Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web browser developed by Google that uses the WebKit layout engine and application framework. It was first released as a beta version for Microsoft Windows on 2 September 2008, and the public stable release was on 11 December 2008 (Dell XPS M1210 Battery) http://www.hdd-shop.co.uk .

The name is derived from the graphical user interface frame, or "chrome", of web browsers. As of December 2010, Chrome was the third most widely used browser, with 13.35% of worldwide usage share of web browsers, according to Statcounter (Dell Studio XPS 1340 Battery) .

In September 2008, Google released a large portion of Chrome's source code, including its V8 JavaScript engine, as an open source project entitled Chromium.This move enabled third-party developers to study the underlying source code and to help convert the browser to the Mac OS X and Linux operating systems (Dell Studio XPS 1640 Battery) .

Google also expressed hope that other browsers would adopt V8 to improve web application performance. The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the permissive BSD license, which allows portions to be incorporated into both open source and closed source software programs (Dell Vostro 1710 Battery) .

Other portions of the source code are subject to a variety of open source licenses.Chromium implements the same feature set as Chrome, but lacks built-in automatic updates and Google branding, and most notably has a blue-colored logo in place of the multicolored Google logo (Dell KM958 battery) .

History

For six years, Google's Chief Executive Eric Schmidt was against the idea of building an independent web browser. He stated that "At the time, Google was a small company," and he didn't want to go through "bruising browser wars" (Sony VGP-BPS13 battery) .

However, after co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page hired several Firefox developers and built a demonstration of Chrome, Mr. Schmidt admitted that "It was so good that it essentially forced me to change my mind."

Announcement

The release announcement was originally scheduled for 3 September 2008, and a comic by Scott McCloud was to be sent to journalists and bloggers explaining the features of and motivations for the new browser (Sony VGP-BPS13/B battery) .

Copies intended for Europe were shipped early and German blogger Philipp Lenssen of Google Blogoscoped made a scanned copy of the 38-page comic available on his website after receiving it on 1 September 2008. Google subsequently made the comic available on Google Books and mentioned it on their official blog along with an explanation for the early release (Sony VGP-BPS13/S battery) .

Public release

The browser was first publicly released for Microsoft Windows (XP and later only) on 2 September 2008 in 43 languages, officially a beta version.Chrome quickly gained about 1% market share despite being only available for Microsoft Windows. After the initial surge, usage share dropped until it hit a low of 0.69% in October 2008 (Sony VGP-BPS13A/B battery) .

It then started rising again and by December 2008, Chrome again passed the 1% threshold.

In early January 2009, CNET reported that Google planned to release versions of Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux in the first half of the year (Sony VGP-BPS13B/B battery) .

The first official Chrome Mac OS X and Linux developer previews were announced on 4 June 2009 with a blog post saying they were missing many features and were intended for early feedback rather than general use.

In December 2009, Google released beta versions of Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux (Sony VGP-BPL9 battery) .

Google Chrome 5.0, announced on 25 May 2010, was the first stable release to support all three platforms.

Chrome was one of the twelve browsers offered to European Economic Area users of Microsoft Windows in 2010 (Sony VGP-BPS13B/B battery) .

Development

Chrome was assembled from 25 different code libraries from Google and third parties such as Mozilla's Netscape Portable Runtime, Network Security Services,NPAPI, as well as SQLite and a number of other open-source projects (Sony VGP-BPL11 battery) .

The JavaScript virtual machine was considered a sufficiently important project to be split off (as was Adobe/Mozilla's Tamarin) and handled by a separate team in Denmark coordinated by Lars Bak atAarhus (Sony VGP-BPL15 battery) .

According to Google, existing implementations were designed "for small programs, where the performance and interactivity of the system weren't that important," but web applications such as Gmail "are using the web browser to the fullest when it comes to DOMmanipulations and JavaScript", and therefore would significantly benefit from a JavaScript engine that could work faster (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery) .

Chrome uses the WebKit rendering engine to display web pages, on advice from the Android team. Like most browsers, Chrome was extensively tested internally before release with unit testing, "automated user interface testing of scripted user actions" and fuzz testing, as well as WebKit's layout tests (99% of which Chrome is claimed to have passed) (Dell Latitude E6400 battery) .

New browser builds are automatically tested against tens of thousands of commonly accessed websites inside the Google index within 20–30 minutes.

Chrome includes Gears, which adds features for web developers typically relating to the building of web applications (including offline support). However, Google is phasing out Gears in favor of HTML5 (HP Pavilion dv6000 Battery) .

