DigiMantra » Chrome

Google Chrome Frame powering Internet Explorer

Sachin Khosla — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 19:28:21 +0000

Google undoubtedly has been the biggest contributor to make web faster and reliable. Google code has introduced a plugin called ChromeFrame to add open web technologies and Google chrome’s v3 JavaScript engine to the Internet explorer 6,7 and 8. So it does not matter after how long Microsoft is going to add these features to their legacy browsers as after installing Google’s ChromeFrame your web application becomes as responsive as it is in Firefox or other browsers.

With the chromeframe plugin installed web developers will no longer have to wait for browsers to support the new features which they have not got already. Tags like canvas tag in html5 can also be used straight a way if your machine has chromeframe installed.The application in Internet Explorer becomes faster after installing chromeframe.

Getting Started with Google Chrome Frame

All you need to do is type the following tag in top of your html page (inside the head section). When Google Chrome Frame plugin is present the tag is read by the browser and it switches to faster javascript engine. But when the plugin is not installed, the browser simply skips the line, as it does not understand what it is all about.

You can control whether to start Google chrome frame or no. You also have the option to redirect user to download plugin before viewing the particular webpage. It is more like Adobe flash player needed for videos to play.So if you want such a redirect use the following code.(from code.google.com)

But I would suggest you not to redirect user for now until your application is very crucial to run in Javascript and is facing speed interaction issues with Internet Explorer. But I personally feel that using gmail on Internet Explorer has become faster.

Critics

Some believe that it is Google trying to monopolize by taking over Internet Explorer via Chrome Frame. Well it is matter of interpretation, some take it in negative sense and some take in positive. People who are using Internet Explorer all the time and hate its slow page rendering or response time can go forward and install it. It will help them enjoy Internet Explorer more nicely. Google Chrome Frame is just a plugin to make Internet Explorer better.

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

NEWS: Google to launch operating system called CHROME

Sachin Khosla — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 09:48:29 +0000

Google has always taken world by surprises but have never seen such major announcements in this short period of time. Google unveiled google wave and then introduced new features in the Gmail. Yesterday it removed Beta from all of its lab applications and now they have Chrome as an Operating system. At the Google official blog they announced that this OS is going to be named chrome and this is going to be Open Source. They launched Google chrome browser in the end of year 2008, which could not attract more users but 30 million

Browser is something which we used inside the OS but we are here talking about the OS, which means other than Windows, MAC , Linux , Solaris etc we will have another known as Chrome. Google’s products are undoubtedly fast, reliable and free (most of them). So Google already has its market and the estimated target users set. Google said it right, when the Operating Systems were designed their base was put taking in context how to run an OS on a PC, but today we need operating systems, which should be web enabled and should specifically be designed taking in context that WEB is going to be its major component. A look at the perecentage of users from my various operating systems which visit Digimantra

Various OS percentage of visitors at Digimantra

In the first phase they are launching this for Netbooks and later this year i.e. 2009 they are going to release Notebooks which already have this Chrome OS bundled. They also plan to open-source the code, so that developers get hands on it. After mid 2010 the OS should be there in market for consumers, then harware giants like Dell, IBM, HP can think of making an OEM versions of it .

The operating system, Chrome, by google is going to be light, powerful, secure and Fast. I am sure about this light feature, because they are launching it through Netbooks and they claim this is going to be a natural extension of Google Chrome. Target is to boot the system up pretty faster, an example would be www.google.com loads faster comapred to other search engines, until others optimized or chopped of their search pages like google

Talking about platform independence and its the Core base of the operating system, Chrome, google has to say the following :

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

Google is going to change the way we start our laptops and browse internet. It would be pretty simple, fast and secure

Lets all from the open-source community join hands with Google and change the computer world.

Note : I am not going to remark anythere about Windows Vs Chrome, because this is a big comparison and a seperate post will suffice the readers

Stay Digified !!
Sachin Khosla

Detect chrome using php

Sachin Khosla — Wed, 08 Oct 2008 04:48:41 +0000

The other day i was coding arround and i found that i need to know if the user is using the new shiny browser chrome. So for that i wrote a small snippet and wanted to share with you guys. Here is how we do in php.

function is_chrome()
{
return(eregi("chrome", $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT']));
}
 
if(is_chrome())
{
// do something if its chrome
 
echo 'You are using Google Chrome Browser.';
}

cheers !!
Realin !

Webkit released a faster Javascript Engine

Sachin Khosla — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 17:43:56 +0000

Continuing to the browser’s war, after the pre-mature release of Google’s chrome WebKit announced its own much faster javascript engine. Chrome supported new V8 javascript engine. However, WebKit is an open source project which forms the basis of both Chrome and Apple’s Safari browser, has released the latest version of its own JavaScript engine, SquirrelFish Extreme. Google replace this SquirrelFish engine with its all new V8 Javascript engine to utilize latest multicore processor technologies and its predecessors.

Contrary to google’s belief to deliver high-speed browsing, some of the benchmark results proved that, google’s V8 Javascript Engine is slower than the one WebKit has. i used SunSpider benchmark to test the latest version of WebKit against Google’s Chrome. The results are quite impressive. WebKit with SquirrelFish Extreme finished the benchmark in 1235ms while Chrome needed 1598ms.

Can’t paste the result here though, but what i can perceive is that google has to work a lot harder if it wants to give some tough time to its competitors like Firefox and WebKit (the heart of all browsers).

Cheers!!

Realin !

Google Chrome : Change default download location

Sachin Khosla — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 08:54:23 +0000

Well its again about google chrome, its the in thing these days mayne..

So sparyk !! you wanna change the default download location of the new light-weight but seems to be powerful browser chrome. well here you go..

1. Open Google Chrome.(that sounded common, eh ?)

2. Click the wrench icon in the upper-right corner of the toolbar and select Options.

3. Go to the Minor Tweaks tab. In the Download location section, click the Browse button and locate the desired download directory. If you want to have more control over where each file is downloaded to, check the Ask where to save each file before downloading checkbox.

That should do the trick .

cheers !!

Realin !

v8: an open source javascript Engine

Sachin Khosla — Wed, 17 Sep 2008 05:24:37 +0000

hiya,

v8 javascript engine lies at the heart of Google’s browser Chrome and claims to be reason for its faster processing of javascript code.

Here is what wiki has to say for it

The V8 JavaScript engine is an open source JavaScript engine developed by Google in Denmark and shipping with the Google Chrome browser.

It increases performance by compiling JavaScript to native machine code before running it, rather than to a bytecode or interpreting it. Thus, JavaScript applications will run at the speed of a compiled binary.

Share more if you got ..

cheers !!

Realin !