Embedded PDF viewer in Chrome

Thursday, November 4, 2010 | 9:20 AM

With every Google Chrome release, we hope to bring new features and improvements that will make your life on the web speedier, simpler, and more secure. Today, we’re excited to introduce the integrated PDF viewer to the beta channel.

PDF is a popular file format that’s used for delivering documents on the web (such as the IRS W-4 tax form). To open a PDF document, you’d typically need to install additional software or a browser plug-in in order to view it in a web browser. With the integrated Chrome PDF viewer now available in Chrome’s beta, you can open a PDF document in Chrome without installing additional software. The PDF document will load as quickly and seamlessly as a normal web page in the browser.

Just like we do with web pages viewed in Chrome, we’ve built in an additional layer of securitycalled the “sandbox” around the Chrome PDF viewer to help protect you from malware and security attacks that are targeted at PDF files. For now, the Chrome PDF viewer is available only in the beta channel, but we look forward to adding more polish and features, as well as making it widely available in the stable channel soon.

Posted by John Abd-El-Malek, Software Engineer

http://chrome.blogspot.com/

How to speed up Google Chrome

Disables usage statistics of Google Chrome

This option is used to help in Development of Google chrome, It send your usage data to Google so that based on that they can further improve Chrome. But if you are worried about system performance you should disable it . To disable this go to tools menu > Options > Advanced and uncheck the check box which says Send usage data to Google….

Disable DNS Preload in Google Chrome

This will prevent Google chrome to keep DNS info in their cache. Most of time it is unnecessary if you have a good connection of at least 256kbps or more. It is recommended only for slow dial up connection or Mobile users who actually spend a lot f time in DNS query during browsing. to disable this select tools menu of Google Chrome and select “Options.” In the next window, go to the “Advanced” tab and uncheck the “Use DNS preload ….”


Disable anti-phishing filter

If you are advanced web user and you know how a phishing site look like or you know how to prevent from them you can disable this option. But if you are not at all comfortable working without phishing filters or don;t want to take risk you should keep it as it is . Disabling this not only saves your CPU time but also save your Internet bandwidth. This option can also be disabled from Tools Menu > Options > Advanced.

Removes navigational data regularly

All of the browsers cache the Navigation data and other info for faster access to web pages you frequently visit. But if your cache size is big or it contains very old pages which you hardly visit once or twice in a month it will start performing negative for you, as web pages will load faster but they Browsers perform worse when navigation data is saved. So it is important to remove navigational data frequently. To delete this in Chrome, go to Tools menu and choose the option “Remove navigation data” and choose “Delete data for this period” and not the option “All”. So it will remove old data and will keep recent data do this once in a week at least.

Disable Useless function which we don’t use normally –


To options that are mentioned below you need to edit the properties of Chrome shortcut which you are using to start the browser. To Change it, right click on the Chrome icon and choose “Properties.” this will open a windows with the “Shortcut” tab, in this tab there is a box called “Destination”. You have to change things in this box itself.

E.g. To disable Java box,

if you are using Windows Vista it should go like this — : “C:Users\AppDataLocalGoogleChromeApplicationchrome.exe -disable-java”
and if you are using Windows XP: “C:Documents and Settings%username% Local SettingsApplication DataGoogleChrome.exe”
The options which we are adding after the full path of chrome can be used one after the other leaving a space between. You don’t need to write the entire path every time you are using a new options. Here are the option which can be used -

Disable-dev-tools – This will disable Developers tool which is not used by a normal user for sure.

Disable-logging – This will disable looging of browser activity, This log files are useful only in case of Crash or Other error which prevent you from using browsers. if you are experiencing any such problem and need to know the reason you can enable this option. but in general you don’t need these log files. By disabling this you will certainly save CPU RAM and Hard disk space.

Disable-metrics-system – This option will disable gathering of Usage Statistics data. This is used by Google and we don’t need it any how so you can safely disable this option.

Disable-metrics-reporting – If you disabled Metrics system there is no point in keeping Metrics reporting On, as there won’t be any data to send across. Disable it for sure.

Disable-java – Java on the web is rarely used these days and it greatly slow downs your browsers performance. If you not running any online application which uses Java or Java Applets you can safely disable this feature. This will prevent you from playing number of Online Java Games though. (like Yahoo Games)

Disable-java script – This will disable all kinds of JavaScript from being run on the web pages you visit. This is not recommended at all as most of the sites these days are using some kind of JavaScript, to display pages. By Disabling JavaScript you will not be able to see these site properly and they will behave improprly. This is why disabling JavaScript is not recommended.

Disable-plugins – This will disable all plugins including Flash player and other media player. After applying this modification you won’t be able to see a lot of media sites properly including YouTube. If you understand impact of disabling this go ahead and do it otherwise don;t use this option.

