Google Chrome Plugins and Themes

I was contacted by someone today who informed me that Google Chrome is blocked in a number of counties. It appears Chrome is not only blocked from download from these locations, but also will not run if it’s used from this IP space even if downloaded by proxy.

Google had this to say:

“In accordance with US export controls and economic sanctions regulations, we are unable to permit the download of Google Chrome in Cuba, Syria, North Korea, Iran, and Sudan.”

Users are presented with this, and no further explanation:

A couple of other Google downloads are also blocked such as Google Talk, GMail Notify and “possibly” Google Toolbar and Google Earth.. Can any readers from these blocked locations confirm these last two?

It does seem rather odd, Google displays Adsense in these countries no problems and “technically” makes advertising revenue in these blocked countries so i don’t see how this is ok with the “Economic Sanction” regulations but making Chrome available isn’t. Also many other Open Source applications, browsers and similar technology from other major US companies isn’t blocked and can be freely downloaded from these sanctioned locations.

The Treas.gov website says this under the Iran Sanctions document:

In general, a person may not export from the U.S. any goods, technology or services, if that person knows or has reason to know such items are intended specifically for supply, transshipment or re-exportation to Iran. Further, such exportation is prohibited if the exporter knows or has reason to know the U.S. items are intended specifically for use in the production of, for commingling with, or for incorporation into goods, technology or services to be directly or indirectly supplied, transshipped or reexported exclusively or predominately to Iran or the Government of Iran.

Is making something available to download worldwide on the internet “exporting” to a specific country?

I have no idea, so feel free to leave comments.

Firstly sorry for the lack of updates this past week, but work has been keeping from doing anything fun. It’s been 6 weeks since Chrome was released, so i thought I’d do a quick recap of things since we kicked off Chrome Plugins.

In no particular order:

We published an article explaining how to switch your Chrome installation over to the Dev Build if your interested in obtaining various bug fixes or new features before it’s released to the masses. You can read how to do this in
Update Chrome to Dev Build

A feature i used in FireFox a lot was the ability to highlight text on a page, then search that text on sites like Google, Yahoo, MSN, Wikipedia, Trends, Amazon, Dictionary.com etc from the context menu. No problems, one click bookmarklets to
Search Selected Text with Google Chrome

Want to split a single Chrome Tab down the middle to view two sites simultaneously so you can do things like read text in one, and write about it in the other? Try
Google Chrome Dual View

One thing many people wanted was a Google Toolbar for Chrome, (almost 10,000 StumbleUpon visitors one afternoon definitely did) and with Google developing both the Browser and the Toolbar many assumed it would of been included in Chrome or at least compatible as an addon. Not so unfortunately, so we came with with basically all the Google Toolbar features as well as the SEOQuake features for webmasters as one click bookmarklet options. So you can have a substitute
Google Toolbar For Chrome

With the common Web Browser becoming more customizable, more personal and remembering more of our behavior it’s nice to have separate profiles so your “nefarious” browsing habits don’t pop up for other users on a shared computer. Miha released the
Chrome Backup and Profile Tool

We also outlined how to create Custom Search Engines in Chrome which allows you to search in any site directly from the Omnibox (Not just Search Engines) provided the site has a search feature. This saves opening another tab, loading the site, navigating to the search box or page to conduct the search.
Custom Search Engines in Chrome

Miss the look of FireFox? Switch Chrome to a FireFox 3 theme.
Firefox 3

Do you jump between FireFox and Chrome for your daily browsing? There’s an
Open in Chrome Firefox Extension

For people who make extensive use of keyboard shortcuts when browsing, we have put together a list of
Google Chrome Shortcuts

Many people were plagued by scroll problems,
PaulusDev released the
Chrome Scroll Fix

The authors of the popular CCleaner announced in the forum from v2.12.651 there is
Support for Chrome in CCleaner

Also, we built a page that provides information about your Chrome Version, Webkit Version, Flash Info, Java Details, Screen Resolution, IP and ISP details. You can check this out at
Chrome Browser Details

Anyhow that’s a brief look at Google Chrome and Chrome Plugins over the past 6 weeks, there’s many more topics in the Chrome Forum and on the main site.

