Smarterware » Chrome

Lady Gaga’s Poker Face Played on a Tesla Coil

Gina Trapani — Mon, 23 May 2011 18:24:38 +0000

Time to break the blog block with a delightful rendition of Gaga's Poker Face played on a musical Tesla coil. Coincidentally, Mother Monster's new album is 99 cents on Amazon today, and she's starring in a fantastic new Google Chrome commercial.

Google’s Gaggle of Announcements

Gina Trapani — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 23:41:59 +0000

This week is the last chance for big companies to make 2010 product announcements before things slow down for the holidays, and Google's not letting the opportunity pass them by. Yesterday they announced the Google eBookstore (here's the Android app) and Gingerbread's flagship handset, the Nexus S, which will be on sale on December 16th. (Nexus One users, the over-the-air Gingerbread update will hit your handset in "the next few weeks.") Today, Google announced the Chrome Web Store and their ChromeOS prototype netbook, the Cr-48. Being a laptop girl who loves her keyboard and hasn't personally fallen for the touchscreen tablet craze (no iPad or Galaxy Tab here yet), the Cr-48 is exciting: full-size keyboard, built-in 3G that's free-to-cheap with reasonable pay-for-what-you-use plans from Verizon so you're always online, pure webapps (no native apps) and no spinning hard drive. Needless to say, I applied to be a tester in the pilot program. The boldest thing Google asserted at today's Chrome event: That you can do ANYTHING in a webapp that you can do in a native app. Truthfully I'm dubious--how do you compile code on the web? Is there a web-based Eclipse?--but I'm willing to give it a try. What did you think of the last bits of 2010 Google goodness? There will be much to discuss on tomorrow's episode of TWiG.

Chrome Beta for Mac/Linux Released

Gina Trapani — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 17:53:21 +0000

Today Google finally releases a beta of Google Chrome for Mac and Linux. I've been using a Chromium build on my Mac for awhile now, and while it's faster than Firefox on the Mac, it's not nearly as fast and stable as the Windows version of Chrome. Also, without Google Gears for Mac OS X 10.6, Chrome and Google webapps are even less useful on the Mac. While I was on the road with my MacBook over the last few weeks, I found myself missing my desktop PC back at home only because of the more-stable Chrome and Gears availability. Will Gears for 10.6 will ever come out, since they're phasing it out in favor of HTML5? With features that depend on Gears like offline Gmail coming out of Labs, you'd think so.

Google Chrome Power User’s Guide

Gina Trapani — Wed, 21 Oct 2009 16:49:02 +0000

Mentioned earlier this week that I've been rediscovering Google Chrome (mostly due to Wave), so this morning over at Lifehacker I rounded up some of its latest and greatest features in my Power User's Guide to Google Chrome, 2009 edition.

Pin Tabs in Chrome ala Firefox’s FaviconizeTab

Gina Trapani — Thu, 15 Oct 2009 22:17:18 +0000

Googler Matt Cutts tweeted a Chrome tip a few days ago that made me switch from the stable build to the developer version of Google Chrome. In it you can right-click on a tab and choose "Pin tab" from the menu. Like Firefox's FaviconizeTab extension (a favorite when combined with Better Gmail 2 and the PermaTabs extensions), that option shrinks a tab down to only its favicon and sends it to the far left, which saves you tab bar real estate. Note that pinned tabs do not persist between Chrome sessions.

Now that I've been spending a lot of time in Google Wave, I'm spending a lot more time in Chrome (because, you know, I don't use enough Google products). I miss my Firefox extensions, but in Chrome's dev version there appears to be extension support. Guess I should look into porting Better Gmail 2 and friends. In the meantime you can get early access to the developer version of Chrome here. (Thanks to Matt for the nudge to transition to Chrome's dev channel.)

Google Wave Team Gives Up on Internet Explorer

Gina Trapani — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 02:50:23 +0000

After "countless hours" of work, the Google Wave team has thrown up their hands and decided not to make Wave work in Internet Explorer natively. Instead, they released Google Chrome Frame, an IE add-on that puts Chrome's backend inside Internet Explorer. Next week another batch of Google Wave invitations will go out, and IE users will have to install Chrome Frame or switch to Firefox or Safari to try Wave. (The screenshot is the prompt IE users will get when they try to log into Wave.) Google explains why Internet Explorer just doesn't have what it takes to run Wave:

Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology.

My experience using the developer preview of Google Wave (which I've never even tried in Internet Explorer) has shown that Wave is consistently more stable in Chrome, and even noticeably faster in Chrome than Firefox or Safari. As such, I usually run Wave in a separate Chrome window while I do my regular surfing in Firefox--and I wouldn't be surprised if more early adopters do the same as Wave rolls out. Until then, the IE team has a lot of work to do, because for them, hearing "my webapp is too advanced to run in your browser" from Google has to sting.