TweetDeck adds scheduling to the Chrome app

Ever since TweetDeck launched their app for Google Chrome, I’ve been using it to manage Twitter and to keep an eye of Facebook notifications without logging in to the social network. Despite fears that it will be discontinued after the acquisition by Twitter, the apps under the TweetDeck brand continue to thrive and add features. The latest addition to the Chrome app is scheduling of updates, arrived with version 0.9.8. The status field added a simple new button with a clock icon, which enables the controls for date and time. Like any other status update from TweetDeck you can add your location, links and select several social networks to update simultaneously. There is even a new ‘Scheduled’ column that you can add from the big ‘TweetDeck’ menu to track the scheduled updates.

At first I was pretty excited by the feature; it looked like the perfect opportunity to replace HootSuite, which I only use for scheduling some tweets and Facebook status updates nowadays. Unfortunately, TweetDeck’s solution has the same usability problems as HootSuite: the app doesn’t remember the last used settings and instead defaults every time to the current date/time and deselects the previously used social networks; and a different one on top: setting the time for the post can only be done by clicking on the arrows next to the two fields for hour and minute; you cannot enter the numbers directly from the keyboard or use the keyboard arrows to set the time. This makes scheduling through TweetDeck even more tedious that in HootSuite. Let’s hope they will revisit the setup soon, because in this form it’s barely usable.

What’s new in Chrome 21

As I noticed before, the odd version numbers in Chrome tend to bring more changes – at least visible changes – than the even versions. In Chrome 21 the first thing that I noticed – and got slightly annoyed at – was the inclusion of Google Docs as a default extension, along with Search, YouTube and Gmail. I promptly removed it, as I use Docs less and less – it’s a very poor replacement for a desktop editor. But moving on…

The biggest potential improvement in this version is a new way to build extensions, announced a couple of weeks ago on the Chromium blog. “Event pages” should help reduce the memory consumption by loading and running extensions only on specific events instead of having them loaded all the time in the background. This would make extensions act more like native browser functions instead of separate processes. Looking at my (rather short) list of extensions, most of them would benefit from being converted to extension pages: ad-blocking could run only on page load, LastPass only when it detects a login form, the couple of extensions I use to open new tabs in the background could kick in only when they detect the creation of a new tab. Even something more complex like SpeedDial 2 could be optimized to run only when the user opens a new tab, since it doesn’t do anything otherwise.

AdBlock for Chrome enables itself in incognito mode by default

Like many Internet users, I’m not very fond of seeing ads all over the webpages I visit, so for years I have used extensions to block most of them. Last week I casually visited the ‘Extensions’ page in Chrome and discovered something very disturbing: AdBlock had enabled the checkbox ‘Allow in incognito’! The problem here is, I didn’t do that myself – I never enable extensions in incognito mode, since most of them can theoretically track every page you visit – so the extension must have did that by itself, without prompting me for permission nonetheless. Even worse, the checkbox is now disabled, so it’s impossible for me to revoke the access to incognito mode! I hide the toolbar button for most extensions, so if I didn’t visit the Extensions page that day I wouldn’t have noticed the change until much later.

What’s new in Chrome 40

Despite the round number, this version of Chrome is relatively light on updates. The most important are aimed at developers, as highlighted in the official announcement. Service Workers are likely the most relevant long-term, a new API enabling web applications to use functionality normally reserved for native apps, like rich offline experiences, periodic background syncs and push notifications. You can read a more comprehensive description of the technology in this introductory article on HTML5 Rocks. Unfortunately, support is currently limited to browsers using the Blink rendering engine (Chrome on desktop and Android, Opera) and Firefox; without a commitment from Apple on Safari, service workers will have a limited impact on the development of mobile apps.

Google Chrome Canary build already up to version 8?

Well, I was planning to write an article about the many new labs features in Google Chrome’s dev and Canary channels. But after I returned home to my personal laptop after more than 2 months, my Chrome Canary browser wouldn’t stop crashing, immediately after starting up. I found that strange, because I didn't have any problems with it on the work laptop, in fact I used it every day – except for the couple of days when an update broke the LastPass login and I had to switch to Firefox.

So I went for the universal solution for crashing software: uninstall it and try a fresh install from the Internet. Except in Control Panel, I noticed something unexpected: the version number listed for Chrome Canary was 8.0.549.0 – in the time it took me to fly back from Munich, Chrome launched a new major version!