As mentioned before, work is mounting up but i will do my best to continue with regular updates and new things for Chrome but posting may be sporadic at times. If anyone has an interest in Chrome, and the ChromePlugins.org website feel free to contact me.

As most people are aware, the Google Chrome logo is very similar to a number of other brands and images and in particular the Simon Game by Milton Bradley. So the most obvious thing to do?

Hit Play of course!

Thanks for the laugh Roman Cortes, Mr. Doob and Supersole.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can update your Google Chrome version with the latest developer builds. Many people are unaware on how to do this but it’s very simple to do, and the Dev channel gives users access to upcoming features, features in development, and the latest bug fixes.

However do note, the dev build is mainly designed for developers or people wanting to test the latest updates to Chrome and it may not be as stable as the regular public build. With that said though, i have not noticed an increase in crashes or bugs on the dev build compared to the regular public build.

Also if you have an annoying bug that’s preventing you from using Chrome or doing important tasks, it may be worth a shot to check the latest dev build to see if the problem is fixed and you can try updating. You can opt out of the dev builds at any time if you don’t want to receive any more dev updates, all you have to do is run the Chrome Channel Chooser again and switch back to “Beta” builds.

Still want to continue?

Ok download the Chrome Channel Chooser (Direct from Chromium.org, filesize 100kb)

Run the Channel Chooser, select the Dev box then press Update

Once it’s updated, close the Channel Chooser

Then in Chrome, update as usual by clicking the Wrench Icon then choose About Google Chrome

Done, now just restart Chrome and you will be on the Dev build. Just go back in to Wrench, and About to confirm.

Also i haven’t mentioned before, but i done a page on the forum that shows all sorts of data such as your IP, ISP, PC Details, Java and Flash Versions, Chrome and Webkit Versions and Screen Resolution. It’s useful for veryifying your Chrome and Webkit versions amongst other things, there’s no need to register to use it.

Check Your Browser Details Here

As you can see, the latest Dev build is 0.2.153.1 and i have listed the features and changes below. One good addition to note is the “Add word to Dictionary” so Chrome will no longer highlight it as misspelled.

Highlights:

r2266 Fix scrolling (cannot scroll up) with touchpads on most laptops. Issue 4.

r2334 Fix the problem in 152.1 with the About box spinning forever to check for updates and leaving behind an orphaned chrome.exe process. Issue 2362

r2282 and r2320 Remove the separate installer for the Gears component. It is now installed as a versioned component alongside chrome.dll. When 0.2.153.0 (or later) is installed successfully, the previous version of Gears is uninstalled.

New command line flags are:

–new-http

Enables the new network layer. This is nearly complete, but there are still be some things that don’t work. Areas that need more attention: SSL and SSL-EV sites, proxies (especially requiring authentication), very large downloads (>2GB).

–magic_browzR

Enables the new tab and window manager code. The code has been refactored to help make it more portable, easier to add new features, and make it more Windows-friendly. Things like ‘ Tile windows horizontally’ or extensions that manage multiple desktops/monitors should work, the full Google Chrome window menu is available when you right click a pop-up or application window title bar, and pop-up address bars looks nicer.

User Interface

r2026 Double-clicking a tab’s entry in Google Chrome’s task manager (Shift+Esc) brings that tab to the foreground.

r2222 Your choices for Clear browsing data… are saved so the same boxes are checked the next time you open the dialog.

r2322 Add an “Add to dictionary…” option to the right-click menu for misspelled words. Use this to add a word so that Google Chrome does not highlight it as misspelled.

r2412 Fix an issue that could prevent users from saving bookmarks. Issue 1946.

r2413 Allow mutiple bookmarks to refer to the same URL (which can be useful if you want a bookmark on the bookmarks bar and also saved under Other bookmarks). To get a new bookmark for a URL, either drop a link on the bookmarks bar (not by dragging the star) or right-click the Bookmarks bar and choose Add page…

r2504 Adds a Page info option to the context menu (right click). This brings up the same information as double clicking the lock or warning icon in the address bar of an SSL page.

Plugins

r2400 Add support for Adobe Reader’s fast web view, which fixes a performance problem loading PDF files. Issue 206.

