Image via Wikipedia

Google have published a design document for adding extensions to Google Chrome.

It’s pretty comprehensive, and even exceeds Firefox‘s extension system in a few areas:

We should not need to disable deployed extensions when we release new versions of Chromium.

Unfortunately it’s fairly obvious that the extension feature is at a very early stage, so we probably won’t see it for a long time – at least months away.

EDIT: Google have published a new Extension Process Model document with some more details about how it’s going to work – interesting reading

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Remember The Milk logo

I think GMail has a big piece of missing functionality – todo’s.  Most of the emails in my inbox are things I’ve left there to remind myself to do something.

I signed up for Remember The Milk quite a while ago when they released a Firefox extension that integrated RTM with GMail.  I didn’t end up using it for very long because I didn’t like the way the integration slowed GMail down.

RTM just released a new GMail gadget that works with the recently released GMail labs “Add any gadget by URL” feature.  This integration works a lot better than the Firefox extension but it still has its issues.

I’d prefer to be able to shrink the box vertically because it takes up a lot of space if you only have a few todo’s.  Also it doesn’t wrap the text in the todo’s, which because of the limited horizontal space means that you can only read the first few words.  There also isn’t any integration between emails and todo’s like there was with the Firefox extension.

All problems aside, I think I’ll keep using the Remember The Milk gadget – it beats sending myself emails to remind myself to do things.

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Google Chrome logo

As promised, the beta of Google Chrome was released today.  With great anticipation I downloaded and installed it.

The installer went away for a while, using 100% (of one) CPU, but I think that was because of the sheer size of my browsing history being imported from Firefox.  Need a progress bar there, I think.

When it finally installed, I started it up and…

The application failed to initialize properly (0xc0000005). Click OK to terminate the application.

I get that message every time I try to load any page.

That makes me a saaaad panda

EDIT: The problem seems to be caused by Symantec Endpoint Security (specifically the Application & Device Control component).  Hopefully Symantec will release an update that fixes this soon.  In the meantime you can uninstall Application & Device Control without completely uninstalling Symantec Endpoint Security.

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Chrome bug tracker, so you can track its progress here

EDIT: The problem has been added to the Symantec Knowledge Base here

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Google Chrome

Apparently Google have sent out a comic book (!?) announcing their browser project – Chrome.

For years there have been rumors that Google was working on their own browser – I guess the rumors were true.

They seem to have put a lot of work into performance, usability and security.  Each tab is a separate process, which makes memory management and security easier and means a javascript-heavy tab won’t slow your other tabs (or the main browser) down.  Hopefully this will also mean that it will take advantage of multi-core/CPU computers.

Interestingly they’ve included an Omnibar which seems to be very similar to Firefox 3‘s Awesomebar and IE8′s Smartbar.  They’ve also made a smart homepage like IE8 beta 2 has and Mozilla is thinking about.  Google Gears is of course included.

They have also put a lot of thought into a fast JavaScript engine called V8.  It seems to do a lot of the optimizations that Mozilla were talking about for Firefox 3.1.

An advantage Google has when developing a browser is the enormous resources of their index – they can run automated tests against millions of websites without ever leaving their own data centers.  So by the time their browser gets to beta it should be much more stable than other betas.

One interesting thing is that Google and Mozilla just renewed their relationship for a few years, and now Google will be in competition with them – I wonder how Mozilla feels about that.

I’ll definitely check Chrome out when it’s released, but the one advantage Firefox will still have is Extensions.

EDIT: Apparently they’re releasing the beta tomorrow

EDIT: Google Blogoscoped have found some more info about Chrome

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Internet Explorer 8 beta 2 was released yesterday.

I’ve been a fan of Firefox for years, and nowadays I only use IE when I have to (i.e. when someone’s web site only works in IE), but I still keep track of what they’re doing and of course I’m into anything with “beta” written on it.

Beta 1 was a bit of a disappointment because it was a lot slower than IE7 and had a lot of rendering problems on sites I use regularly.

Beta 2 is faster and has less rendering problems than beta 1, but it’s still not release quality.

What I really like about beta 2 are the features they’ve added to keep pace with Firefox:

• Smart Address Bar – so far it seems basically the same as Firefox 3′s smart bar (and there’s nothing wrong with that)
• Favorites Bar -seems a bit smarter than any of Firefox’s bars, not sure how much I’d use the cleverness though
• New Tab Page -Mozilla are only at the Labs stage with coming up with this type of feature
• Tab Grouping -I think there’s a Firefox extension that does this – meh
• Find on Page -as of Firefox v1…

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A couple days ago, Mozilla Labs released a preview of a Firefox extension called Ubiquity. The blog post and video do a very good job of explaining what and why it is, but basically it lets you easily combine information from different web pages and services.