In December 2010 Google announced that to make deploying Chrome easier in a business environment they would provide an official Chrome MSI package. The normal downloaded Chrome installer puts the browser in the user's home directory and provides invisible background updates (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ Battery) ,

but the MSI package will allow installation at the system level, providing system administrators control over the update process.

Features

Google Chrome aims to be secure, fast, simple and stable. There are extensive differences from its peers in Chrome's minimalistic user interface,which is atypical of modern web browsers (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ18 Battery) .

For example, Chrome does not render RSS feeds. Chrome's strength is its application performance and JavaScript processing speed, both of which were independently verified by multiple websites to be the swiftest among the major browsers of its time. Many of Chrome's unique features had been previously announced by other browser developers, but Google was the first to implement and publicly release them (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ180E Battery) .

For example, its most prominent graphical user interface (GUI) innovation, the merging of the address bar and search bar (the Omnibox) was first announced by Mozilla in May 2008 as a planned feature for Firefox.

Acid tests

The first release of Google Chrome passed both the Acid1 and Acid2 tests. Beginning with version 4.0, Chrome passed all aspects of the Acid3 test.[53] With any browser codebase, Acid3 compliance can change over time (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ220E Battery) .

Security

Chrome periodically retrieves updates of two blacklists (one for phishing and one for malware), and warns users when they attempt to visit a harmful site. This service is also made available for use by others via a free public API called "Google Safe Browsing API" (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ340E Battery) .

Google notifies the owners of listed sites who may not be aware of the presence of the harmful software.

Chrome will typically allocate each tab to fit into its own process to "prevent malware from installing itself" and prevent what happens in one tab from affecting what happens in another; however, the actual process-allocation model is more complex (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ430E Battery) .

Following the principle of least privilege, each process is stripped of its rights and can compute, but cannot write files or read from sensitive areas (e.g. documents, desktop)—this is similar to the "Protected Mode" used by Internet Explorer on Windows Vista and Windows 7 (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ460E Battery) .

The Sandbox Team is said to have "taken this existing process boundary and made it into a jail"; for example, malicious software running in one tab is supposed to be unable to sniff credit card numbers entered in another tab, interact with mouse inputs, or tell Windows to "run an executable on start-up" and it will be terminated when the tab is closed (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ480E Battery) .

This enforces a simple computer security model whereby there are two levels of multilevel security (user and sandbox) and the sandbox can only respond to communication requests initiated by the user.

Typically, plugins such as Adobe Flash Player are not standardized and as such, cannot be sandboxed as tabs can be (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ4000 Battery) .

These often need to run at, or above, the security level of the browser itself. To reduce exposure to attack, plugins are run in separate processes that communicate with the renderer, itself operating at "very low privileges" in dedicated per-tab processes. Plugins will need to be modified to operate within this software architecture while following the principle of least privilege (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ31E Battery) .

Chrome supports the Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface (NPAPI), but does not support the embedding of ActiveX controls. On 30 March 2010 Google announced that the latest development version of Chrome would include Adobe Flash as an integral part of the browser, eliminating the need to download and install it separately (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ31B Battery) .

Flash would be kept up to date as part of Chrome's own updates. Java applet support is available in Chrome with Java 6 update 12 and above . Support for Java under Mac OS X was provided by a Java Update released on May 18, 2010.

A private browsing feature called Incognito mode is provided that prevents the browser from storing any history information or cookies from the websites visited (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ31J Battery) .

Chrome warns on the new tab page that "this feature does not make your actions on the internet invisible", however, and the browser advises the user to be wary of:

• Websites that collect or share information about you
• Internet service providers or employers that track the pages you visit (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ31M Battery)
• Malicious software that tracks your keystrokes in exchange for free smileys
• Surveillance by secret agents
• People standing behind you

Incognito mode is similar to the private browsing feature introduced with Apple's Safari, Mozilla Firefox 3.5, Opera 10.5, and Internet Explorer 8 (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ31S Battery) .

Speed

The JavaScript virtual machine used by Chrome, the V8 JavaScript engine, has features such as dynamic code generation, hidden class transitions, and precise garbage collection. Tests by Google in September 2008 showed that V8 was about twice as fast as Firefox 3.0 and the WebKit nightlies (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ31Z Battery) .

Several websites performed benchmark tests using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark tool as well as Google's own set of computationally intense benchmarks, which include ray tracing andconstraint solving. They unanimously reported that Chrome performed much faster than all competitors against which it had been tested (SONY VAIO VGN-FZ38M Battery) ,

including Safari (for Windows), Firefox 3.0, Internet Explorer 7, Opera, and Internet Explorer 8. However in more recent independent tests of JavaScript performance, Chrome has been scoring just behind Opera's Presto engine since it was updated in version 10.5 (SONY VGP-BPS8 Battery) .

