The Google browser has nearly fifty million users; and that is only a fraction of all Google users on the Internet the world over. Google loses only a small portion of its potential Chrome advertising income, if people download an ad-blocking application. Firefox today has 7 million installations of its ad blocking software. It is not really that likely that ad-blocking will get so popular, that the Internet ad-serving industry should just go bankrupt. Google’s sentiment is that to live in fear of being shut out of its market, is kind of a primitive; to embrace the whole dynamic of the market, is more appropriate of a responsible Internet citizen. Perhaps this will foster creativity, and make people put up more creative, and watchable advertising.

Extensions are small programs that are added to Google Chrome to modify existing features and customize the way it works. From today, all developers in Google Chrome will get extension support enabled by default which was previously hidden behind the developer flag.

Boodman explains this clearly in the blog – “Removing the flag is the first step in our launch process, and it means we’re ready for a few more people to start using extensions– the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel. For this release, we focused on getting most of the basic infrastructure and security pieces in place, in particular our new permission system. However, you should still be cautious and only install extensions from developers you trust.” As he says, a developer has to be cautious while installing extensions from a third party.

Visit this page to download the dev channel.

The article will help you make your site compatible with Google chrome.

Detecting Google Chrome

Google Chrome is a web-kit based browser. Hence, if your site is compatible with web-kit based browsers like Safari, then your site will look good in Google Chrome as well. If it is not, then your site may not recognize Chrome’s user-string.

Google has given the following solution for this issue:
As platforms and browsers adopt WebKit as their rendering engine, your site can detect and support them automatically with the right JavaScript checks. Commonly, sites use JavaScript to ‘sniff’ the navigator.userAgent property for “Chrome” or “Safari”, but you should use proper object detection if possible. In fact, Gmail has been detecting WebKit properly in Chrome since day one!

If you must detect the user-agent type, you can use this simple JavaScript to detect WebKit:

var isWebkit = navigator.userAgent.indexOf(“AppleWebKit”) > -1;

Or, if you want to check that the version of WebKit is at least a certain version—say, if you want to use a spiffy new WebKit feature:
var webkitVersion = parseFloat(navigator.userAgent.split(“AppleWebKit/”)[1]) ||
undefined;
if (webkitVersion && webkitVersion > 500 ) {
// use spiffy WebKit feature here
}
For reference, here are a few browser releases and the version of WebKit they shipped:

We do not recommend adding “Google” or “Apple” to your navigator.vendor checks to detect WebKit or Google Chrome, because this will not detect other WebKit or Chromium-based browsers!

Display Content
Google Chrome can render content correctly, only when content and character encoding declaration information are provided at the top of your document’s source. Also it doesn’t read encoding information that’s declared with document.write (). If your site has frames or i-frames, then specify the encoding information at the top of the source of those frames.

Popup
Google Chrome will display only the title bar of pop-ups in the lower-right section of the browser window, in order to prevent undesired pop-ups from covering the page. If needed, users can view a pop-up’s content by dragging its title bar into a more visible position.

Scripts
Google Chrome supports only Netscape Plug-in Application Programming Interface (NPAPI) instead of ActiveX. Hence, if you want to load ActiveX control, specify the NPAPI version of the plug-in.

Do we really need more browsers? Yes, because it can add more value for users and help them drive innovation on the web. This article gives some information about the latest browsers.

Google chrome beta web browser:

Advantage: Nice look and feel, fast, tabbed browsing, advanced security.

Security: Google promises that the Chrome is extremely secure. There’s a privacy mode called “Incognito” in Chrome. It allows you to secure the Pages whatever you view in the main window by not displaying in your browser history or search history, and it won’t leave other traces, like cookies, on your computer after you close the incognito window.

Usability: It has a single box for Search, history and address bar.

It facilitates tabbed browsing. Tabs are positioned at the top of the window. This will make the navigation faster and easier. Apart from this, Chrome displays 9 most visited web sites and sites most often searched on the home page.

Performance: Chrome uses a new JavaScript engine called V8 for faster performance.

It is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer

Drawbacks: Its major drawback is poor performance, particularly when users open multiple web pages.

Internet Explorer 8 beta:

Advantage: Tremendous browser leader in full functionality.

Security: It has a great option called InPrivate browsing for extra secure when browsing the web. It helps to prevent your browsing history, temporary Internet files, form data, cookies when you’re using someone else’s computer or using a public computer.

Usability: It facilitates search suggestions. As user searches for a keyword, relevant images and text is displayed which allows user to get single-click access to the web page without having to leave the Search box.

Tabs in IE8 have been improved to provide a good platform for easy browsing experience. Here tabs are automatically grouped together using color codes belonging to the same site.

It has a nifty feature called Web Slices. It facilitates to add just a portion of a web page (like sports scores, weather report) to your favorites and keep updated by clicking on the slice

Performance: Accelerators enables you to access directly from the webpage in the context of what you are doing, letting you bookmark, email, map and more with a simple selection.

Drawbacks: Its biggest drawback is designed strictly to industrial standards, and web sites that use deprecated HTML or designed with reduced functionality.

Here is the comparison chart for Google Chrome and Internet Explorer 8.