Chrome beats IE market share for one day
Google's Chrome took the crown as the world's most-used web browser last Sunday, March 18th. But as the world suited up to go back to work on Monday, Internet Explorer re-gained the lead.
So says online service StatCounter, although the service also urges us all to take its data with a grain of salt. That's because while it collects data about 15 billion page views per month from three million websites, it says its results “are subject to quality assurance testing and revision for 14 days from publication. Read more...
Google adds Do Not Track button to Chrome
Google's Chrome browser has added a Do Not Track option that will prevent websites using your browser history to target ads at you.
Pioneered by Mozilla Firefox, the Do Not Track convention adds a field in the HTTP header of each web page instructing websites not to take info about you from your browser. Commonly used to prevent overly personal targeted ads, Do Not Track also stops web visitors having their data picked through by websites' social features and analytics engines. Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer doesn't track its users and Do not Track is an option in Safari. Read more...
Symantec: Stripping online certificate revocation checks from Chrome is misguided
Stripping OCSP (Online Certificate Status Protocol) and CRL (certificate revocation list) checks from Google Chrome could have dangerous implications because it will turn Google into a single point of failure, according to security vendor Symantec.
When accessing a website over HTTPS (HTTP Secure), browsers check whether its SSL certificate has been revoked by the issuing certificate authority (CA). This is done by querying the CA's OCSP responder or by checking its published certificate revocation list.
For usability reasons, all major browsers currently ignore OCSP and CRL requests that result in network errors by default, in what is known as a soft-fail mechanism. However, some of them do offer users the option to enable hard-fail, which triggers errors for every request that goes unanswered. Read more...
Google’s punishment of Chrome drops browser’s share, says metrics firm
The browser world turned upside down last month as Internet Explorer's share jumped by its largest-ever increase and Chrome posted its biggest one-month loss, a Web metrics company said today.
Net Applications, which measures browser usage by collating data from some 40,000 sites, attributed the turnabout to Google's self-imposed punishment last month when it downgraded Chrome's search ranking.
Google demoted the PageRank -- the rating Google assigns based on how many other sites link to a URL -- for Chrome's download site after it admitted a marketing campaign had violated the company's own rules against paid links. Read more...
Chrome beta promises super-fast URL loads
Chrome 17 has hit beta with the promise Google's browser will start loading web pages before you've completed the URL.
The Chrome team blogged here that Chrome 17 loads some pages in the background and if the URL auto-completes then Chrome will begin pre-rendering the page.
Google software engineer Dominic Hamon wrote: "Pre-rendering reduces the time between when you hit Enter and when you see your fully loaded web page - in some cases the web page appears instantly." Read more...
Chrome is the most secured browser – new study
Google Chrome offers more protection against online attacks than any other mainstream browser, according to an evaluation that compares exploit mitigations, malicious link detection, and other safety features offered in Chrome, Internet Explorer, and Firefox.
The 102-page report, prepared by researchers from security firm Accuvant, started with the premise that buffer overflow bugs and other security vulnerabilities were inevitable in any complex piece of software. Rather than relying on metrics such as the number of flaws fixed or the amount of time it took to release updates, the authors examined the practical effect protections included by default in each browser had on a wide class of exploits.
Their conclusion: Chrome is the most secured browser, followed closely by Microsoft IE. Mozilla's open-source Firefox came in third, largely because of its omission of a security sandbox that shields vital parts of the Windows operating system from functions that parse JavaScript, images and other web content. Read more...
Google patches 30 Chrome bugs, adds Instant Pages
Google patched 30 vulnerabilities in Chrome today, paying out the third-highest bounty total ever for the bugs that outsiders filed with its security team.
The company packaged the patches with an update to Chrome 13, adding Instant Pages to the "stable" channel of the browser. The feature, which Google earlier tucked into Chrome 13 previews, proactively pre-loads some search results to speed up browsing.
Google last upgraded Chrome's stable build in early June. Like Mozilla, which this year shifted to a rapid-release schedule, Google produces an update about every six-to-eight weeks.
Fourteen of the 30 vulnerabilities patched today were rated "high," the second-most-serious ranking in Google's four-step scoring system, while nine were pegged "medium" and the remaining seven were labeled "low." Read more...
Chrome 13: Google uncloaks search click prediction engine
Google has released a new stable version of its Chrome browser, adding an "Instant Pages" service that attempts to accelerate your Google searches by rendering pages before you actually click on them.