On September 3, 2008, Mozilla responded by stating that their own TraceMonkey JavaScript engine (then in beta), was faster than Chrome's V8 engine in some tests.John Resig, Mozilla's JavaScript evangelist, further commented on the performance of different browsers on Google's own suite (SONY VGP-BPS13 Battery) ,

commenting on Chrome's "decimating" [sic] of the other browsers, but he questioned whether Google's suite was representative of real programs. He stated that Firefox 3.0 performed poorly on recursion intensive benchmarks, such as those of Google, because the Mozilla team had not implemented recursion-tracing yet SONY VGP-BPS13/S Battery .

Two weeks after Chrome's launch, the WebKit team announced a new JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme, citing a 36% speed improvement over Chrome's V8 engine.

Chrome uses DNS prefetching to speed up website lookups, as do Firefox and Safari SONY VGP-BPS13A/B Battery .

This feature is available in Internet Explorer as an extension, and in Opera as a UserScript.

Stability

The Gears team implemented a multi-process architecture in Chrome, similar to Loosely Coupled Internet Explorer (LCIE)implemented by Internet Explorer 8 SONY VGP-BPS13B/B Battery .

By default, a separate process is allocated to each site instance and plugin, a procedure referred to as process isolation. This prevents tasks from interfering with each other, increasing security and stability. An attacker successfully gaining access to one application cannot gain access to others SONY VGP-BPS13A/S Battery ,

and failure in one instance results in a Sad Tab screen of death, similar to the well-known Sad Mac, but only a single tab crashes instead of the whole application. This strategy exacts a fixed per-process cost up front, but results in less memory bloat overall as fragmentation is confined to each instance and no longer requires further memory allocations SONY VGP-BPS13AS Battery .

Safari and Firefox are also adopting this architecture in upcoming versions, meaning that most common browsers will use a multi-process architecture in the near future.

Chrome includes a process management utility called Task Manager which allows the user to see what sites and plugins are using the most memory, downloading the most bytes and over-utilizing theCPU" and provides the ability to terminate them (Dell Inspiron 1320 Battery) .

User interface

By default, the main user interface includes back, forward, refresh/cancel and menu buttons. A home button is not shown by default, but can be added through the preferences menu to take the user to the new tab page or a custom home page (Dell Inspiron 1320n Battery) .

Tabs are the primary component of Chrome's user interface and as such, have been moved to the top of the window rather than below the controls. This subtle change contrasts with many existing tabbed browsers which are based on windows and contain tabs. Tabs (including their state) can be transferred seamlessly between window containers by dragging. Each tab has its own set of controls, including the Omnibox (Dell Inspiron 1464 Battery) .

The Omnibox is the URL box at the top of each tab, which combines the functionality of both the Address bar and search box. If a user enters the URL of a site previously searched from, Chrome allows pressing Tab to search the site again directly from the Omnibox (Dell Inspiron 1564 Battery) .

When a user starts typing in the Omnibox, Chrome provides suggestions for previously visited sites (based on the URL or in-page text), popular websites (not necessarily visited before – powered byGoogle Suggest), and popular searches. Although Google Suggest can be turned off, suggestions based on previously visited sites can not be turned off (Dell Inspiron 1764 Battery) .

Chrome will also autocomplete the URLs of sites visited often. If a user types several keywords into the Omnibox and press enter, Chrome will conduct the search using the default search engine.

When Google Chrome is not maximized, the tab bar appears directly under the title bar (Dell Studio 1450 Battery) .

When maximized, the tabs become flush with the top of the titlebar. Like other browsers, it has a full-screen mode that hides the operating system's interface as well as the browser chrome.

One of Chrome's differentiating features is the New Tab Page, which can replace the browser home page and is displayed when a new tab is created (Dell Studio 1457 Battery) .

Originally, this showed thumbnails of the nine most visited web sites, along with frequent searches, recent bookmarks, and recently closed tabs; similar to Internet Explorer and Firefox with Google Toolbar 6, or Opera's Speed Dial. In Google Chrome 2.0, the New Tab Page was updated to allow users to hide thumbnails they didn't want to appear (Dell Latitude D610 Battery) .

Starting in version 3.0, the New Tab Page was revamped to display thumbnails of the eight most visited web sites. The thumbnails could be rearranged, pinned, and removed. Alternatively, a list of text links could be displayed instead of thumbnails. It also features a "Recently closed" bar that shows recently closed tabs and a "tips" section that displays hints and tricks for using the browser (Toshiba NB100 Battery) .