Unfortunately, I can’t say a lot about the new features – I didn’t get to see any because of the constant crashes, both on Windows 7 and on XP. One thing that could be new is a nice desktop notification I got before even starting any of the Chrome versions on the laptop, saying something like “A new version of Chrome is available, would you like to try it now?”. I think it’s built in the Google updater that runs in the background. I didn’t take a screenshot, but it could pop up later – I expect a new minor version pretty soon to fix all these crashes on Windows.

What’s new in Chrome 18

Unlike the previous version, I haven’t seen many changes in Chrome 18 until later in the development cycle. Frankly I used the Canary variety a lot less these past weeks because of some incompatibilities with Google apps like Docs and Maps, which would stop responding right after the initial loading phase.

Most of the changes this time around were related to standards support – like CSS Filter Effects – and new features for developers. The single most important visual update users are bound to notice is a redesigned ‘Settings’ page: the three sections present until now have been merged into a single interface, although the more advanced options are still one extra click away, at the bottom of the page ‘Under the Hood’. Apparently grey is the color of choice for this part of Chrome, there is no trace left of the light blue from before. Extensions are listed on a separate tab and have received only a minor update: the ‘Remove’ button has been replaced by a small trash-can icon only visible while hovering and with a nice animation. If you prefer the old design, you can restore it by activating the flag ‘Disable new settings and extensions web-ui’.

Another smaller update, probably borrowed from Chrome OS, is that the ‘New Tab Page’ now displays your Google profile picture in the top right corner as long as you are signed in with that account. On the other hand, an older experiment started in version 15, displaying the bookmarks in a screen on the new-tab page, has been discontinued and the corresponding flag removed from the internal experiments page.

Chrome’s silent update extending to Flash

Last week, one of the news circulating on the Internet reported that Google Chrome is working with Adobe on improved integration with Flash and PDF, going as far as bundling these plug-ins in the standard install process of the browser. At first I was not impressed with the news. I’ve never been a fan of such bundles, because I prefer to decide for myself whether to install something or not. Not to mention the Flash and Adobe Reader plug-ins are shared between several browsers on Windows, which could lead to conflicts and having multiple versions of the same files on your computer. I can see how this could have advantages for mobile devices like a Chrome OS tablet or netbook: Flash would be already included in the operating system, enabling people to start using the device sooner. It would be both a marketing advantage compared to the forever Flash-less iPad and a genuine long-term bonus for users, because web-surfing would be closer to the desktop experience.

What’s new in Chrome 34

If you were among the Windows users upset by the decision to remove scrollbar steppers in Chrome 32, version 34 will solve this annoyance and bring arrows back – but only on Windows. I don’t use the scrollbar arrows very often, but when I needed precision positioning inside a page I missed not having that option, so it’s good to have arrows back.

The other big update is ‘Search by Voice’, included by default for English (U.S.) users on Windows, Mac and Linux; you can enable it by going to google.com, clicking on the mic icon and allowing the new feature. Alternatively, you will also find the corresponding option in Settings, called ‘Enable "Ok Google" to start a voice search’. I played around with it a little while writing this blog post and the success rate is not very impressive, the voice search recognized only half of the commands correctly. You have to speak very clearly and define words carefully to get good results. It’s nice that for some search results – I think where Knowledge Graph is involved – you also get a female voice reading back some information from the top hit. Performance-wise though the feature is slowing down the browser and PC considerably, it’s constantly accessing the CPU to detect voice inputs; at least on my work laptop with the Dev version of Chrome I had to turn this off to recover something resembling normal performance.

What’s new in Chrome 36

I’m a little late with this article, as the stable version was already released last week, but if you’re interested, here are the significant updates in this version of Chrome. An important change around the security model of extensions is being added on Windows, in order to limit the incidents of browser settings highjacking. With this new Settings API implemented, extensions that change the behavior of the new tab page and search provider will be clearly labeled in the browser settings screen, so that users can easily identify and disable them. Other minor user-facing changes include:

The experimental new tab page(s) in Google Chrome

The “new tab page” was a feature of Chrome ever since the launch nearly three years ago. Even though the concept was pioneered by Opera, Chrome managed to make it more popular and slightly modified versions have since appeared in Safari and Internet Explorer. Mozilla is also finally considering it’s own concepts for a more interactive new-tab page, while at the same time running a study on user interaction with the new tabs and offering an experimental extension that suggest where the user might want to go after opening a tab. From Opera we recently saw the introduction of extensions for the Speed Dial, enabling mini-applications to run in the tiles instead of just static links.