For example you can select an address on a web page, look up a map for it and put that into an email in one step.

It works like Quicksilver (Mac) or SkyLight (Windows) – you press a hotkey (default ctrl+space, which is reminiscent of SkyLight’s alt+space) and then type a few letters.  It shows you matching commands, and you keep typing until you find the one you want (e.g. just pressing “g” is enough to select “google search”).  Then you either type some data for the command to use (in “natural” language) or type “this” to insert the current selection and hit enter.

Additional commands for Ubiquity are easily written, so it can be extended very simply.

The preview is obviously not release quality yet – the UI is pretty basic and if you put the wrong input in you get a floating error message that you can’t get rid of.  Nevertheless it is extremely impressive, and I can’t wait for the final version.

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Google Reader screenshot

My Google Reader is messed up. It happened all of a sudden last night and I don’t know how to fix it.

It only seems to be broken in Firefox on this computer – I tried it in IE and Prism on this computer and Firefox on another computer and it works fine.

As you can see from the screenshot on the left, it looks like the CSS isn’t working or something – all of the internal bits of text and pictures are visible and nothing’s in the right place.

I’ve tried reloading it many times, loading in a new tab, restarting Firefox, emptying the cache, and nothing seems to make any difference…

Image via Wikipedia

I like the new look in v3, the speed and memory usage improvements are great (although apparently 20 tabs take up 200Mb of RAM in any browser…) and I love the Awesome Bar. Between that and the Awesome Search extension, the search box may be a thing of the past. Of course Awesome Search doesn’t work in the release candidates, so I’m still stuck with the search box for now.

The extensions I use don’t seem to necessarily be the same as everyone else’s, so I thought I’d list which ones work with the current release candidate and which ones don’t.

• Adblock Plus – Works. How did I ever live without this?
• AutoCopy – Doesn’t Work. I really miss this.
• Awesome Search – Doesn’t Work. This will be really cool when it works.
• Download Statusbar – Works. Even in Firefox v3 the default download manager is pants.
• Evernote Web Clipper – Doesn’t Work. I don’t use it anyway – I either use the web interface or the app.
• Faviconize Tab – Works. Pretty essential for saving space when you have as many tabs as I do and a lot of them are ones that are always open (e.g. Google Reader, Gmail).
• Google Gears – Works as of todayish. I can see how useful this would be, except I’m always online, so offline access is a bit surplus.
• Google Toolbar – Doesn’t Work. This one is a biggie for me. I can get along with the built-in Firefox search bar but without the Google Toolbar, Google Hisory isn’t tracking what sites I visit. To be honest, that’s really the only problem – I don’t use the rest of what the Google Toolbar does – they need to be careful they aren’t obsoleted. If I remember correctly, they didn’t update the Google Toolbar for Firefox v2 until after it came out, so I’m not really expecting it to work before that.
• Google Web Accelerator – Doesn’t Work. Not a big deal, the acceleration still works (as it’s just a proxy), the bit that doesn’t work is the little speedometer graphic, and I switch that off anyway (it’s already in the systray).
• Greasemonkey – Doesn’t Work. But there is a pre-release version that does.
• Hide Menubar – Works.
• IE Tab – Works.
• Image Zoom – Works.
• Menu Editor – Works.
• Open Link In… – Doesn’t Work. I miss being able to right click a link and open it in a background tab.
• Open Download – Doesn’t Work. I really miss being able to just run executables I download instead of having to navigate to my download directory and double click them. I realise it’s a security feature but I feel grown-up enough to fly without this particular safety net.
• Open New Window From Here – Doesn’t Work. I don’t use this too often, but I do miss it.
• Prism – Works. It’s new for Firefox v3 so it had to work really…
• Show Picture – Works. Why is this not part of Firefox?
• Stop-or-Reload Button – Doesn’t Work. I really miss this one. Why is this not part of Firefox? Having stop and reload as two buttons when only one at a time will ever be enabled is such a waste of space.
• Tab Scope – Works. I’m a bit on the fence with this one. It’s mostly only useful to tell whether a slow site has finished loading without switching tabs.
• Tabbrowser Preferences – Doesn’t Work. I really miss this one.
• Weave – Works. It’s also new for Firefox v3 so it had to work really… I’m replacing Google Browser Sync with this, but it’s still very buggy.
• Zemanta – Works (as evidenced by this post)