Chrome includes a bookmark manager that can be opened from a menu. Adding the command-line option: --bookmark-menu adds a bookmarks button to the right of the Omnibox that can be used in place of the bookmarks bar. However, this functionality is currently unavailable on the Linux and Mac platforms (Toshiba Satellite M65 battery) .

Popup windows are associated with the tab they came from and will not appear outside the tab unless the user explicitly drags them out.

Google Chrome's preferences window has three tabs: Basic, Personal Stuff, and Under the Hood. The Basic tab includes options for the home page, search engine, and default browser (Toshiba Satellite M60 battery) .

The Personal Stuff tab lets users configure synchronization, saved passwords, form autofill, browsing data, and themes. The Under the Hood tab allows changing network, privacy, download, and security settings.

Chrome does not have a status bar, but displays loading activity and hover-over information via a status bubble that pops up at the bottom left of the relevant page (Dell Latitude D830 Battery) .

For web developers, Chrome features an element inspector similar to the one in Firebug.

As part of Google's April Fools' Day jokes, a special build of Chrome was released on 1 April 2009 with the additional feature of being able to render pages in anaglyph 3D (Dell Latitude D620 Battery) .

Desktop shortcuts and apps

Chrome allows users to make local desktop shortcuts that open web applications in the browser. The browser, when opened in this way, contains none of the regular interface except for the title bar, so as not to "interrupt anything the user is trying to do (Dell Inspiron Mini 10 Battery) .

" This allows web applications to run alongside local software (similar to Mozilla Prism and Fluid).

This feature, according to Google, will be enhanced with the Chrome Web Store, a one-stop web-based web applications directory which opened in December 2010 (Sony VGN-FW11S Battery) .

Chrome Web Store

Announced on December 7, 2010, the Chrome Web Store allows users to install applications (which are essentially shortcuts) to popular and highly used web pages and/or games. The themes and extensions have also been tightly integrated into the new store, allowing users to searched the entire catalog of Chrome extras (Sony VGN-FW11M Battery) .

Criticism of the idea came quickly. Ryan Paul of Ars Technica said on 9 December 2010: "The way that users consume applications in the desktop and mobile world is fundamentally different than they way that they do it on the Web—where paywalls are often reviled and there is little distinction between content and software (Sony VGN-FW139E/H battery) .

In such an environment, does the application store model make any sense? We are not convinced...Aside from gaming, the idea of an application store in a Web browser—where installation is little more than bookmarking—seems counterintuitive and leaves us with the impression that the entire exercise is a solution in search of a problem (Dell Latitude E5400 Battery) ."

Aero peek capability

Google has included aero peek capability for each tab on Windows 7. This has not been added by default but can be user enabled,resulting in a displayed thumbnail image of the tab. This will create similar functioning to that which is already included in IE8, Firefox and other browsers (Dell Latitude E4200 Battery) .

Negative responses from beta users on the inefficiency of aero peek tabs has prevented Google from including this as a default function.

Extensions

On 9 September 2009, Google enabled extensions by default on Chrome's Dev channel, and provided several sample extensions for testing (Dell Vostro A840 Battery) .

In December, the Google Chrome extension gallery beta began with over 300 extensions.

Along with Google Chrome 4.0, the extension gallery was officially launched on 25 January 2010, containing over 1500 extensions.

As of 19 August 2010, the extension gallery featured over 6000 extensions, including official extensions from The Independent,CEOP, Transport for London, Cricinfo, Web of Trust and FIFA (Dell Inspiron 300M Battery) .

Themes

Starting with Google Chrome 3.0, users can install themes to alter the appearance of the browser. Many free third-party themes are provided in an online gallery, accessible through a "Get themes" button in Chrome's options. Even more themes are available in Chrome extension gallery (Dell Studio 1737 battery) .

Automatic web page translation

Starting with Google Chrome 4.1 the application added a built-in translation bar using Google Translate. Translation is currently available for 52 languages.

Release channels and updates

On 8 January 2009 Google introduced a new release system with three distinct channels: Stable, Beta, and Developer preview (called the "Dev" channel) (Dell Inspiron E1505 battery) .

Before this change there were only two channels: Beta and Developer preview. All previous Developer channel users were moved to the Beta channel. The reason given by Google is that the Developer channel builds are less stable and polished than those that Developer channel users were getting during Google Chrome's Beta period (Dell RM791 battery) .

