Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don't need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google's servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new "Content Settings" option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn't easy. While these new features aren't available for Mac and Linux users yet, it's likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

Before today, bookmarks in Chrome for Mac were unbearable. Now they are a joy to click, drag around, delete and rename. The only remaining problem I see? Major issues with Adobe Flash. Is there anything else you wish was fixed in Chrome?

Like other Chrome extensions we love to play with, this one is lightweight, fast and useful. There's no bulky sidebar here. Bookmarks can be created and saved with a miniscule "TAG" button and they can be searched from Chrome's excellent omnibar. So, do you think this will prompt loyal Delicious users - many of whom had been holding out on Chrome in favor of Firefox - to switch to Google Chrome entirely?

While this extension doesn't have all the bells and whistles of some of Delicious' other browser add-ons, the team noted that the public demand for a Chrome extension prompted them to release a beta earlier than they would have liked.

"It doesn't have all the API's needed and it's missing a good chunk of the functionality we believe it needs, but we're getting so many requests for the Chrome extension that we're going to make this available sooner than we originally planned...

"As soon as Chrome is able to support the functionality needed we'll ensure the features of this extension matches that of our other browser add-ons. There are still some interactions we're not quite happy with that we'll address shortly, but we wanted to give you an official Google Chrome extension as soon as possible."

What do you think? Does the new Delicious extension make you want to use Chrome more? Or if you're a Chrome fan, does this move give you a renewed interest in Delicious? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.

Preparing for Chrome OS?

It makes sense for Google to enable geolocation for Chrome, especially given the impending release of the Chrome OS, which will also benefit from these new features. Mozilla already offers a built-in location API for Firefox and with Geosense for Windows, Windows 7 developers can now also make use of Google's Geolocation API in their native apps.

Location for Every Browser

Thanks to the current efforts by most browser developers, location APIs will soon become ubiquitous and hopefully more developers will make use of them. While a number of mobile apps for the iPhone, for example, now make use of the location feature in the mobile version of Safari, only a small number of browser-based apps are currently aware of your location. While using WiFi location isn't quite as precise as using a GPS, the precision is usually much better than relying on a user's IP address.

For more of our thoughts about location as a platform, also have a look at this post: The Era of Location-as-Platform Has Arrived.

What part of the world has the highest percentage of people who use the best browser available, Google's Chrome? Good job, South America, you're number one. North America isn't just #1 in I.E. use (not that there's anything wrong with that), we're also in last place for Chrome and Firefox. Check out the chart below.

What's the takeaway here? At the very least it means that we North Americans should remember where we stand in terms of online sophistication by our mainstream population, relative to some other places in the world.

Chrome for Mac was introduced in December and, to many people's dismay, did not support extensions. This latest version not only brings extensions to the Mac, but browser syncing for keeping your bookmarks organized and with you, wherever you may go.

For most people, the update should happen automatically. If you're wondering if it has already happened for you, simply look under "About". If you have version 5.0.307 you're ready to go.

The new extensions support makes installing extensions simple and quick. This feature should help Chrome to continue grabbing an ever larger piece of the browser market. It currently sits at about 6%, holding the No. 3 spot behind Internet Explorer and Firefox.

For some good background on Chrome and extensions, read Marshall Kirpatrick's "5 Cool Things to Know About Google Chrome Extensions".

If you've found yourself in the terrible position of having a broken version of Chrome and you don't want to uninstall and start over from scratch, you can instead launch Chrome using "incognito mode", which disables extensions and allows you to disable the bad apple extensions.

Setting up a shortcut to launch Chrome in incognito mode is a simple four-step process:

1. We recommend first making a copy of your shortcut, that way you can access the browser normally too, once you've fixed whatever problem you're experiencing.


2. Find your copied Chrome shortcut, right click on it and select "Properties".


3. Select the "Target" field and append "--incognito" to the end of the command.


4. Click "Apply" and then "Okay" to save your changes.

Now, all you have to do is double click on the edited shortcut to enter into a "Safe Mode"-style Chrome. From here, all you'll need to do is enter "chrome://extensions/" (minus the quotes) into the browser's navigation bar to edit the extensions.

If you're unsure which extension broke Chrome's back, simply disable them all and switch back and forth between incognito Chrome and regular Chrome until you break it again.

And while we're speaking of Chrome extensions, we recommend going and getting the ReadWriteWeb extension to keep up to date with everything we post here. After all, if your Chrome shuts down from extension overload, now you know how to fix it.