Chrome itself is experimenting with an updated design of its own, though not as ambitious as the concept from Mozilla. As with many experimental features, it can be enabled from the internal page about:flags. The main difference compared to the standard new-tab page is that the content is split into several ‘home screens’: one for the most visited sites, another for apps and another two ‘dummy’ tabs: Foo and Bar. The recently closed pages have been moved to a menu in the bottom left corner of the browser window, visible on every home screen. The redesign is clearly focused on smaller screens and mobile devices; there’s more space on each screen for links or apps compared to the classic design, where they shared the same window. And you can drag the mouse to navigate to the next screen, a gesture more natural on a touchscreen. Unfortunately the bookmarks bar is no longer visible when you open a tab and you can’t rearrange the apps with drag-and-drop in this newer version.

Experimental notifications in Chrome 6

I use Chrome as my primary browser every since the first version, but after a while I switched to the stable channel because I prefer stability in a software I use practically every day all day long. The Chrome team recently launched the Canary build, allowing you to basically have two versions of the browser running in parallel on the same machine, so I have no excuse anymore not to test the latest innovations in Chrome. Apart from the more important features, like a built-in PDF viewer and possibly voice recognition, there are a number of smaller changes to the visual side of the program I have recently noticed.

Changes to internal pages in Google Chrome

Internal pages, or about: pages, have a long history in browsers, as well as a wide range of uses, from the functional to Easter-egg-like – with Firefox’ about:Mozilla probably being the most famous. Chrome has also used them extensively, mostly for functional purposes. Starting with version 14, currently in the Canary and dev channels, Chrome switches the URI scheme from the common about: to the specific chrome:// that already powers the more visible settings, history, download pages and recently even the task manager. That includes the page that centralizes them, so now instead of heading to about:about, users will have to use the harder to remember – and type – chrome://chrome-urls. Fortunately about:about redirects here, for now at least.

List of About pages (stable version)	List of Chrome URLs (Canary v. 14.0.802.0)
about:about about:appcache-internals about:blob-internals about:view-http-cache about:credits about:conflicts about:dns about:flags about:gpu-internals about:histograms about:memory about:net-internals about:plugins about:stats about:sync-internals about:tcmalloc about:terms about:version	chrome://appcache-internals chrome://blob-internals chrome://chrome-urls chrome://crashes chrome://credits chrome://dns chrome://flags chrome://flash chrome://gpu-internals chrome://histograms chrome://memory chrome://net-internals chrome://view-http-cache chrome://plugins chrome://settings chrome://stats chrome://sync-internals chrome://tcmalloc chrome://terms chrome://version chrome://conflicts

What’s new in Chrome 33

After the big changes in Chrome’s graphics engine in the previous version caused numerous problems and complaints from users, this version could prove equally controversial, if not more, as Google pushes two changes many people are not happy about: restricting extensions to the Chrome Web Store and removing the previous New Tab page completely. Announced back in November, the new extension policy will be enforced starting with version 33, meaning that any extension not hosted in the Web Store will be automatically disabled and cannot be re-enabled as long as they’re not in the Store, as far as I understand. The only remaining option for running non-web store extensions is to use the Canary or Dev channels, but that exposes users to stability problems and bugs. Also, after being enabled by default in Chrome 32, the redesigned New Tab page based on the Instant Extended API cannot be disabled anymore, as the necessary flag has been removed. I don’t feel like commenting again; Google made up its mind and there’s nothing else to do than search for an extension that can restore the New Tab to some level of usefulness.