The stable channel will be updated with features and fixes once they have been thoroughly tested in the Beta channel, and the Beta channel will be updated roughly monthly with stable and complete features from the Developer channel. The Developer channel is where ideas get tested (and sometimes fail) and can be very unstable at times (Dell XPS M1530 battery) .

On 22 July 2010 Google announced it will ramp up the speed it will release new stable versions; they will shorten the release cycles from quarterly to 6 weeks. The faster release cycle brought a fourth channel: the "Canary" release; the name refers to using canaries in coal mines, so if a change "kills" Chrome Canary, they'll block it from the developer build (Dell XPS M2010 battery) .

Canary will be "the most bleeding-edge official version of Chrome and somewhat of a mix between Chrome dev and the Chromium snapshot builds". Canary releases run side-by-side with any other channel; it is not linked to the other Google Chrome installation and can therefore run different synchronization profiles, themes, and browser preferences (Dell Vostro 1000 battery) .

It cannot be set as the default browser.

Chrome automatically keeps itself up to date. The details differ by platform. On Windows, it uses Google Updater, and autoupdate can be controlled via Group Policy, or users can download a standalone version that does not autoupdate (Acer Aspire One battery) .

On Mac, it uses Google Update Service, and autoupdate can be controlled via the Mac OS X "defaults" system. On Linux, it lets the system's normal package management system supply the updates (Toshiba Satellite P10 Battery) .

Google uses its Courgette algorithm to provide the binary difference of the user's current version in relation to the new version that's about to be automatically updated to. These tiny updates are well suited to minor security fixes and allow Google to push new versions of Chrome to users quickly, thereby reducing the window of vulnerability of newly discovered security flaws (SONY VGN-FZ210CE Battery) .

Usage tracking

Chrome sends details about its usage to Google through both optional and non-optional user tracking mechanisms.

Some of the tracking mechanisms can be optionally enabled and disabled through the installation interface and through the browser's options dialog (Dell Precision M70 Battery) .

Unofficial builds, such asSRWare Iron and ChromePlus, seek to remove these features from the browser altogether.The RLZ feature is not included in the Chromium browser either.

In March 2010, Google devised a new method to collect installation statistics: the unique ID token included with Chrome is now only used for the first connection that Google Update makes to its server (Toshiba Satellite L305 Battery) .

This sole remaining non-optional user tracking mechanism is removed following the server ping.

About and Chrome URLs

Chrome has special URLs that load application specific pages, instead of websites or files on disk.

• about:about – List of about pages.
• about:appcache-internals – HTML 5 Application Cache diagnostics (Toshiba Satellite T4900 Battery) .
• about:blank – Shows a blank HTML document.
• about:cache – A list of all the web pages cached by Google Chrome.
• about:conflicts – Modules loaded into the main process and modules registered to load at a later point.
• about:crash – Crash the active tab (Toshiba PA3399U-2BRS battery) .
• about:credits – Credits, licenses, and links for all software used to make Chrome.
• about:dns – DNS prefetching engine diagnostics.
• about:gpu – Graphics card information, used to assist in GPU acceleration debugging.
• about:histograms – Detailed technical metrics (Toshiba Satellite A200 Battery) .
• about:inducebrowsercrashforrealz - Crashes the Google Chrome browser.
• about:memory – Memory used.
• about:net-internals – Network diagnostics.
• about:flags – Experimental browser features (Toshiba Satellite 1200 Battery) .
• about:plugins – List of installed plugins (not extensions), with disable support for diagnostics.
• about:shorthang - Hangs the tab's process, making it become unresponsive.
• about:sync – Synchronization engine diagnostics.
• about:tcmalloc – Stats as of last page load.
• about:terms – Terms of service.
• about:version, about: – Version of Chrome, WebKit, V8, and the command line options used to launch.
• chrome://bookmarks – Bookmark manager (Toshiba Satellite M300 Battery) .
• chrome://downloads – Download manager.
• chrome://extensions – Extensions manager.
• chrome://history – Page history.
• chrome://print – Print Preview
• chrome://view-http-cache – Cached HTTP objects.
• view-cache:url – Shows you some under-the-hood cache details.
• view-source:url – Displays the source code of the URL specified WD passport essential (500GB/640GB) .

