Finally! Google has released version 4.0 of Chrome for Windows, bringing the much-anticipated extensions framework out of beta and into the stable channel. Currently, more than 1500 extensions are already available. Version 4.0 carries more features than just extensions, though.
The extensions framework for Google Chrome has been one of its most anticipated features. Many people rely on several extensions in Firefox, so the arrival of extensions in Chrome should certainly compel a new group of users to switch to Google’s browser. The gallery is already packed with them – including several ad blockers. My favourite extension is Flashblock, which blocks all Flash content by default, making it accessible through a single click.
Another new feature in Chrome 4.0 is bookmark sync. This handy little feature will allow you to synchronise your bookmarks (really?) across different machines, so you don’t have to manually recreate/manage them for each machine. You’ll need a Google account for it, though.
Web developers can rejoice too with this new release, as it brings support for several HTML5 features, like LocalStorage, Database API, WebSockets, and more. Another newcomer for developers is the notification API (Windows-only, for now), which allows web pages to send notifications to the browser in a non-annoying way. This feature is obviously important for ChromeOS.
Sadly, Chrome 4.0 is only stable on Windows. Linux users are on the beta channel at the moment, but are more or less at feature parity with the stable Windows version (except for bookmark sync), and in all honesty – I don’t have a single stability problem with the Linux beta channel. Mac users still have a lot to wait for though, as they don’t even have extensions yet.
Chrome is making great progress. I’ve recently noticed that it renders a number of websites more correctly than Firefox too. May look at switching to Chrome very soon – keep up the great work, Google!
Good job to Chrome and all, but I was just thinking that they are a little over a year since original release (2008 Sep 2 by: wikipedia) – say we give them 1.5 years.
Isn’t that a really short time to generate a 4th major version number?
Firefox did the same thing in about 5 years, and Netscape did the same thing in 4 years.
In the throws of Microsoft competing with Netscape, they did 4 versions in about 2 years.
I just seems to me that they are using a version number for marketing purposes.
Firefox has been jumping by arbitrary fractions since 1.0. If anything, Chrome consistently incrementing by ones is less marketing-driven.
Plus they are developing pretty quickly, partly due to starting so bare-bones:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_chrome#Release_history
Version number is always arbitrary.
But the point is that from 1.0 to 4.0 in 1.5 years is tooooo marketing.
If mozilla wanted marketing, they could have called 3.6 4.0.
But they didn’t.
Then why do you care if Chrome goes up by 1’s instead of 0.1’s?
If by “marketing” you mean “simpler,” then I guess so. Since it’s all arbitrary, you might as well cut the modesty and estimation and decimals, and just increment by one every time. Let people who care read the release notes if they want to find out “how much” has changed.
… This time. Previously they jumped from 2.0 straight to 3.0, and the plan after 3.7 is to skip to 4.
I’m meaning arbitrary because there is no “law” on what to do.
That is how Microsoft went from Word 2.0 for Windows to Word 6.0. Or how WordPerfect for Windows started at 5.1.
Now, “normally”, products start at 1.0, and grow in version number as in MAJOR.Minor updates.
So, no, going from 1.0 to 4.0 in 1.5 years is NOT normal, and it is a marketing plot for sure: Chrome 4.0 should be better than Firefox 3.5, but still worst than IE 8.0, so probably in another year, Chrome would be at 8.0.
And I don’t care. It’s just an observation.
By the way. Mozilla jumped from 2.0 to 3.0 after 1.5 years. And the changes from 2.0 to 3.0 where major enough to warrant that option.
Same time it took google to go from 1.0 to 4.0.
