Google Chrome‘s been under hyper-experimentation lately, pushing out new innovative features every couple of days. Google has recently enabled pre-rendering of pages in Read more…
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In spite of stiff competition from other browsers Google Chrome is undoubtedly the fastest and the most responsive browser. With 11 versions in, Read more…
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Chances are that you might have to refresh your memory about the open-source OS from Google that created much brouhaha last year. Google, however, has been silently improving it all this time to make a grand launch this December 7th. It has started sending out invites for the Chrome OS event scheduled to be held in San Fran, Calif.
The invitation email is pretty straightforward,
Google’s idea behind Chrome OS is to provide an open source platform for netbook computers with cloud based data storage. This, as Google hopes it, will drastically improve hardware speed. Although Google’s invite didn’t mention it explicitly, there can be no other reason besides the launching of the OS.
It’s not much of a happy news for Firefox fans that Mozilla has decided to remove atleast one (or more) of the promised features from the final version of Firefox 4 scheduled to be released by the end of this year.
Mozilla developers said that in order to meet the deadline, some features planned for Firefox 4 need to be removed. These features include the new account manager which was introduced in April this year, the Inspector, the web-console and some misc features for the Windows platform. However, things may change by a few degrees here or there as the final feature freeze is due next week, September 10 to be precise.
On a happier note, Google Chrome turned 2 today and for a browser that young, it’s ground breaking to evolve to a 17% foot print in market share [Aug 2010]. Moreover, Google released version 6 of the browser today with security fixes and performance boosts. Download Google Chrome 6 now!
Google’s largest developer event, Google I/O, is being held at San Fran, California where Google just unleashed a third alternative for video in HTML5 – WebM. It is an open, royalty-free web media file format which aims to become the default standard for web videos.
The dilemma with the original two competitors for HTML5 video, namely Ogg Theora and H.264 was that Theora is open source and royalty free but a really low quality codec. While on the other hand, H.264 is better than Theora but is licenced to an entity called MPEG-LA which might not be acceptable to the big daddies.
Google introduced WebM and broke the decision deadlock. WebM incorporates the goodness of both. The video codec is based on VP8 by On2 (FYI: Theora is based on VP3) and the audio on Vorbis. A subset of Matroska media container will be used as a container for the audio and the video.
What’s more exciting is that Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, Adobe and even Internet Explorer 9 will support WebM. In fact, the nightly builds of aforementioned browsers are already supporting WebM and are available for download.
Mozilla Firefox builds supporting WebM:
Download for Windows / 12.3MB
Download for Mac / 25MB
Download for Linux (Intel) / 11MB
Download for Linux (64-Bit Intel) / 12MB
Opera builds supporting WebM:
For Windows-
For Mac-
For Linux-
Google Chrome builds supporting WebM:
The Chromium blog reported that the dev channel build of Google Chrome supporting WebM will be out in few weeks. So stay tuned!
For Linux-
Now Ubuntu users can try Chromium’s latest build power-packed with WebM support.
Download Chromium latest Build for Ubuntu
With mighty Google at its side, backed by Mozilla, Opera and Microsoft, WebM sure looks like the future of web videos. But are we missing someone special here? Yes. Apple. And Apple is fiercely in love with H.264. My guess is that we are going to witness yet another war of the codecs; WebM, backed by Google and Microsoft and H.264, allied with Apple. This is going to be interesting. Very. Interesting.
The latest versions of Firefox and Google Chrome support location-aware browsing, enabling websites to use the geo-location of the user to provide them relevant and localized content. Although both browsers claim to keep your privacy intact by revealing as little information possible, some of you might want to tweak the settings to either enable / disable the feature completely.
By default, the location-aware browsing feature is partially enabled in both the browsers. Meaning, it’ll ask for user’s permission when a website requests their geo-location. You can set the preferences like so.
Mozilla Firefox (v. 3.5+)
Undo a geo-location permission granted to a website
- Go to the website you have already granted the geo-location permission.
- Go to ‘Tools’ > ‘Page Info’.
- Click ‘Permissions’ tab.
- In ‘Share Location’, uncheck ‘Always ask’ and set it to ‘Blocked’.
Disabling the location-aware browsing feature completely
- In the address-bar, type ‘about:config’.
- In the ‘Filter’ box, type ‘geo.enabled’.
- Now double-click the ‘geo.enabled’ entry to make it ‘false’.
To enable it back again, toggle the above settings.
Google Chrome (v. 5+)
- In Google Chrome, click the Tools icon > Options.
- Click ‘Under the hood’ tab > ‘Content Settings…’ button.
- In the small window that appears, click the ‘Location’ tab.
- To disable the feature completely, select the third option – ‘Do not allow any site to track my physical location’.
- Close all configuration windows.
Of course these settings can be changed as and when required in both browsers.