About:flags

Originally called about:labs, "about:flags" is a place in Google Chrome developer and beta builds that contains experimental features. Features available in the developer builds include WD passport essential (250GB/320GB) :

• Side Tabs: Adds a "Use Side Tabs" entry to the tabstrip's context menu. Use this to toggle between tabs on top (default) and tabs on the side. Useful on widescreen monitors.
• Tabbed Settings: Uses an in-tab UI for the Settings (Options/Preferences) dialog instead of a stand-alone window.
• Remoting: Enable Remoting Host support. (Currently non-functional) WD passport essential SE (750GB/1TB)
• Disable outdated plug-ins: Automatically disables plug-ins with known security vulnerabilities and offers update links for them.
• XSS Auditor: Enables WebKit's XSS Auditor (cross-site scripting protection). This feature aims to protect you from certain attacks of malicious web sites. It improves your security, but it might not be compatible with all web sites.
• Check for known conflicts with 3rd party modules: Enables a background check that warns you when a software incompatibility is detected (ie. 3rd party modules that crash the browser) WD passport elite(250GB/320GB) .
• CRX-less Web Apps: Enables support for installing Chrome apps that are deployed using a manifest file on a web page, rather than by packaging the manifest and icons into a crx file.
• GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D: Enables higher performance of canvas tags with a 2D context by rendering using Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) hardware WD passport elite(500GB/640GB) .
• Print Preview: Enables an in-tab preview of a print operation. (Currently non-functional)
• Native Client: Enable support for Native Client.
• Web Page Prerendering: Speculatively prerenders complete webpages in the background for a faster browsing experience.
• Experimental Extension APIs: Enables experimental extension APIs. Note that the extension gallery doesn't allow you to upload extensions that use experimental APIs WD passport studio for Mac(320GB/500GB) .
• Click-to-Play: Click on a blocked plug-in to run it.
• Disable hyperlink auditing: Disable sending hyperlink auditing pings.
• Experimental location features: Enables experimental extensions to the geolocation feature. Includes using operating system location APIs (where available), and sending additional local network configuration data to the Google location service to provide higher accuracy positioning WD passport studio for Mac(500GB/640GB) .
• Instant Type: Configures the behavior of instant.

Reception

Usage share of web browsers according to Stat Counter, Chrome is 11.92% in October 2010.

In 2008, The Daily Telegraph's Matthew Moore summarizes the verdict of early reviewers: "Google Chrome is attractive, fast and has some impressive new features, but may not—yet—be a threat to its Microsoft rival WD Elements series(250GB/320GB) ."

Initially, Microsoft reportedly "played down the threat from Chrome" and "predicted that most people will embrace Internet Explorer 8." Opera Software said that "Chrome will strengthen the Web as the biggest application platform in the world." But by February 25, 2010, BusinessWeekhad reported that "For the first time in years WD Elements SE(500GB/640GB) ,

energy and resources are being poured into browsers, the ubiquitous programs for accessing content on the Web. Credit for this trend—a boon to consumers—goes to two parties. The first is Google, whose big plans for the Chrome browser have shaken Microsoft out of its competitive torpor and forced the software giant to pay fresh attention to its own browser, Internet Explorer WD Elements SE(750GB/1TB) .

Microsoft all but ceased efforts to enhance IE after it triumphed in the last browser war, sending Netscape to its doom. Now it's back in gear." Mozilla said that Chrome's introduction into the web browser market comes as "no real surprise", that "Chrome is not aimed at competing with Firefox", and furthermore that it should not affect Google's revenue relationship with Mozilla WD Elements desktop(500GB/640GB) .

Chrome's design bridges the gap between desktop and so-called "cloud computing." At the touch of a button, Chrome lets you make a desktop, Start menu, or Quick Launch shortcut to any Web page or Web application, blurring the line between what's online and what's inside your PC. For example, I created a desktop shortcut for Google Maps WD Elements desktop(750GB/1TB) .

When you create a shortcut for a Web application, Chrome strips away all of the toolbars and tabs from the window, leaving you with something that feels much more like a desktop application than like a Web application or page WD Elements desktop(1.5 TB/2TB) .

—PC World

On 9 September 2008, when Chrome was still in beta, the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) issued a statement about their first examination of Chrome, expressing a concern over the prominent download links on Google's German web page WD passport essential SE (750GB/1TB)--USB 3.0) ,

because "beta versions should not be employed for general use applications" and browser manufacturers should provide appropriate instructions regarding the use of pre-released software. They did, however, praise the browser's technical contribution to improving security on the web WD passport essential (500GB/640GB) .

Concern about Chrome's optional usage collection and tracking have been noted in several publications. On 2 September 2008, a CNETnews item drew attention to a passage in the Terms of Service statement for the initial beta release, which seemed to grant to Google a license to all content transferred via the Chrome browser WD passport for Mac(320GB/500GB) .

The passage in question was inherited from the general Google terms of service. On the same day, Google responded to this criticism by stating that the language used was borrowed from other products, and removed the passage in question from the Terms of Service WD passport for Mac(640GB/1TB) .