On a more positive note, Google Now notifications are now enabled on desktop. Users of recent versions of Android and in the US should be happy about this, for the rest of us the impact will likely be minor. Google Now is tied into the Google search app on iOS, but personally I don’t see the need to open an app for web search when I can do that faster from the Spotlight search box. Since I’ve been travelling with a work laptop for the past weeks and using the Dev version, I’ve used this feature for some time; and yet I see little use for Google Now. It does indeed highlight the amount of data Google stores on me or any other user; at some point it showed direction to a place that I searched a couple of hours before. On the other hand some cards are simply stupid: the temperature on the weather card is shown in Fahrenheit, even though I live and travelled inside Europe, where everyone uses Celsius. If it claims to offer relevant information, Now should at least make an effort on these little details; knowing my location it should be trivial to check which measurement unit the country is using. Even worse, there’s no visible setting to change this on desktop; apparently you can do that on mobile, but for me that would mean installing an app just to change a stupid default… I’m not going to bother.

What’s new in Chrome 28

As many other ‘even’ releases, Chrome 28 doesn’t add many features – at least nothing immediately apparent in day-to-day browsing. I get the impression the development is currently focused on Chrome OS – a lost cause in my opinion that is just trying to implement features ‘real’ operating systems have had for ages – and on the migration to the new rendering engine Blink. This should first translate into faster page loads thanks to a new threaded HTML parser.

The main officially announced feature are the new rich notifications, now enabled by default on Windows and Linux – the Mac port is still being worked on. While they look better and display more information, including action buttons to quickly reply to notifications, they are part of a worrying trend at Google to move away from standards to proprietary APIs. Also I haven’t seen them implemented anywhere outside Gmail, for example TweetDeck doesn’t use them. That could well change as the feature graduates to the stable channel in a couple of weeks, but the fact that it’s no longer a standard means website owners will have to do extra work to implement them for a marginal benefit.

What’s new in Chrome 19

A little more than 6 weeks between releases this time, but it’s end of life for the Chrome Canary version 19, so let’s see what the user-facing changes are. Following the trend from the previous version, when extensions have been integrated in the ‘Settings’ page - a.k.a. the Uber page - it now incorporates ‘History’ and ‘Help’ / ‘About’ as well. There is not much to say about ‘History’, it’s basically the same design introduced in version 17 only in a new location. The ‘About’ page in web format looks unfinished for now: it can’t check for updates so it hasn’t replaced the usual modal dialog yet. On the other hand it has two handy links for help and reporting issues, the latter being buried under two levels of menus until recently – it should be much more visible here.

What’s new in Chrome 29

This version of Chrome introduces a number of updates aimed at developers; regular users won’t see the changes until the new features will be integrated into apps. A series of new APIs (‘Identity API’, ‘In App Payments API’, ‘Analytics API’, ‘Media Gallery API’, ‘Bluetooth API’ and ‘Native Messaging API’) will enhance packaged apps bringing them closed to their native desktop counterparts. Other new features for apps not mentioned in the official announcement include the ability to specify which local files can be opened by the app and to keep a list of the 500 recently accessed files, to load a specific URL after being uninstalled – in order to run a survey about the reasons for removing the app for example. The VP9 video codec is now enabled by default, but it remains to be seen if it will be adopted outside YouTube. Another developer related change – I’m not going to even pretend to understand what it means – is that Chrome JavaScript engine, V8, now supports ES6 generators.

What’s new in Chrome 20

The version increase to v21 is right on schedule, even though the stable channel still remains at version 18, so it’s time to do a quick summary of the changes. Unfortunately, like many of the versions with even numbers before it, Chrome 20 brings next to nothing new for casual users – the only change you may notice is a slightly larger ‘New Tab’ button. Most of the updates concern developers and standards implementation, for example:

• A setting to enable ‘Web Intents’ has been added to the interface, located under ‘Advanced Settings’ ► ‘Privacy’ ► ‘Content settings’ ► ‘Allow Web Intents to enable me to connect my applications’.
• The datalist element for web-based forms is now available in Chrome – a bit late compared to other browsers, since Firefox and Opera already support it.
• Mobile developers – all developers interested in responsive design actually – can use the Web Inspector to specify the screen resolution and font scale factor in order to quickly simulate different screen sizes; and also emulate touch events with the mouse. You can find the two new options in the Inspector ‘Settings’ menu (the gear icon in the lower right).
  

