Tag Archives: chrome

Chromebook gets a bit more family friendly



Google is taking aim at the PC market with its increasingly better offerings of Chromebook hardware. Now the search giant is also touting “family safe” as one of its selling points.

If you are using the beta channel version of Chrome, you now have access to monitor and control what other users access through the browser/operating system. “Let’s say you’ve recently purchased the new HP Chromebook 11 and want to share it with your son. He’ll be able to use your Chromebook as a supervised user. This means once you’ve created a supervised user for him on your Chromebook, you’ll be able to visit chrome.com/manage to review a history of web pages he has visited, determine sites that you want to allow or block, and manage permissions for any blocked websites he has requested to view”, says Google’s Pam Green.

The feature is called “Supervised Users” and has been in testing in the Canary build for sometime. Canary, if you aren’t familiar, is the cutting -edge version of the browser that customers can opt for — at their own risk.

google-supervised-users


Get faster subscriptions with Add to Feedly for Chrome



feedly logoWith the death of Google Reader earlier this year, many net denizens were left scrambling for an alternative — and issuing a few choice words to Google upon departure. While countless (exaggeration) alternatives exised, most would up landing on Feedly. In fact, the service did an admirable job scrambling to add bandwidth and servers to face the influx head-on.

While the app does a decent job, there are certainly still complaints to be made about its shortcomings — lack of alphabetical order that results in a chaotic looking feed is mine.

Though that one has not been fixed by Feedly, extension or user script, other tweaks can be made. For instance, how about the ability to add a feed right from the site you are on and without even knowing the RSS address? That is what “Add to Feedly” can do, providing you are using the Chrome web browser.

The extension places an icon in your menu bar that, when clicked from any site, will automatically determine the RSS feed associated with a website and offer you an option to add it to your Feedly subscriptions.

This is one option that helps to soften the Google Reader blow just a bit, by adding a feature that we did not previously have access to in that old RSS program.


New Chromebooks



Chrome logoYesterday on the Chrome blog, Google announced that new Chromebooks from Acer, Asus, HP, and Toshiba were on their way. Arriving in the next few months the new Chromebooks are based on Intel’s Haswell chips rather than the current ARM processors and the chip’s low power consumption will double the battery life.

Chromebook 14These new Chromebooks are (roughly) the third iteration of the laptops and it’s great to see new entrants, Asus and Toshiba, joining the party. HP’s new Chromebook 14 will be out before the holiday season, cost $300 and come in a range of colors. Although Acer will be bringing out a new model as well, there’s no news on whether Samsung will be refreshing its line-up. The eye-watering expensive Pixel seems to remain the only touch-screen model in the range but that could change as details emerge on the new models.

Google quotes that in the sub-$300 computer segment, Chromebooks have taken a little less than a quarter of the market and around 5,000 US schools have also provided Chromebooks to students. For a product that’s just 2 years old, it’s pretty impressive.

I’m looking forward to the new models as I’m currently using a Samsung Chromebook to write this article and I’m bought into a web and cloud-centric view, especially for people who actually want to get stuff done wherever they are. Neat, low-cost, instant-on devices with a keyboard make Chromebooks very handy to have around. More apps are appearing, particularly business ones and if you haven’t considered a Chromebook in the past, you might want to consider one.


Google’s Chrome browser gets Now…sort of



There have been hints and rumors circulating for several weeks that Google would bring its popular Now feature over from Android and into the Chrome web browser. Now, pun-intended, it seems is that time, but only a little bit.

The latest build of Canary, the development channel version of Chrome, has been updated to version 28 and with it comes a Now feature that users can enable. Canary can thankfully be run side-by-side with a stable or beta build of the browser so that users are not forced to run it full-time — a good thing since it can be buggy at times.

Today, when I fired up Canary build 28 and accessed chrome://flags I found the ability to enable Now (it is disabled by default). You will need to scroll all the way to the bottom of the Flags page to find it, as it is the last entry. Click “Enable”, but do not get your hopes up yet. It is early, and so far it does exactly nothing. The Google Now server URL still remains secret, rendering the service useless for the time being.

Still, this means the service is coming to your computer, though I expect it to be less useful here than on an Android device that moves around with you, but it remains to be seen what Google may add to a computer version of it.

google chrome flags


Google Chrome Now Available on iOs



As of today Google Chrome browser is now available on iOs devices. Now you can sync your tabs between your computer, any android device you have and your iOs device. So if you open a tab on your Chrome browser on your desktop, it will be available under Other Devices on your mobile device in almost realtime. I did have to refresh the page for the new url to show up. You go from tab to tab by swiping with one finger and the edge of the page. Like any Chrome browser you can search or type in a url from the same search bar. You can also search in incognito mode. Which means it will not show up in your search history. To get to the incognito tab, other devices, bookmarks, find in page and settings just tap on the icon with four lines in the top left hand corner. You can also email a page directly from the browser by tapping the same icon and then email.

The bad news is that on iOs Google Chrome has to use the Uiwebview engine provided by Apple for all third-party browsers instead of the Apple’s Nitro JavaScript engine. According to the critics, this makes the browser slower than it is on comparative Android devices. It will also be slower than the Safari browser on iOs which does have access to the Nitro JavaScript. Also like all third-party browsers on iOs devices you can’t make it your default browser.

I think that most users will not notice the speed differences, after all we are talking about at the most seconds. The biggest strike against the Chrome browser on iOs is it isn’t the default browser. Unfortunately only Apple can fix this problem and they are unlikely to do that.


CS #9 Productivity Tools



In this episode of Chrome Show I talk about productivity apps and some nice extensions to help you find what you need in a hurry. Make sure you visit the ChromeShow.com website!

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Autocad WS
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CS #8 Chromebook & Chromebox



The Chrome Show is back with a new episode, I talk about new developments in the Chromebook space along with a new entry the Chromebox

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