Unlike similar projects like Arc90's TBuzz bookmarklet, the extension doesn't connect to your own Twitter account, so you can't tweet and retweet from within the extension.

While it doesn't offer any advanced features, Twitter Reactions is a quick and easy way to see what the twittersphere is saying about any site. If you are not using Chrome, also give TBuzz a try.

[via Lifehacker]

Greasemonkey, previously only a Firefox add-on, lets you customize the way a website is displayed using small bits of Javascript, and we're excited to see it added to one of the faster, tidier browsers available.

Greasemonkey scripts perform a variety of nifty little functions, from autofilling Twitter usernames to hiding links on Digg that you've already dugg.

While users were able to manually install Greasemonkey scripts before Chrome 4, this latest version provides native support and one-click installation. We gave it a quick test run and everything was just as advertised. Pick a Greasemonkey script, read up on it, and if you decide you like it and trust it, click install. Voila!

We'd been expecting this development since December, when we noticed that Boodman had been hired onto the Chrome Extensions team. It looks like the day has finally come. If you'll excuse us, we have a couple thousand new browser tweaks we need to go check out.

The concept for an incentive program is not new, as Google notes in its blog post. It's based on a similar venture created by the folks at Mozilla, the organization behind the Firefox Web browser. Like Mozilla, Google's rewards also start at $500 for most issues. The payment of $1,337 - a nod to the geeky Internet slang called "leet speak" - will be reserved only for critical bugs that would have had a major impact if left unpatched.

Participating researchers are asked not to publicly disclose the bug prior to reporting to Google. According to the company, responsible disclosure is a two-way street and Google admits their job will be to fix the reported issues in a reasonable time frame.

Currently, the program only encompasses the work being done in Chromium and the Google Chrome Web browser, but not in third-party plug-ins such as those found in any of the newly launched Chrome extensions. Bugs that take advantage of vulnerabilities in the base operating system of the computer running the Web browser will also be ineligible.

Those interested in contributing to this new program can file their bugs using the Chromium bug tracker. Only the first researcher to report the issue will receive the reward. To kick off the program, the first developer or development team to earn the cash will receive a little notoriety for their actions - they'll be featured on the company's releases blog. Future contributions will be credited in the appropriate Google Chrome release notes section and some developers may even be featured in the Google Security thank you section of the corporate website itself.

Google first made extensions for Chrome available in a developer release in December. Since then, developers have created over 1,500 extensions for Chrome. Some of the most popular include an extension that checks your GMail for new messages, an extension that allows users to open certain sites in an Internet Explorer window inside Chrome, as well as various ad blockers. Google also just updated its own Google Voice extension for Chrome.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, some of our personal favorites include Type-ahead find and the Google Similar Pages extension.

For now, the only stable version of Chrome that supports bookmarks and extensions is the Windows version. If you want to use extensions on the Mac, you will have to switch to the developer preview channel. For Linux users, extensions are already enabled in the beta channel.

Bookmark Sync

Starting today, the stable version of Chrome will also feature Google's bookmark sync. We reported that Google was planning this feature last August and the first version to support bookmark syncing was released in early November. Right now, this feature only supports the syncing of bookmarks, but as our own Sarah Perez pointed out last year, the infrastructure is flexible enough to also allow Google to sync other data (passwords, favorite sites on the New Tab page or your browser history) in real time.

With Weave, Mozilla is working on a similar project. For the time being, however, this is just an extension and not a core feature of Firefox.

Pay to Play: H.264 and its $5 Million per Year Fee

According to Mozilla's vice president of engineering, Mike Shaver, this issue is more than a simple choice about picking the right technology for the job. It's about principles. Supporting the H.264 video codec means paying licensing fees to an organization called MPEG-LA, a group that charges $5,000,000 annually for the codec's use. But it's not the cost to their organization that Mozilla is worried about - it's the cost to the developers, distributors, and anyone who wants to create video content on the web. "If H.264 becomes an accepted part of the standardized web, those fees are a barrier to entry for developers of new browsers," Shaver writes on his blog. "I want to make sure that there are no toll-booth barriers to entry for someone building a whole new browser, or bringing a browser to a whole new device or OS, or making and using tools for creating standard web content."

In other words, the decision to support or not support the codec isn't just about technology, it's about where the web is going and what it should be. And in Mozilla's eyes, that means free, open, and available to anyone.

But Will End Users Care?

Unfortunately, Mozilla's idealism won't mean much to the end user who may soon discover that YouTube videos don't work in their preferred browser. And once they learn that switching browsers solves the problem, the years they spent loyal to Firefox will be forgotten in the need to have functional video.

