Articles about Chrome

Android developers looking to include web content in their apps have a new option available to them that will help to greatly improve performance. The new (for the stable branch, at least) 'custom tabs' feature makes it possible to pre-load pages in the background resulting in load times that are a fraction of using WebView or firing up Chrome separately.

The feature can be used by developers to use their own app to change the way Chrome looks and feels, effectively blurring the move from app to the web. In addition to the speed advantages, custom tabs also bring improved security to apps, and provide users with a more familiar browsing experience.

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Google has come a long way over the years, but one thing has remain remarkably simple: its logo. There have been various designs for the six, colorful letters and today the company has taken the wraps off the latest version... complete with an uppercase G!

It's going to take a while for some people to get used to, but the clean, sans serif look of the new logo is simultaneously modern and retro. But today's announcement is about more than the main logo -- this is the launch of a new 'identity family'. In addition to the main logo, there's also a new four-color G icon, as well as similarly-colored imagery for other elements.

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You've found a great new Chrome extension. Installing it only takes a click, but if you're not quite sure what it's doing, whether it's safe, you might want to take a look at its source code, first.

Chrome Extension Source Viewer (CSEV) is a free extension which makes it easy to inspect the innards of other Chrome add-ons.

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The writing has been on the wall for Flash for some time now. A web technology loathed for countless reasons -- not least the security issues -- the death knell is now tolling loudly as HTML5 is more widely embraced.

Back in June, Google announced that Chrome would pause Flash ads in its browser by default, helping to eliminate a major online annoyance. Now the company has outlined when this will happen -- and there are only a few days to wait.

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If you were hoping to see Chrome notifications integrated into Windows 10, prepare to be disappointed: it's not going to happen. While the Action Center might seem the natural home for Google's web browser to display messages, developers have a different opinion.

In short, Chrome's notifications are staying as they are. Despite a campaign for Action Center support, the request has been labeled Won'tFix and there's no sign that this will change for some years to come. Chrome and Windows 10 have already clashed heads once, but this time Google seems unlikely to back down.

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It's no secret that Chrome for Mac (OS X) is a mess. It eats a ridiculously high amount of memory, energy and shortens the battery life. Google announced earlier this year that it was working on a fix. And now it is delivering on that promise. The latest Chrome build -- available via Canary channel -- is significantly less resource hogging, and surprisingly faster at the same time.

The company has been hard at work improving the memory consumption in its Web browser while also making the tabs snappier. You can read about the development process and feedback at Chromium's developer website. The build dubbed 45.0.2454.46 is also significantly lighter on the battery and is no longer making the laptop crazy hot. In a recent build, the company was testing interesting internal processes like tab discarding in the background. The idea behind it is simple: make the tabs you haven't used in awhile idle automatically. This would, under the typical condition, free up a significant amount of memory.

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Mozilla today announces a series of important changes that affect Firefox add-ons. The good news? Add-ons should be reviewed faster, they will be more secure, and a new API means that Chrome extensions can be more easily ported across. But, of course, there is also bad news.

The bad news for developers is that Mozilla is switching to new technologies -- Electrolysis and Servo -- and this means that work will have to be done on existing extensions to ensure compatibility. In the switchover, it is likely that a large number of older add-ons will simply not be updated, but with a 12 to 18 month timescale for phasing out XPCOM and XUL means there is plenty of time for other developers to come up with alternatives to projects that have been abandoned and will no longer work.

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Microsoft is pushing Bing heavily in Windows 10. Bing is the default search engine in Microsoft Edge, and while you can change this to Google (or any other choice), the process of doing so is far from intuitive -- you can’t simply pick "Google" from a list of options.

Cortana, Microsoft’s built-in personal assistant, is powered by Bing too, which means when you ask her a question she doesn’t immediately know the answer to, she’ll open up your default browser and display a list of results sourced from Microsoft’s search engine. There is a way to get her to use Google instead though, but you won’t find this in any Settings.

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Chrome users who rush to install the latest build of Windows 10 have found that their favorite browser is broken. Build 10525 of Windows 10 prevents Chrome from working properly -- launch the browser and you'll be greeted by a series of notifications saying that plugins have crashed.

Additionally, when attempting to visit any website, all that is displayed is an error message that reads "Aw, Snap! Something went wrong while displaying this webpage. Closing the apps and tabs that you don't need may help by making more memory available". The compatibility issue has been reported to Google so a patch will be forthcoming soon, but in the meantime you can use this workaround.

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Google Hangouts is my choice for a communication service, so even though I prefer Firefox, I've been using Chrome lately since it worked better with it. Shockingly, the service did not have a dedicated web page. Yeah, Google touts the open web and web apps for its Chromebooks, but Hangouts was sort of missing from the equation.

Guess what? Today, this changes. Yeah, Google officially launches a Hangouts webpage and it is pretty damn good. It is so good, in fact, that I uninstalled the Chrome browser today and went back to Firefox full time -- I had no good reason to stay on Google's web browser.

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Today marks the twentieth anniversary of the launch of Internet Explorer. First making an appearance in the Windows 95 era via the Microsoft Plus! Add-on pack which featured the excitingly-named Internet Jumpstart Kit and version 1.0 of the browser people love to hate and hate to love.

Two full decades later we have slowly but surely worked up to Internet Explorer 11 -- Chrome, for comparison has hit the 40s in less than half the time -- and now IE has been all but retired. With the launch of Windows 10, Microsoft Edge is the new kid on the block. Twenty years is a long gestation period. Was it worth the wait?

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One of the main benefits to owning a MacBook is the superb battery life. Apple's laptops can work for a great deal of time on battery power alone, thanks in no small part to the numerous improvements made to OS X in recent years. Take my 2013 13-inch MacBook Air for example: it gets well over six hours of battery life on Yosemite, despite being nearly two years old at this stage. I rarely have to worry about plugging it in.

In fact, it could last even longer. The trick is not to use Chrome, which, despite Google's recent efforts to lower its power consumption, continues to be the most power-hungry major browser on OS X, more so than Apple's Safari and Mozilla's Firefox.

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For many people Google Chrome is their browser of choice. It may be popular, but most users would concede that Chrome has something of a memory problem -- it will gobble up resources like they are going out of fashion. To get around this issue, all manner of extensions have sprung up offering tab suspension -- but there's a hidden Tab Discarding option built in that does the same job.

As revealed by Google's François Beaufort, the Chrome development team is working on bringing the feature, which is already used by Chrome OS users, to the Windows, Linux and Mac versions of the browser. The Discarded Tabs feature works by unloading tabs from memory when resources are running low, and reloading them if and when they are next clicked. If you install the latest nightly builds, this is already available to you -- here’s how to use it.

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Microsoft is no stranger to controversy when it comes to web browsers. Internet Explorer has been the butt of jokes for many years, and the company also found itself in trouble in Europe as part of an antitrust case. With the release of Windows 10, history could be about to repeat itself.

Mozilla CEO Chris Beard penned a letter to Microsoft the other day expressing his disappointment that people upgrading to Windows 10 have their default browser choice overridden and changed to Microsoft Edge. While some may feel that Mozilla is whining, it could be argued that the company is right to be pissed -- and Windows 10 users should be just as pissed at the liberties Microsoft is taking.

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You’re browsing with Chrome, and have found a great video. Ideally you’d watch it all, uninterrupted, but there’s other work to do, and so you have to resize all your various windows to fit.

ScreenOut is a Chrome extension which gives you another option. Click an address bar button and the video opens in a floating, always-on-top pane. Then you can switch to some other application while still watching the clip.

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