Vittorio Pasteris

Da sito di sviluppo di Chromium

Era ora che arrivasse la versione beta di Chrome per Macos

Via Techcrunch

We’ve just received a pair of screenshots that may be of Google’s upcoming Chrome OS operating system. Google announced the entirely browser-based OS in July, and since then a number of alleged screenshots have popped up that have ranged from laughably bad to somewhat plausible. Because we haven’t seen any confirmed screenshots from Google, anyone with a copy of Photoshop can throw together some Google icons and claim to have the goods, so take these with a grain of salt.

The screenshots below depict Google’s Chrome browser, with a dock of unnecessarily large app icons lining the right side of the screen (including what appears to be a Google media player app). Thing is, Google Earth, which is included in the dock, primarily uses a downloadable client, as does Picasa. This doesn’t really mesh well with the fact that Chrome OS is a browser OS. On the other hand, Google does offer a browser plug-in for Google Earth, and you can use a web version of Picasa to browse albums, so they’re still within the realm of possibility.

Via Google Operating System

The new interface of Google Docs, which is slowly rolled out to all users, brings the service one step closer to an online storage service. The “items by type” menu replaced “PDFs” with “Files”, suggesting that Google Docs will allow users to upload any type of files.

Google Docs also added the advanced search options that are available in Gmail:

• exact phrase matching (“todo list”)
• negative matching (summer -trip)
• disjunctive matching (budget OR invoice)
• built-in labels (is:starred, is:hidden)
• collaborators: to find the documents shared by Michael Robinson, you need to search for: from:michaelr@gmail.com, assuming that’s his email address. The problem is that you need to know the email address, since the operator doesn’t support (partial) names.

Read more »

Via techcrunch

The new browser wars on on. More than a decade after Microsoft killed off Netscape with Internet Explorer, competition in the browser market has never been stronger. Just last week, Mozilla released Firefox 3.5, which has now been downloaded nearly 14 million times. Earlier in June, Apple released Safari 4. In March, Microsoft introduced Internet Explorer 8, and Google came out with a speedier beta of its Chrome browser.

Some early data is coming in showing relative market share and how fast people are upgrading. If you look at the chart above from Statcounter, it indicates that since March Internet Explorer has lost 11.4 percent market share to other browsers. That is the combined market share of IE8, IE7, and IE6. Certainly IE8 (the light blue line) has been growing strong since its release last March, capturing 16.7 percent of the market as of July 4.

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Via Chromium blog

In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON’T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software.

How incomplete? So incomplete that, among other things , you won’t yet be able to view YouTube videos, change your privacy settings, set your default search provider, or even print.

Google ha lanciato una mini galleria di video su Chrome

L’articolo del Guardian segnala il sito di Techsutra di Manu J. da cui è possiible trovare un link alle  copie di sviluppo non ancora ufficiali di Google Chrome per Mac disponibili  solo per processori Intel e per Leopard.

Incuriositi ci siamo scaricati la versione diciamo alfa di Chrome per Mac, chiamiamolo con il suo nome: Chromium. Per i patiti dei numeri versione 0.1, build 15170

Chrome funziona benino. Sono disponibili tutti gli strumenti per navigare senza particolari problemi in classiche pagine HTML. Funzionano la navigazione a tutto schermo e i siti più visitati. Per ora non funzionano i più classici plugin come Flash, quindi buona parte dei video tipo Youtube. Mancano ancora il search e  le preferenze estese della versione per Windows. La funzione di stampa funziona a singhiozzo.

Il fatto che manchi ancora Flash porta alla sparizione dei banner da moltissimi siti commerciali. Può servire per focalizzarsi sui contenuti :-) L’assenza di plugin rende impossibile l’uso di siti come quello RAI che però hanno difetti di usabilità già più volte evidenziati.

Qui trovate una piccola raccolta di videate di qualche sito molto visitato, oltre che per megalomania di questo blog, tanto per capire l’effetto che fa Chromium.

Comunque a parte i difetti multimediali, il browser è già stabile e veloce: aspettiamo la prima beta pubblica, nel frattempo passeremo a riscaricare le successive versioni disponibili.

UPDDATE: il test di Chromium da Cnet

Via Techcrunch

Flock, a social-focused browser startup that has raised nearly $30 million in venture funding, has ceased building on top of the open source Firefox browser, say multiple sources. The next version of the Flock browser will be built on Google’s open source Chrome browser platform. The last version of Flock was released in October 2008.

Flock first launched in October 2005 and has had 6 million or so downloads. But it still has less market share than even Netscape, which was discontinued over a year ago.

In the past Flock has said all it needs is a few tens of millions of users to score big dollars from the search engines (each active user generates $5 or so in search engine revenue). But after three years of trying, Flock hasn’t been able to achieve more than a fraction of that number of users.