What’s new in Chrome 32

Chrome’s 32nd version finally adds a small, but very useful feature that has been in the works for some time: an indicator for tabs playing audio! The announcement on the official blog mentions another couple indicators as well, for tabs accessing the webcam or casting content to a TV, but those are rather unlikely activities in a browser compared to listening to music or video. In my experience though the indicator is not full-proof: it works flawlessly with native video players (and most-likely audio), to the extent of live syncing with the audio playback, so when a video segment has no audio, the indicator fades out and returns as soon as the audio track is back! Also very helpful: the audio indicator replaces the favicon for pinned tabs. On the other hand, the indicator doesn’t work at all when the player uses Flash – I suppose this was the reason why this feature was delayed for so long, until someone finally gave up trying to support Flash and shipped a version for native playback only. At least for Flash videos on YouTube you can still fall-back to its own in-tab arrow indicator.

Update: As mentioned in the comments, the audio tab indicator works with Flash videos as well, as long as you’re using the built-in Flash plugin, not the older, soon to be deprecated NPAPI version. To enable Pepper Flash, visit the internal page chrome://plugins, look for ‘Adobe Flash Player’ (it should be the first entry on the page), click on ‘Details’ on the left to show all options and then disable the NPAPI Flash plugin and enable PPAPI (out-of-process). With all the efforts Google is putting into moving away from the old NPAPI plugin architecture, I find it a little ironic that the ‘Google Update’ plugin is still using it…

While not mentioned anywhere on the official blogs, this version also enables the new design for the New-Tab page by default, featuring the superfluous Google search box and missing a lot of useful features like direct access to apps and recently closed pages. For now, the flag controlling the Instant Extended API is still available, so users an theoretically disable it and revert to the previous New-Tab page layout.

Version 32 also marks the switch from native rendering to the new UI stack Aura. This will cause an important user-facing change, namely a new visual style for scrollbars on Windows: instead of the native, familiar look they will have a flatter style, without arrows at either end. Personally I don’t mind the visual change, but after updating to the stable channel the new scrollbars behave very strangely: often pages don’t respond to scrolling from the mouse wheel, or even zoom in or out as if I was holding down the Ctrl key! Hopefully these problems will be sorted out shortly, scrolling is almost unusable as it stands now.

This version will also bring a new user-interface in Windows 8, Metro-mode – nothing exciting from the images presented, Chrome didn’t spend any time trying to come up with new ideas to match Metro style, relying on the same boring windows as the classic desktop mode. Another minor Windows-related update is that the browser now supports opening and closing drop-down lists using the F4 key – I personally didn’t even knew this keyboard shortcut existed!

What’s new in Chrome 35

Among the customary low-key Google Chrome releases, this one will be particularly hard to notice for regular users, with no major changes to the user interface or features. The relevant updates are mainly aimed at developers, from improved support for JavaScript standards to unprefixed support for Shadow DOM, CSS background blending, the Web Audio API and the ability for websites to override Ctrl+mouse wheel scroll events. The in-browser developer tools received a couple of updates as well, as described in this article.

An experimental feature, the so-called ‘Origin chip’, got a lot of attention lately, with people actively discussing the security merits and usability downsides to hiding the page URL by default and replacing it with a button displaying only the top-level domain. For now it’s not enabled by default, there’s a flag for this allowing users to try out different versions. Personally I find the change very confusing and I can understand the people pointing out that this move is only serving Google by driving more searches to their search engine: the Omnibox is converted into a full-time search box and the URL is revealed only when you click on the origin chip, very hard to discover for an average user who doesn’t closely follow the browser release notes. Maybe I just got used to the URL and the different layers of information it silently provides, but without it the address field feels empty and out of place, they could just as well remove it completely!

What’s new in Chrome 39

After the numerous developer updates and APIs introduced in Chrome 38, this version focuses more on JavaScript, with ES6 Generators, improved animation controls and a new standard for defining mobile web apps, the Web Application Manifest. Of course, at some point adding features will lead to older ones being deprecated, and now it’s time for the chrome.pushMessaging API to be replaced by the newer Google Cloud Messaging service. Another change that should be live in this version is that people can install free Chrome apps without being signed in to the Web Store. Since I haven’t installed an app in a while I can’t verify this – I’m also almost constantly logged in to Chrome.

Security-wise, Chrome 39 marks the first step in the process of gradually phasing out support for the SHA-1 cryptographic hash algorithm, used in HTTPS certificate signatures, as detailed in the official announcement. SHA-1 is old and weak, and unfortunately widely used, so moving to the improved SHA-2 is scheduled to take at least a couple of years. Other big technology companies have similar plans, starting with Microsoft and most recently Mozilla.