Edited 2010-01-26 14:30 UTC
Firefox 1.0: first real release with nice extension manager
Firefox 1.5: great update manager and a big improvement to extension mananger
Firefox 2.0: spellcheck, session restore, phishing protection
Firefox 3.0: faster javascript, resume download, tab scrolling, awesomebar, Full page zoom, better password management, bookmark tags, much lower memory usage
Firefox 3.5: faster javascript, HTML5 <video><audio><Drag and drop><offline>, improved awesomebar
Firefox 3.6: faster javascipt, improved HTML5 like video, personas
Chrome 1.0: fast startup, fast javascript, fast rendering
Chrome 2.0: ehm?
Chrome 3.0: ehm? extensions?
Chrome 4.0: ehm? something like personas?
Chrome’s version number is for developer’s only. They do not relay it to the end user at all. It’s not used in any marketing, anywhere on their download page. The _only_ place a user can see the number is in the about box.
Any system at all is somewhat arbitrary, but Firefox does have a system.
They reserve the major version updates (2,3,4) for releases that have major changes to the UI. For updates that change the browser core but only slightly update the UI, they bump by .5 instead (except they went for 3.6 instead of 3.10 because it’s less confusing to people)
“Major” UI change is a bit of a judgment call, of course, but I don’t think they’ve done anything too crazy. If they were being marketing driven, it seems like they’d update a whole version every release.
Edited 2010-01-26 05:58 UTC
Look at the version numbers:
1.0
2.0
3.0.195
4.0.249
4.0.306
You that the second 0 never increases? If they consistently increment by ones for anything else then marketing purposes the second zero would be useless.
the version number is done for marketing purposes, because there are many people who rather use IE6 then Chrome 3.0 because the verion of IE is higher, thus better. It’s like a maskerated version of what distributions like Slackware did.
Not that I care though
Except that it’s not used in any marketing, anywhere. It’s done for developer’s purposes.
Both IE and Chrome do not advertise their version number. IE6 does not say “IE6” on the desktop—it says Internet Explorer. Not many users could tell you what version of IE they are on. Some people can’t even tell me what version of Windows they are on, and it says “Windows XP” everytime the computer boots.
Really? Just read the news, like for example “Chrome 4.0 brings, blah, blah, blah”. Or “IE6 is vulnerable, blah, blah, blah”.
Geek news cares about version numbers. Google’s advertising and website does not include the version number.
Any tech site would have version number.
Non tech sites get information from either tech sites, or tech guys, so 99% of them, print version number.
If you where right, why aren’t they using the more common during dev 0.1, 0.2, 0.3, 0.4 version number, and when they think they are ready, call it 1.0?
Mac users still have a lot to wait for though, as they don’t even have extensions yet.
Chrome for Mac, in the dev channel, has almost feature-parity with Chrome 4 final Windows.
I’ve been using it as my primary – and only – browser for two or three months and extensions have been working for a few weeks now. I personally use Flashblock (who can live without it?) and Google Wave Notifier (I still want to believe) without any glitch.
Bookmark sync works too and, if the bookmark manager still needs a bit of polish, Chrome for Mac’s stability is perfect – never experienced a crash with it.
Other companies than Google would not call it a dev version, but a final version. If you are on a Mac, try it, you cannot find a better browser (and I don’t think you’ll be able to find one for some time).
> Chrome for Mac, in the dev channel, has almost feature-parity with Chrome 4 final Windows
Does the Mac dev channel version autoupdate yet?
Yes, beautifully. It has the autoupdate feature for ages, now (in Google time, I mean).
Forgot to mention that it plays HTML5/h.264 video as well as on other platforms (that is with minor glitches, but YouTube/HTML5 is what, one week old?).
Also forgot the mandatory link: http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-Mac
Click on “Dev channel: GoogleChrome.dmg”, accept the EULA and you’re done.
Opera has their version that only works with Opera.
Chrome has their version that only works with Chrome.
If only there was a cross-browser sync plugin that would keep your bookmarks in sync in each browser …
Wait, there is … http://www.xmarks.com Why bother with 1-browser-only lock-in?
I don’t get the point of cross-browser bookmark sync. You are going to use the bookmark sync to keep your bookmarks updated on browsers you regularly use. Since you regularly use these computers, chances are that you are going to use the same browser everywhere.
