Jolicloud, the French startup founded by well-known European entrepreneur Tariq Krim that produces a custom Linux-based operating system for netbooks, has just announced on its blog that it will be releasing a solid beta version of the OS later this month.
In a fairly surprising move, the company also announced that it is ditching Mozilla Prism in favor of Google Chrome to power the back-end of its app platform. All Web applications currently in the App Center – more than 600 by now – will automatically be converted to Chrome.
Simply put: Google Chrome is amazing. Ever since it was finally released for the Mac late last year, I’ve been blown away by its big things (speed) and little things (search box that is also the URL box). But the true power of Chrome may lie in what third-party developers are able to do with it. This is what helped Firefox rip market share away from Internet Explorer over the past several years. Chrome is still young, but already making impressive gains in share each month as well. And the browser could be about to get even better.
In a post today on the Chromium Blog, software engineer Erik Kay notes the existence of experimental APIs for Chrome. Basically, these are new APIs that aren’t yet ready for prime time development, but are available on the dev builds of Chrome for developers to play with right now. The first two experimental APIs available sound very interesting. One, “experimental processes,” allows third party developers to access Chrome’s process model. This allows for extensions that could monitor CPU processes for individual tabs, for example. But the other is potentially more interesting. “Experimental history” is described as follows:
After a lengthy legal face-off, Microsoft and European antitrust officials recently agreed on the implementation of a so-called ballot screen that will give European Windows users a chance to download rivals’ browsers – including Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Opera – as possible alternatives to Redmond’s own Internet Explorer (see screenshot above or go here).
Under the terms of the deal, Microsoft has agreed to provide a “ballot screen” to most European customers that will offer links to downloads of browsers offered by the company’s fiercest competitors when it comes to the Web browsing space, starting next week. The browser choice screen was designed to give all listed browsers a random order upon each new visit; antitrust regulators saw this as the right path to take to make European consumers more aware of alternative browsers to IE without favoring one over the other.
But how random is the presentation of the browser on that ballot screen, really?
Google’s Chrome browser is quickly gaining market share, with one estimate putting it at about 5 percent of total usage, while Microsoft’s Internet Explorer is seeing a drop in overall share. But among TechCrunch readers Chrome is already beating every browser except for Firefox.
A look at our Google Analytics numbers for the past 30 days shows that 20 percent of TechCrunch visitors are using the Chrome browser. Just on TechCrunch, we’ve seen Chrome’s share almost double since October. Firefox is still the most popular browser among readers, with 38.6 percent share, and Safari is a close third with 19.5 percent. Internet Explorer comes in fourth with 17.3 percent.
Ever since I upgraded my beloved Chrome browser to version 5 on my (Windows) computer, I’ve been wanting to get something off my chest about a new feature that was baked into it, one that annoys me to no end.
With the update to the most recent version of the program came an integration with Google Translate, a feature that makes a custom toolbar appear under the bookmarks bar whenever I visit a Web page that contains text in a language other than English. Basically, Google Chrome supposes that I don’t understand any other languages besides English by default and enables me to translate Web pages in say, Spanish or Dutch, with one click.
Thanks for the help, Google, but how about you let me turn that damn toolbar off?
Google released a new beta of its Chrome browser for Macs today. The two new main features are the addition of extensions, something that already came out on the dev channel for Mac last month, and on the Windows version in December. (Google releases new versions of Chrome across different channels, the beta channel available today is the most fully baked)
There are 2,200 extensions now available for Chrome, including ones from Aviary, Brizzly, Google Voice, and there is even an unoffical TechCrunch extension. Extensions are like add-ons on FireFox, they extend the browser’s capabilities with new features.
Today, the blog Chromium Notes, which is written by a developer who works on the open source project (that Google Chrome is built on top of), posted a very interesting graph: one that shows the number of code commits to WebKit. Notably, it appears that Google has overtaken Apple as the organization that contributes the most commits to the open source project.
Now, the author is quick to point out the caveats of the graph (and does so for four paragraphs), and notes that he was hesitant to even publish it because of how easy it is to misinterpret. The graph, while it shows commits, doesn’t weigh more important ones versus less important ones. Nor does it in any way measure the ways in which companies or individuals contribute to WebKit in other meaningful ways. That said, it does clearly show that in late 2009, Google surpassed Apple as the company that now contributes the most (again, in terms of commits) to the project.
Yesterday, browser market share figures came out from Net Applications, and the big news is how Chrome is moving up the ranks at the expense of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and even Firefox, compared to December. But you have to look further back to get a sense of what is really happening.
The various flavors of Internet Explorer (IE6, IE7, and IE8) together have 62.1 percent market share, down from 68.5 percent last March. That is a 6.4 percent drop in about a year. During the same period Chrome went from 1.6 percent share to 5.2 percent. Firefox and Safari each gained about a percentage point each over the same period to 24.4 percent and 4.5 percent, respectively. (Although Firefox is a tiny bit down since November, when it peaked at 24.7 percent). If you add up the gains from those three—Chrome, Firefox, and Safari—that is where most of IE’s share went. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story because if you look at share of individual versions of the different browsers, you can see another dynamic in play.
Last week, the world saw Apple’s long anticipated tablet device, the iPad, for the first time. In the aftermath since that announcement, a few things have become clear: it will be great for some people, but its apparent lack of flexibility (at least in its first iteration) may leave something to be desired. It’s increasingly looking like the best alternative will be Google’s Chrome OS, which is clearly on a collision course with the iPad. And tonight, we’ve come across some very impressive mockups of what Chrome OS may look like on a tablet form factor.
The photos have been posted to the official Chromium site (Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome and ChromeOS). And while Chromium is not actually part of Google, it appears that these mockups were put together by Glen Murphy, Google Chrome’s designer. In other words, there’s a good chance that the final version of Chrome OS will resemble this.
When Google launched Extensions for Chrome in December, they had around 300 of them ready to go in their gallery. A day later, that number was already up to 500. By now, there are a few thousand available, and that number just got multiple by several times as Google has announced that the latest official version of Chrome, version 4, now natively supports Greasemoneky user scripts.
As Google engineer Aaron Boodman (who also happens to be the creator of Greasemonkey) writes today on the Chromium blog, on the popular site userscripts.org there are over 40,000 scripts alone. While he notes that not all of the user scripts written for Greasemonkey will work seamlessly with Chrome immediately (because of the differences between Chrome and Firefox), that should only affect 15%-25% of those over 40,000. He also notes that Google will continue to work on issues on their end to improve compatibility with these Greasemonkey scripts.