Disable-images – This will disable all images on all Webpages you browse, if you are using low bandwidth conection like GPRS or Dial Up it will be very useful for you as it will save a lot of bandwidth for you. This will make your browser an text only browser. So be sure you need it that way before making these changes.

http://www.pchijack.com/internet/tips-to-speed-up-google-chrome/

Chrome 8.0 Bugs and features

Google Chrome 8.0 recently graduated to the Dev Channel, but the development process needs to move extremely fast, if the final version of Chrome 7.0’s successor will be wrapped up and offered to users in approximately six weeks.


In this regard, Chrome 8.0 Beta is just around the corner. The Mountain View-based search giant is already gearing up to build the first Beta development milestone of Chrome 8.0.




For the time being however, early adopters and developers will need to content themselves with test driving the Dev channel release of Chrome 8.0, which went live on October 12th, 2010.


In a note shared with the developers working on Chrome, Google’s Jason Kersey emphasized the need to accelerate the efforts around the Beta Build.

The pressure put on devs to move as fast as possible is related to the six week major release process pace imposed by Google.

“As part of our goal to make the 6 week release cycle feasible, we are working to keep developers time spent on each release branch as short as possible,” Kersey stated.


“This allows for more feature and bug work on the trunk, and more coverage of the trunk with dev channels. To achieve this, I'm working to shorten the beta cycle for this release as much as possible.


“To do that means two things, less focus on non-blocker bugs, and (hopefully) quicker resolution of blocker bugs.”


Earlier this week, the Mountain View search giant managed to deliver the stable version of Chrome 7.0 right on time.


Users can now download Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 through both the Stable and Beta channels for Windows, Mac, and Linux.


At the same time, Google is also looking to the future and the company is already talking about Chrome 9.0.


Chromium 9.0 will be the first to be offered to early adopters, with Chrome 9.0 Dev and Beta following.


"We are aiming to get our first beta candidate in hand by the end of the week, and fixing this list of bugs is what blocks us from that," Kersey added.

Google Chrome 9 and GPU Acceleration

Google confirm the release 9 of Chrome will add GPU Acceleration like Firefox 4 and Internet Explorer 9.

Some features expected in release 8.0 will be develop in next release of BigG browser

With the release of the first versions of Chrome 7, we noticed a subtle speed increase in graphics-heavy websites and suggested that Google is improving Chrome’s overall graphics performance. Our readers later found that GPU acceleration can already be manually activated in Chrome. Google has now officially confirmed that “there’s been a lot of work going on to overhaul Chromium’s graphics system” and that the browser will “begin to take advantage of the GPU to speed up its entire drawing model.”




It is the feature that Microsoft has been promoting for several months for its upcoming IE9 beta and a feature that is about to be activated in Firefox 4 Beta (5) early next month. Browser are beginning to take advantage of the multithreading capabilities of graphics processors to speed up their 2D and 3D performance. Google said that the functionality has been integrated in the “tip-of-tree Chromium” lately and the team “figured it was time for a primer.” Google says that it will be using the GPU to “speed up its entire drawing model, including many common 2D operations such as compositing and image scaling.”

The foundation of the GPU acceleration in Chrome is a new (modified) sandbox process called the GPU process. Via this process, Chrome can take graphics commands from the renderer process and send them to OpenGL or Direct3D. This approach enabled Google to separate the rendering of a web page into different independent layers, such as CSS, images, videos, and WebGL or 2D canvases. While some layers can be rendered on the GPU already, such as WebGL, others still depend on the CPU (text, images). Google says that blending the layers again by using the CPU would have erased all GPU speed gains, so Chromium now combines the layers by using the GPU. You can try this already simply by launching Chromium with the -enable-accelerated-compositing flag switch (make launch the browser from the command line menu and use the switch as an extension. Example: C:\Users\Wolfgang\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -enable-accelerated-compositing)




Google said that it plans on offloading more and more work onto the GPU to “achieve impressive speedups”. Details are provided in a separate document on Google’s site.

The latest Nightly Builds of Chrome (Chromium) have also been equipped with a new “labs” feature that is apparently designed to deliver experimental features. It can be accessed via an about:labs command in the URL bar and shows, in this latest version (Chromium 7.0.508.0 Build 57738) vertically organized tabs on the left side of the screen, which resembles the navigation structure of a website. It’s an interesting concept if you have a widescreen monitor that can accommodate side tabs, but it may be a rather useless feature on smartphones or even netbooks. I personally like Mozilla’s Tab Candy (Panorama) approach to organize tabs much better.

http://www.conceivablytech.com/2463/products/google-confirms-chrome-7-gpu-acceleration/