPad’s soft keyboard is annoying. Similarly, you can create bookmarks by hitting the “star” button in the Omnibox, but you can’t organize these bookmarks in folders, sync them back to the cloud or import / export them. The Reading List, however, works fairly well in the way it makes entire webpages available offline. Too bad it doesn’t sync anywhere else either, which comes as a surprise considering Diigo’s cloud-oriented nature.

In spite of its missing features, I can’t say iChromy isn’t “nice” in how it mimics Chrome for Mac. The browser is very lightweight, it never crashed on me with multiple pages open in the background and, personally, I think it’s always great to see a browser with tabs on top (I was a huge fan of Safari 4 beta, until Apple killed that magnificent tab implementation). Overall, I see Chromy as an interesting experiment that a) needs some obvious adjustments like the .com button, top scrolling and search suggestions and b) with an upcoming Pro version could have a chance to become a Chrome-inspired, powerful competitor to my personal favorite iCab. We’ll see. In the meantime, go download the app here.

Google Chrome 11 Officially Released In Stable Channel

A few minutes ago, Google announced the release in the Stable Channel of Google Chrome 11 for Mac, Windows and Linux machines. The new version (labelled 11.0.696.57) has been in development for months in the beta and developer channels, hitting the “stable” status (meaning it’s ready for public consumption and download from Chrome’s official page) today. Google Chrome comes with several bug fixes and performance enhancement, and it contains “some really great improvements including speech input through HTML” – announced by the Google team here. With this feature, you’ll be able, for example, to literally “speak” some words to translate to another language in Google Translate, and have the results available as text in the browser.

You can check for updates in Chrome 10 to download the new Stable version, or start a direct download here.

Prevent Accidental Quit In Google Chrome

In my typical work day, I keep a lot of browser tabs open in the background. MacStories articles, links from Google Reader, Twitter, Reddit and many others are always sitting there in the browser, which is an essential tool in my workflow. Perhaps the most important one. So when I accidentally hit CMD+Q instead of CMD+W and I lose the contents of an article I’m writing in my online visual editor, I usually would like to smash my computer’s keyboard. It actually never happened (otherwise I wouldn’t be here typing on this keyboard), and luckily for me it looks like such a situation won’t ever take place thanks to a subtle, yet life-saving feature implemented in the Dev version of Google Chrome: quit warning.

Enabled by default in the early dev versions (latest one is 11.0.696.14) and now available as an option in Chrome’s settings, the quit warning works a little bit different from what you’d expect: instead of putting a dialogue box up on the screen that asks you “if you really want to quit”, Google thought that it’d be best to implement a system that would prevent accidental clicking of CMD+Q. So instead of just hitting the shortcut to quit Chrome, you have to click & hold CMD+Q for a few seconds. Pure genius: this way, if I accidentally hit “Q” instead of “W”, my browser won’t quit.

To enable the feature, type “about:flags” (without quotes) in the Chrome Omnibox and activate “Confirm to Quit. Enjoy. [Mac OS X Hints]

Google Chrome 10 Release Brings Tabbed Settings, Flash Sandboxing

Google Chrome

Google Chrome

Google Chrome has a new stable release you can download today (which should arrive automatically or manually via the ‘About Google Chrome’ pane), which offers a couple new features for faster & more secure Internet browsing, and a significant update to Google Chrome settings. Google Chrome’s new settings interface has been overhauled, placing your settings in a new open tab while enabling a new search box so you can find settings (like bookmarks) quickly and easily. Settings have also been extended to the Omnibox, where you can share direct URLs to jump to a specific settings page so you can quickly help mom & dad enable or disable browser options. You can preview the new features via a video after the break.

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Going Back To Windows Has Taught Me I Could Live Off A Chrome Notebook

This is a bit of an off beat story for MacStories, but I’d like to talk about my experiences from moving to the Mac onto a PC desktop I’ve tossed together in the past week. It irks me that even going into 2011, you still see the age old arguments of software availability, familiarity, and often other non-issues when people partake in with the Mac vs. PC debate. I’d like to discuss software availability, because this is where I think PC advocates are highly mistaken in their perception of what we have available on OS X.

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