Google noted that this change would "apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome." There was subsequent concern and confusion about whether and what information the program communicates back to Google. The company stated that usage metrics are only sent when users opt in by checking the option "help make Google Chrome better by automatically sending usage statistics and crash reports to Google" when the browser is installed My book essential 4 generation (640GB/1TB) .

The optional suggestion service included in Google Chrome has been criticized because it provides the information typed into the Omnibox to Google before the user even hits return. This allows Google to provide URL suggestions, but also provides Google with web usage information tied to an IP address WD My book essential 4 generation( 1.5TB/2TB) .

The feature can be selected off in the preferences-under the hood-privacy box .

Chromium is the open source web browser project from which Google Chrome draws its source code WD My book elite( 1TB/1.5TB) .

The project's hourly Chromium snapshots appear essentially similar to the latest builds of Google Chrome aside from the omission of certain Google additions, most noticeable among them: Google's brand, auto-update mechanism, click-through licensing terms, usage-tracking, and bundling of Adobe Flash Player WD My book studio(1TB/2TB) .

The Chromium Project takes its name from the element chromium (Cr), the metal from which chrome is made. Google's intention, as expressed in the developer documentation, was that Chromium would be the name of open source project and that the final product name would be Chrome WD My book essential 4 generation( 1.5TB/2TB) .

However other developers have taken the Chromium code and released versions under the Chromium name.

One of the major aims of the project is for Chrome to be a tabbed window manager, or shell for the web, as opposed to it being a traditional browser application. The idea is for the application to be minimalist in the same way Windows Explorer or Mac OS X's Finder are minimalist WD My book elite(640GB/2TB) .

The developers state that it "should feel lightweight (cognitively and physically) and fast".

Differences from Google Chrome

Chromium is the name given to the open source project and the browser source code released and maintained by the Chromium Project Seagate expansion portable (320GB/500GB) .

It is possible to install the latest precompiled snapshots for Windows, Linux and Mac, or by downloading the source code and building it manually on those platforms. Google takes this source code and adds an integrated Flash Player , the Google name and logo, an auto-updater system called GoogleUpdate Seagate expansion (1.5TB/2TB) ,

an opt-in option for users to send Google their usage statistics and crash reports as well as, in some instances, RLZ tracking (see Google Chrome) which transmits information in encoded form to Google, for example, when and where Chrome has been downloaded Seagate Freeagent Desktop (500GB/1TB) .

By default, Chromium only supports Vorbis, Theora and WebM codecs for the HTML5 audio and video tags, while Google Chrome supports these in addition to H.264, AAC, and MP3. Certain Linux distributions may add support for other codecs to their customized versions of Chromium Seagate Freeagent Go(250GB/320GB) .

In June 2010 Google confirmed that the RLZ tracking token is only present in versions of Chrome that are downloaded as part of marketing promotions and distribution partnerships and not in versions of Chrome downloaded from the Google website directly or in any versions of Chromium Seagate Freeagent Go(500GB/640GB) .

The RLZ source code was also made open source at the same time so that developers can confirm what it is and how it works.

Licensing

The Google-authored portion of Chromium is released under the BSD license, with other parts being subject to a variety of different permissive open-source licenses, including the MIT License, theLGPL, the Ms-PL, and an MPL/GPL/LGPL tri-license Seagate Freeagent Go(750GB/1TB) .

History

An early alpha build of Chromium for Linux, which clarifies its separation fromGoogle Chrome

Because Chromium is the open source project that results in releases of Google Chrome, the history of the two is intertwined. Chromium is a project, making all releases developmental, with Chrome being the official release Seagate Freeagent Goflex(250GB/320GB) .

Google Chrome was first introduced in September 2008 and along with its release the Chromium source code was also made available allowing builds to be constructed from it. The initial code release included builds for Windows and Mac OS X, as well as Linux, although the latter was at a very early stage of development and lacked complete functionality Seagate Freeagent Goflex(500GB/640GB) .

Chromium 1.0 was released in December 2008 and with it Chrome was removed from beta status for Windows only.

In January 2009 the first development versions of Chromium 2.0 were made available, featuring a bookmark manager and support for non-standard CSS features, including gradients, reflections and masks Seagate Freeagent Goflex(750GB/1TB) .