Interestingly enough, one of the browsers where the H.264 encoded videos will work is Google Chrome, the up-and-coming browser that's also the basis for Google's new web-based operating system, Google Chrome OS, due out later this year. The new browser is already nearing a 5% market share as of December (according to Net Applications) - a notable chunk given Chrome's lack of support for Mac and Linux-based machines until only last month. Ironically, it's Google, typically fellow supporters of an open web, that is pushing the H.264 format's adoption. Their choice to move forward with this codec on YouTube, a Google-owned property, has a major impact on the web as a whole.

There's Still Hope

But even though it looks as if Google's choice is pushing the web towards this pricey format, Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla's Open Source Evangelist, reveals there's still hope. According to an article in The Guardian, Blizzard says that there's a chance that H.264 will not be Google's final choice in the matter. There's good reason to believe that Google is purchasing On2, a technology whose capabilities exceed that of H.264, he says. If that occurs, Google will likely license it royalty-free. Whether or not Google does so remains to be seen, of course, but we hope that Google will remember their motto, "don't be evil" when the time comes. Until then, Mozilla stands alone at a crossroads, sticking by their principles, supporting the open web...even if that choice one day leads to their downfall.

New Features

Along with the focus on speed - an area where Opera used to lead before WebKit-based browsers like Safari and Chrome became popular - the company also included a number of other enhancement in this early version of 10.5. Windows 7 and Vista users, for example, will notice that the browser is now closely integrated with the desktop environment and makes use of features like Aero Glass in Vista and Aero Peek and Jump Lists in Windows 7. On the Mac, Opera can now make use of multi-touch gestures like the three-finger swipe and Growl notifications.

Other new features include a new "private tab" and "private window" mode that actually works far better than similar features in other browsers. You just have to right-click on the tab bar and select "private tab" to start the private browsing mode in this new tab, for example.

Opera also updated the look and feel of the browser's in-line page search and password manager.

It's All About Speed

The focus for Opera, however, is clearly not so much on bringing new features to the browser (the current Alpha doesn't even support Opera Unite, for example), but on testing the new JavaScript engine. When we spoke to CEO Jon von Tetzchner about the state of the browser during LeWeb earlier this month, he stressed that the company was very focused on improving the speed of the browser. He did say, however, that the JavaScript engine was only a small part of this effort and that the company was also looking at other bottlenecks that are slowing the browser down. The fact that that the new image rendering engine is already pre-wired for hardware acceleration is a good example for this (though the feature isn't turned on yet). We will bring you more of our interview with von Tetzchner after the holidays.

In our own tests, Opera performed remarkably well and this new version clearly shows that it would be unwise to underestimate Opera in the browser wars. We should note, however, that this is still a very early alpha version and that the browser is likely to crash occasionally.

Love or hate the government intervention, it's notable to see which browsers are about to get a big boost in user numbers. The EU says increased viability in the browser market will lead to more competition and more innovation. Here are the companies that will get a first crack at new levels of market viability in Europe.

On the Front Page - The Best Known 5

The first page of the Choice Screen, which users will be presented with when they first turn on their computers or when they click a link for it later, will feature whichever five browsers have the largest market share over the previous six months. Microsoft will begin showing the page to users in March, 2010.

Right now the top five will include, in the order listed on an EU page about the program:

• Apple Safari - that's right, even for Windows!


• Google Chrome - so soon. If Chrome can grow so fast, it makes you wonder if government intervention is really needed. Of course, Chrome has been promoted prominently on Google pages. That could become part of the next antitrust issue.


• Microsoft Internet Explorer - gets better all the time, even with dominant market share. Couldn't the EU just require people to stop using IE 6?


• Mozilla Firefox - the classic that's most effectively challenged IE. In fact, it's done so pretty effectively. Too bad Chrome now runs circles around its performance.


• Opera - loved by mobile users, loved by Europeans.

Below the Fold - The Smaller Challengers

Users will be able to scroll the Choice Screen horizontally and see the next 7 most popular browsers at the time. Here's who the EU lists as those browsers today.

• AOL - chuckle if you will, but AOL is doing a lot of innovative work with social networks and lifestreaming these days.
• Maxthon - is a popular browser in China and has its sights set on beating Opera in Europe.
• K-Meleon - says it's a super-fast Windows browser built on Gecko, the same layout engine Firefox uses.
• Flock - is a Mozilla-powered browser that integrates a whole lot of social features. It's got such a great feature set that we recently asked Why don't you love Flock?
• Avant Browser - says that it, in fact, is the browser that's the fastest. It includes an in-line RSS reader and a number of other interesting features.
• Sleipnir - is a highly-customizable browser that says it's big in Japan.
Slim Browser - a Windows browser focused on automating processes.

