My goal with these configuration changes is to get Chrome to expose less attack surface to potentially malicious web pages, and to be less chatty on the network. Palmer works at Google on Chrome security.]]>
We confirmed with each employee that sensitive data, such as social security and bank account numbers, were only entered on secure, reputable websites. Despite employees having entered this information on secure websites, Chrome saved copies of this data in the History Provider Cache. Other SQLite databases of interest include “Web Data” and “History.” On Windows machines, these files are located at %localappdata%\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\.
Chrome browser data is unprotected, and can be read by anyone with physical access to the hard drive, access to the file system, or simple malware. As with its passwords-easily-available flaw, Google says the answer is to not let people get at your machine, and to encrypt your whole hard drive. For a browser that's hard to crack remotely, Chrome is surprisingly vulnerable to some head-on attacks.]]>
Here’s what you can expect with new Chrome Apps:
• Work offline: Keep working or playing, even when you don’t have an internet connection.
• More app, less Chrome: No tabs, buttons or text boxes mean you can get into the app without being distracted by the rest of the web.
• Connect to the cloud: Access and save the documents, photos and videos on your hard drive as well as on Google Drive and other web services.
What is the point of this, other than giving Google more things either to support or abandon? The world isn't short of photo editors or to-do lists - two of the apps it touts here.]]>
Bear in mind the apps in this vision will be truly cross-platform as they’ll run on any Windows, Mac or Linux computer with Chrome installed. If it can get developers on board — and those I spoke with at Google I/O are ready to embrace the effort — Google will have a thriving desktop platform built on top of the platforms created by others. But it will be a desktop that’s far more agile, with new features added within days or weeks, not months or years.
Welcome to Chrome, my desktop today and your desktop of the future. It depends more on how much people want web apps that might or might not run offline, and might or might not have a better UI than a native app, on their desktop. Other than that, solid.]]>
Not really.
While you can certainly read the source code, we're fully aware that actually tracking and understanding a modern HTML renderer is extremely difficult. In addition, the first changes we will make are intended specifically to break compatibility with WebKit, so the only organisation with sufficient resources to track our changes will no longer be able to do so.
In practice, this allows us to call the project "open" while simultaneously ensuring Google will be the only effective contributor to the Chrome and Blink source now and in the future. We've had enormous success co-opting the language of open source in the past to imply our products are better, and we aim to continue with that strategy. ]]>
And yet, the more obvious question is why would Google want to be in the hardware business? Isn’t being a web-focused company implicitly suggesting that hardware is a commodity to be farmed off to perpetually impoverished and violently abused OEMs?
The truth is quite different from this. Samsung currently makes far more operating profit from Android phones than Google does from all its operations. Oh, you knew that already?]]>
According to Twitter users, sites such as The New York Times, The Huffington Post, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and many others were being blocked by Google's Chrome browser with warnings about possible malware - malicious software that could infect a user's computer -- emanating from Netseer.
However..."This morning at approximately 5:30 a.m. Pacific time, our third-party hosted corporate website(netseer.com) was hacked and infected with malware. Consequently, Google added our domain to the list of malware-affected websites. Our operations team went into all-hands-on-deck mode and we have successfully cleaned the site of the malware issue," spokeswoman Kathleen Formidoni said.]]>Because the company's corporate site and ad-serving infrastructure share the same domain, the block Google served to keep malware placed on Netseer's website from spreading also affected ads Netseer placed on other sites. However, "the malware was never served into ad serving stream," Formidoni wrote in an email.
Acer, which last week announced a NT$3.5bn ($120m) write-off on the value of its Gateway, Packard Bell and eMachines brands that pushed it into losses, is looking for alternatives as Windows-based computers struggle amid rising popularity of tablets and smartphones. Global computer industry shipments dropped 6.4 percent in the fourth quarter despite Microsoft’s latest operating system being released during the period, according to IDC Corp.
“Windows 8 itself is still not successful,” said Wong, whose company posted a 28% drop in fourth-quarter shipments from a year earlier. “The whole market didn’t come back to growth after the Windows 8 launch, that’s a simple way to judge if it is successful or not.” Also: won't release any Windows RT devices before autumn. Instead, it's getting into the smartphone business.]]>
The problems were short-lived, but widespread. Over at Hacker News — a news discussion site that tends to attract Silicon Valley’s most knowledgeable software developers — a long thread quickly filled up with dozens of crash reports. “My Chrome has been crashing every ten minutes for the last half hour,” wrote one poster.
This may be a first. Bad webpage coding can often cause a browser to crash, but yesterday’s crash looks like something different: widespread crashing kicked off by a web service designed to help drive your browser.
Think of it as the flip side of cloud computing. Google’s pitch has always been that its servers are easier to use and less error-prone than buggy desktop software. But the Sync problem shows that when Google goes down, it can not only keep you from getting your e-mail — it can knock desktop software such as a browser offline too.]]>
When Do Not Track is enabled in a browser, it signals to Websites and to advertisers that the user doesn't want to be followed around the web for ad targeting purposes. Ad networks and sites aren't required to comply, but several of them do, and the U.S. government is now pressuring more companies to play along, including Google.]]>
And you cannot make those nagging messages go away. Any visit to a page in the Blogger content-editing interface results in this nag screen, and although you can dismiss the message, it will keep coming back until you finally decide that the headache isn't worth it and click the "try Google Chrome" link that Google has helpfully provided for you.
This is how monopolies work. Google's competitive position in online advertising is so impenetrable that Microsoft was forced earlier this week to take a $6.2-billion write-off as an acknowledgment that its $6-billion acquisition of Aquantive in 2007 had failed to make a dent in AdWords, DoubleClick, and other Google-owned advertising networks.
Opera has negligible market share in desktop computing, tallying only 1.6% and 1.77% in the latest numbers from Net Market Share and StatCounter, respectively.
But it's a mark of pure arrogance from a company that isn't afraid to act like Microsoft (1998) when it needs to muscle out a competitor.
The Google roadblock for Opera is crude. If you change the User-Agent string for Opera so that it identifies itself as Google Chrome, the Blogger editing and management screens work perfectly. It's the last paragraph that's the killer there. Behaviour first noticed by Bob Leggitt. "First they came for the Opera users, and I said nothing…"]]>
The dispute over usage numbers isn't new: In March, Roger Capriotti, director of IE marketing, made his company's strongest case up to then for the data published by Net Applications, and dismissed the numbers from Irish metrics company StatCounter because of what he labeled omissions and flaws in the latter's methodology. Net Applications says IE is still miles ahead, at more than 50%. StatCounter says Chrome has edged ahead.]]>
I also do a lot of photo editing and uploading, which Chrome OS just isn't suited for; there's a photo editor, but if you want to do more than crop or rotate a photo, you'll need a separate app. There are online photo editors — I used Aviary a lot while using the Chromebook — but they're neither as powerful nor as usable as iPhoto or Lightroom.
I suspect I'm in the minority, though, and for most people Chrome OS would be totally sufficient. Non-owners of Chromebooks, what say you?]]>
Don't think Google will do it? It's already started releasing extensions that integrate Google+ into Chrome. I suspect that these extensions are just precursors to their eventual integration into Chrome.
Facebook may be king of the Web right now, but the browser is still the gateway users must pass through to access the Web. Facebook can't allow Google to control how 30.9 percent of its users access its Web site, especially as its ally (and investor) Microsoft continues to falter in the browser wars.
Facebook could try to counter Chrome with Facebook integration in IE, but it wouldn't be the game-changing move Facebook needs to put Google on the defensive. The only way Facebook can knock Google off its feet is to build its own browser and use its massive reach to promote it.]]>