In May 2009 the first alpha Linux version of Chromium was made available. In reviewing that alpha version Ryan Paul said that it was "still missing features and [has] lots of rendering bugs, but it is clearly moving in the right direction." The first developer releases for Chrome on the Linux and Mac OS X platforms were made available in June 2009 Seagate Freeagent Goflex Pro(500GB/750GB) ,

although they were in a very early stage and lacked Adobe Flash, privacy settings, the ability to set the default search provider and even printing at that point. In July 2009 Chromium incorporated native theming for Linux, using the GTK+ toolkit to allow it fit into the GNOMEdesktop environment Seagate Freeagent Goflex desktop(1TB/2TB) .

Chromium 3.0 was released on 28 May 2009 as version 3.0.182.2. Chrome 3.0 followed in September 2009 and introduced a much faster JavaScript engine, a system for user-selectable themes, improvements to the Omnibox and a redesigned new tab display page Seagate Freeagent go for Mac(320GB/640GB) .

Chromium 4.0.212.0 was the first Chromium 4.0 version and appeared on 22 September 2009 with Chrome 4.0 publicly released in December 2009. Both brought support for extensions, plus synchronization of bookmarks along with Chrome beta versions for Mac OS X and Linux. The all-platform market penetration of Chrome/Chromium 4.0 combined was at 6.73% by the end of April 2010Samsung G2 protable (250gb/320GB) .

Chromium 5.0 was released on 26 January 2010 with 5.0.306.0 as the initial version. Google Chrome 5.0 followed on 25 May 2010 and provided stable (non-beta) releases for all platforms. At that time the web magazine, OMG! Ubuntu!, reported that Chrome/Chromium usage was at 36.53% for Linux browsers, compared to 55.52% for Firefox and 2.82% for Opera Samsung G2 protable (500GB/640GB) .

Chromium 6.0 was introduced in May 2010 with the first release version 6.0.397.0. In July 2010 Chromium 6 daily builds introduced new features focusing on user interface minimalism, including a unified single page and tools menu, no home button by default (although user configurable) Samsung S2 protable (320GB/500GB) ,

no "go button", a combined "reload/stop" button, bookmark bar deactivated by default, an integral PDFreader, VP8 open video compression, the WebM codec for use with HTML5 video, a smarter URL bar. Chrome 6 was released in both a stable and beta version on 2 September 2010 as version 6.0.472.53 Samsung S1 Mini (120GB/160GB) .

The switch to 6.0 brought security fixes, a slightly updated user interface, improvements to form autofilling, synchronizing of both extensions and autofill data, along with increased speed and stability.

Chromium 7.0 was released on 17 August 2010, with 7.0.497.0 as the first version made available Samsung S1 Mini (250GB/320GB) .

This version boosted HTML5 performance to double the speed of Chromium 6. It also added hardware acceleration, which speeds up the browser in complex graphics situations by a factor of 225 times, integration of instant search, UI Tabs which move all the remaining user interface windows into the browser tabs, including the "options" menu, and 3% faster JavaScript performance Samsung story station (1TB/1.5TB) .

7 October 2010 marked the release of Chromium 8.0, seven and a half weeks after that of Chromium 7. The initial release in this series was version 8.0.549.0. The development of Chromium 8.0 focused on improved integration into the Google Chrome OS, and improved cloud features Samsung Story station (1.5TB/2TB) .

These include background web applications, host remoting (allowing users centrally to control features and settings on other computers), and cloud printing.

Chromium 9.0 was released on 23 October 2010, just 16 days after Chromium 8.0, with 9.0.562.0 as the initial version Samsung story station Esata(1TB/1.5TB) .

The new version introduced an infobar refresh feature with the aim of preventing website spoofing attacks. Reviewer Wolfgang Gruener noted that the first builds of Chrome 9 have now doubled in size between Chrome 3 and Chrome 9 to a compressed download of 28.2 MB, calling it "notably more bloated" Samsung G3 station (1TB/1.5TB) .

Gruener also criticized the seemingly arbitrary numbering breaks between major versions, saying, "even by more progressive standards, the version numbering may be a bit excessive. By the end of this year, Google will have gone through seven or eight different browser versions. Some may doubt the benefit of that strategy Maxtor one touch 4 plus (500GB/750GB) .

" Chromium 9 introduced two new test features in November 2010 intended to load web pages more quickly, "pre-rendering" and "false start", plus sandboxing for Adobe Flash Maxtor one touch 4 plus (1TB/1.5TB) .

Chromium 10.0 was released on 3 December 2010, with 10.0.601.0 as the initial version. It introduced 18 new features, including "Instant Type" searching as well as "GPU accelerated compositing". Development of "Webpage pre-rendering" was reduced to an inactive while selectable "snap start" was introduced Maxtor cool black(640GB/1TB) .