Chrome 13 – available here for Mac, Windows, and Linux – also a offers a print preview tool just for Windows and Linux users, plus a new version of the omnibox, that very Googly combination of search box and traditional address bar.
In June, Mountain View added Instant Pages to the Chrome beta channel, boasting that it would remove between two and five seconds from the average Google search. When you use Google's search engine, Instant Pages renders the first search result if it's "confident" that's what you're about to click on. Read more...
Schmaltz-powered Chrome overtakes morally superior Firefox
Chrome overtook Firefox as Britain's second most popular browser in July, with almost one in four users preferring the Google product.
Figures from web metrics outfit Statcounter show Chrome has reached 22.12 per cent market share, overtaking Mozilla Firefox at 21.65 per cent, and doubling its share over 12 months. Good reviews for Microsoft's IE9 failed to stop the slide, with 45.5 per cent using it, down almost 10 per cent year on year. And Opera's "browser ballot" campaign hasn't won it an advantage; it has slipped from 1.22 to 0.89 per cent share over the year. Safari rose slightly to 8.5 per cent.
Since December 2009, Chrome has been heavily promoted by Google in the UK, starting with billboard and newspaper advertising, and TV campaigns this year – Google's first ever UK TV campaign.
There may be a marketing lesson here. Read more...
Best 15 Chrome Extensions for Google+1
Google Plus – Latest addition to the Social Network websites, started very well. People liked the unique features- the Elegant UI,privacy improvements, Google Circles, Hangouts redefined the use of Social networks. Currently Google+ is in beta stage and available only to limited number of users. Here is a list of 15 Google chrome Browser extensions to improve your Google plus experience. All these extensions fills your simple needs like clean css, Facebook and twitter streaming inside Google+, like dislike buttons, Facebook UI into Google+ etc.
Best 15 Chrome Extensions for Google Plus (Google +): Read more...
Google adds download defense to Chrome, patches 15 bugs
Google on Tuesday updated Chrome to version 12, adding a new tool that warns users when they've downloaded files from dangerous websites.
The company also patched 15 bugs in the browser and paid out nearly $10,000 in bounties to outside researchers who reported vulnerabilities to its security team.
New to Chrome 12 is a feature that flags dodgy files pulled from the Web. Chrome now shows an alert when users download some file types from sites that are on the Safe Browsing API (application programming interface) blacklist, which Google maintains. Read more...
Google says Chrome to power only notebooks only for now
Google Inc will keep the focus of its Chrome operating system on notebooks, and has no immediate plan to make it available on tablets or to merge with its popular Android software for smartphones, said a senior executive.
Google has been making aggressive inroads into the PC operating system arena dominated by Microsoft Corp, whose Windows operating system can be found on 90 percent of the world's PCs.
Google had seen Chrome user numbers double over the past year to about 160 million, Sundar Pichai, Google's senior vice president for Chrome, told a news conference on Tuesday during the Computex PC show in Taipei. Read more...
Android now, Chrome OS later. Can Google balance its platforms?
Chrome OS was the focal point for the final day of Google I/O, the annual developers conference held in San Francisco this week. While Google (GOOG) managed to dazzle attendees with forward-thinking discussions of Chrome’s potential, even revealing the Chromebook PC to run Google’s web-based operating system, there seem to be more questions than answers regarding Google’s long term platform goals. On the one hand, Android’s mobile platform has been a runaway hit, incurring a great deal of developer interest. On the other hand, Chrome OS is sneaking into the netbook market, looking to enterprise settings to re-evaluate the way we access applications. Read more...
Security firm exploits Chrome zero-day to hack browser, escape sandbox
Posts video demo of attack that relies on one or more zero-day vulnerabilities in Google browser.
French security company Vupen said today that it's figured out how to hack Google's Chrome by sidestepping not only the browser's built-in "sandbox" but also by evading Windows 7's integrated anti-exploit technologies.
Google said it was unable to confirm Vupen's claims.
"The exploit ... is one of the most sophisticated codes we have seen and created so far, as it bypasses all security features including ASLR/DEP/Sandbox," said Vupen in a blog post Monday. "It is silent (no crash after executing the payload), it relies on undisclosed ('zero-day') vulnerabilities and it works on all Windows systems." Read more...
Chrome notebooks confirmed to be released June/July
You may or may not have seen the news about the Google Chrome production notebooks floating around the web today. Ariotech reports that "Google product manager Sundar Pichai said, Google were still fixing some bugs and improving compatibility with devices such as digital cameras on Chrome OS." and that they expected the company to release the devices during "Summer 2011." Read more...