That's the field, so far! Do you think this move will foster increased innovation? Do you think it's needed?

We got a chance to talk with Nick Baum, Product Manager and Brian Rakowski, Director of Product Management at Google Chrome this afternoon and they shared a number of interesting tidbits with us about the nature and future of extensions in Chrome.

Now those extensions are here and it's a very interesting story.

Understanding the Versions of Chrome

Between Chrome, Chromium, dev and beta releases, things are getting a little complicated. Here's how it breaks down:

• Chromium is open source developer channel, "the bleeding edge" of Chrome development. That's what we've been using here on Mac and it's the only Mac version today that supports extensions. It's untested and less stable than the other versions. We've been using it for months, though, with only occasional problems.


• Chrome is the official release. There are 3 versions of Chrome: dev, beta (Windows or Mac) and stable (Windows only). The vast majority of users use the stable version, Mac users got beta build 4.0 today.


• Dev builds come out every week or so and are at most 1 week behind Chromium. Baum and Rakowski asked in our interview for us to please switch to using the Dev version for Mac instead of Chromium as soon as it supports extensions.

Mac Dev Version Will Get Extension Support Very Soon

Right now the official extension gallery won't allow Mac users to download extensions. Officially, at least. This bookmarklet will allow you to install them in Chromium on a Mac with just one extra click. (Thanks, MG Seigler, for finding that.) That bookmarklet will not allow you to use extensions in the official beta for Mac that launched today, just in Chromium.

Baum and Rakowski told us today that the next dev build for Mac will allow extensions. That could be out as early as tomorrow morning or in a few days, and it's anyone's guess when extension support will come to the Beta version released today. (Who wants to use the Beta version when Dev is so much cooler?)

Anyone can get extensions from an unofficial site called ChromeExtensions.org and if you're on a Mac it's probably most effective tonight to grab Chromium and the bookmarklet above. Then you can get extensions from the official site as well.

Chrome Extensions Are Not Like Firefox Extensions

Unlike Firefox extensions, Chrome extensions install without a browser restart and they update automatically.

Too many extensions have been a part of the bloat that's made Firefox-use nearly intolerable for many of us, but the Chrome team says extensions will cause no more drag on Chrome performance than opening up a new web page in another tab would. That's a big part of the premise of Chrome, that every process is running distinct from other processes, so one tab can't slow or crash the others. It's an architecture well suited to running web applications, not just loading web pages, and it's great to hear that the extensions platform works the same way.

GreaseMonkey? Oh, There Will Be GreaseMonkey

One of the most enjoyable tide pools of innovation in the Firefox extension world is built on top of the Javascript user script plug-in GreaseMonkey. These tiny scripts re-organize web pages in radical ways for more usefulness and fun. Scripts like AutoPagerize will load the next page at the bottom of the one you're on, creating a continuous scroll, or WikiDashboard will insert a drop-down dashboard into every Wikipedia page to show a scatter plot graph of who has edited that page the most. The fun never stops with GreaseMonkey.

What of Chrome, though? Guess where, Aaron Boodman, the creator of GreaseMonkey works now? That's right, on the Chrome Extensions team.

Boodman recently made it even easier for GreaseMonkey scripts to be added to Chrome than they are in Firefox. A single click transforms the scripts into Chrome Extensions, at least for Windows users. We haven't found a successful Mac implementation yet, but we've got our fingers crossed that this will no longer be an issue when full extension support comes to Chrome for Mac.

Red Hot APIs On the Way

Baum told us today that the team "will add APIs for other data types soon, personal web history being a prime candidate, so extensions will be able to access that and manipulate it in all sorts of ways." That sounds great. It's one thing for a browser to promise not to sell my web history, but it's a whole new ball game when developers can build software that lets me derive all the more value from the history of my activity around the web.

Bring it on, Team Chrome! We might feel a little guilty for abandoning the wonderful community project that is Firefox, but this new browser is just so damn good it's hard not to give it a serious try.

It just so turns out, we have a particularly relevant sponsor this month that we should point to. Add-on-Con is a major event all about browser add-ons. It's being held in Mountain View, CA this Friday. Google is a sponsor and Aaron Boodman, the man behind GreaseMonkey and now working on Chrome Extensions, is a speaker. Check it out!