Chrome isn’t available on all OSes (for example, there’s no FreeBSD release). Not all browsers work the same on all OSes (Safari on Windows vs Safari on MacOS X, Firefox on anything vs Firefox on Windows, etc). Not all browsers are available in portable versions that can run off a USB stick.
Hence, having a cross-browser bookmark sync is very handy.
This doesn’t exactly count as a release, but you might be interested anyway:
http://chromium.jaggeri.com/
Yeah, I know about that. I’ve been following the progress on http://forums.freebsd.org
If you used a standard way to sync bookmarks, it would be easier to switch browser if you like.
If a standard way was used, it would also be possible for other types of software than browsers to use this information. E.g you could create a program that used your bookmars as a some sort of search filter that searched the internet for new sites that might interest you based on what you already like or regularly visit.
Google’s bookmarks are stored in Netscape bookmark files in folders on google docs. Doesn’t take a genius to create plugins for other browser to retrieve and parse those.
I might wait until SRWare Iron catches up with the 4.0 release.
Whats the difference beetwen Iron and Chrome?
http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php
Paranoia.
I’m not a “privacy gadfly” (to borrow David’s turn of phrase from a few weeks back), but I do run Iron on my laptop – primarily because it doesn’t include the auto-updater. I dislike auto-updaters in general, but especially on a laptop that often gets used on dialup connections.
The Google update process also has some malware-like behaviour that soured me on it. Not in the sense that it’s malicious, but in that it’s tenacious about relaunching itself if you kill the process – or even delete the executable.
Yeah, that’s not a bad alternative to Google Chrome. One could also just compile Chromium locally.
Yes, Iron is nice, but unfortunately, they don’t really keep up with upstream Chromium releases.
No, that doesn’t work. Google’s official Chrome build is almost exactly the same as Chromium, with just a few minor changes (such as branding). Unless you change the source code, you get basically the same thing as Chrome.
wow theres alot of extensions for this already
They re-enabled web fonts too! Hurray!
The differences between Safari and Chrome do get annoying.
Just tried Chrome 4 (On Linux).
Generally pretty good. However, there is still one area that needs big improvement – bookmark management.
In Firefox, I click on the “Display bookmarks” button in the toolbar, and a *scrollable* list of bookmarks pops out from the left of the screen.
Clean, simple, friendly and powerful.
Chrome’s handling of bookmarks, in comparison, is pretty bad. Nowhere near as easy to use. I have a *very* long bookmarks list, so being able to scroll down them is a must-have.
There also seems to be no way of putting a “Display bookmarks” button on the toolbar. You just have to faff around with the ugly bookmarks thing up at the top right (under the spanner/wrench).
This surprises me. A “display bookmarks” button is almost as essential as a “back” or “refresh” button”.
Why Google chose not to include a button like that is a mystery.
So, although Chrome is getting better, bookmark-handling must be improved.
Edited 2010-01-26 09:14 UTC
There is a way:
http://lifehacker.com/5350737/add-a-bookmark-button-to-google-chrom…
Getting it to work when you don’t launch Chrome from that particular shortcut (e.g. clicking an associated html file in Windows Explorer) is more annoying. To cover those cases too, open Windows Explorer, to go to Tools -> Folder Options -> File Types, and add the –bookmark-menu command-line flag to the launch command for each Chrome-associated filetype. (Click the Advanced button to edit the command.)
Edit: Oh wait, you’re on Linux. Disregard the Windows Explorer advice, then.
Edited 2010-01-26 10:04 UTC
Totally agree with obsidian – the only thing stops me to switch completely to chrome is the lack of bookmarks management firefox-like (at least for Linux)
I didn’t know Chrome had ad blocking extensions, so might have to give it a try now that it’s relevant
Which one of the ad-blocking extensions is recommended? Do they have any that auto-update like the Firefox one?
Chrome is not able to block ads, it can only hide them after they have been requested, downloaded and decoded. You still get all the tasty cookies from advertisers and you still have to bear with badly written sites which cause the engine to block while waiting for some advertisement or tracking server to respond. Chrome simply lacks the necessary APIs.
Having said that, Adthwart is based on Adblock Plus and works with filter subscriptions like EasyList to a certain degree:
https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/cfhdojbkjhnklbpkdaibdccd…
The good news is, the APIs are being worked on; see Comment 9 here:
http://hackademix.net/2009/12/10/why-chrome-has-no-noscript
Interesting. Judging by the feature list Google is going even one step further than Mozilla and is building something akin to Adblock Plus right into the core of Chrome, including an UI for filter management. Bonus points for extending the system to HTTP referrers and cookies. I’m curious now how the final implementation will turn out.
If that allows extension developers, like NoScript’s author, to use those facilities to make their extension work like it did on Firefox good.
If Google’s answer is… nah, you do not need NoScript after all… we have our own alternative… well I would stick with Firefox.
Bookmark tags (thanks SQLite
) + Mozilla Weave sync + Live Bookmarks + NoScript… the reasons why I still use Firefox over Chrome.
Edited 2010-01-26 12:47 UTC
“Interesting. Judging by the feature list Google is going even one step further than Mozilla and is building something akin to Adblock Plus right into the core of Chrome, including an UI for filter management.”
Wow, how cool. Opera only had that since, like 2006?
I am running the Linux version and it is damn fast!
Firefox is getting slower and slower in comparison.
I use gmail, caldendar and docs. I decided since Google owns all my data I might as will give in and switch to Chrome too. I added a couple of extensions. I miss come of the included functionality like keywords in Firefox. I added the keywords extension but it is clumsy. I wonder sometimes what happens if a Google data center burns up. Will I lose all my data?
You’re screwed.
I used Chrome 4.x exclusively on my Ubuntu 9.10 desktop fr about a month (dec/january)… I liked it, but finally came back to Firefox, as it is simply a better browsing experience as of today… Speed isn’t everything.
The AdBlock+ in Firefox is much better than Chrome’s Adthwart.
Xmarks seems better in FF than in Chrome.
Bookmarks are better handled in FF…
There’s no compact theme in Chrome such as FF “Classic Compact”.
Mozilla Weave rocks !
So, as much as I have switched the vast majority of my Windows customers to Chrome, it still doesn’t cut it for me as main browser.
However, it improves at such a fast pace, we don’t know what tomorrow will be made of
Am I the only one worried about the fact that Google now have information about what is my favorite websites, all my emails, all my phone numbers (if you are using an Android phone), all you voice messages (if you use Google voice), all your messages from google talk, all websites I visit (if you use their DNS), an unique ID on my webbrowser (if you use chrome), your calendar (google calendar users), your RSS list (google reader), controls the results of my internet searchs, … ? All this informations on the hands of a marketing company…
Dude, that freaking scares me. Sure, I know I have alternatives, but most of them kinda suck… =/
You’re right, better revert to pen and paper at once. Better get rid of the computer and move into the mountains so they can’t get to you. I shouldn’t even be writing this, they might be watching.
Give me all that in informations you trust so much google to have, all you agenda, your current location all the time (google latitude), all your mails, and let’s see what I can get with that. Shall we?
Come on Google, get with the century already …
Google doesn’t really care about bookmarks. They want you to use *their* search engine. When I use to work on firefox back in the day Mozilla did research and found the majority of users don’t use bookmarks anymore. They just search. You will see this a lot with younger users. They either know the site or they search for it. Power users and techies use them more but this is a smaller market.
Umm .. replied to wrong comment?
I don’t get the Chrome excitement. I thought I had been having all these touted features on Chromium (for Linux) for months..? Is Chromium (5.0.306.0) so far ahead of Chrome? What am I missing??