Javascript/Web API

r2061 Add anti-aliasing support for SVG shape-rendering=”crispEdges”.

r2250 Make navigator.language reflect the current UI language for Google Chrome instead of the operating system. Issue 1862.

SSL and SafeBrowsing

r1998 Fix a problem with links or redirects to pages containing malware. The warning page now correctly identifies the new page as the malware host, rather than the previous page.

r2098 Add support for Extended Validation (EV) certificates from GlobalSign.

r2363 Add support for Extended Validation (EV) certificates from CyberTrust.

Tab Model Rewrite (–magic_browzR)

r1996 Fix several issues on Vista, most notably that tabs were not selectable with the mouse.

r2205 Allow windows to be resized on Vista

r2406 Fix an issue with tooltips showing up in the wrong location.

Other

r2223 Turn off making a request to determine the local URL for Google (google.co.uk, google.co.in, etc) when Google is not your default search provider.

r2323 (related to r2223) Don’t set a cookie when making a request to determine the local URL for Google.

r2287 Fix a problem that prevented Google Chrome from being uninstalled immediately. Issue 2321

r2457 Fix the Open dialog (Ctrl+O) so that it does not lock the directory from which you open a file. Issue

r2466 Fix proxy exceptions that include upper-case characters.

Crashes

r2028 Fix a crash when using Find next (F3).

r2090 Fix a crash when using View Source on an https page.

r2131 Fix a crash when copying data to the clipboard.

r2261 Fix a crash when saving a page.

http://www.chromeplugins.org

AdityaK Sood, from the EvilFingers community who disclosed the first Chrome DoS vulnerability at the beginning of the month, has released a proof of concept demonstrating a memory exhaustion DoS vulnerability affecting Google Chrome versions 0.2.149.30 and 0.2.149.29. He went on to state:

“The Google chrome browser is vulnerable to memory exhaustion based denial of service which can be triggered remotely.The vulnerability triggers when Carriage Return(\r\n\r\n) is passed as an argument to window.open() function. It makes the Google Chrome to generate number of windows at the same time thereby leading to memory exhaustion. The behavior can be easily checked by looking at the task manager as with no time the memory usage rises high. The problem lies in the handling of object and its value returned by the javascript function. Once it is triggered the pop ups are started generating. The Google Chrome browser generate object windows continuously there by affecting memory of the resultant system. Probably it can be crashed within no time. User interaction is required in this.”

Visiting a Vulnerable web page can result in 100% resource usage on PC’s, resulting in the crashing of open applications and the loss of unsaved work.

Note:

Before visiting the proof of concept page, ensure you do not have any unsaved work. The concept page is not malicious, but it will elevate your PC’s resource usage. It’s designed to “not” be too aggressive or to crash your running application but will highlight the issue.

Visit: Proof of Concept

Credit to: Aditya K Sood of SecNiche Security for the discovery.

Back on the 9th September i received an Email from Terri Chen who’s title is “Senior Trademark Counsel” for Google.com regarding a snapshot of the Google Chrome comic, the Google Chrome icon and the Google Chrome logo being displayed on this site and i was told i could not display them.

Considering Google Chrome is an ‘Open Source’ project, and ChromePlugins.org is only serving to promote Google Chrome and is in no way monetizing from Chrome (It’s actually cost me nearly $1k for server, licenses, domain etc) i asked for clarification on what was allowed and not allowed.

To summarize, if you have never visited this site previously this was the issue:

and on the forum..

Terri Chen of Google replied today and the answer is None!

There’s thousands of websites out there displaying the Google Chrome “Sphere” and the Google Chrome Comic in both it’s original form as well as “Bastardized” versions of it and profiting off the content via Google Adsense.

Websites cannot display the Google Chrome Icon, the Google Chrome Comic or the Google Chrome Favicon. Seems pretty absurd to me having an Open Source project, and thousands of people wanting to promote and development for the platform to make it more functional and in turn gain a higher market share then tell them you cannot display any of the graphical elements on your site. It’s a bit like having a Jennifer Lopez fan site, and not being able to show pictures of Jenifer Lopez.

What is interesting is Wikipedia is displaying the logo on This Page that says it qualifies as fair use. Also i asked Terri Chen about the comic, telling her i have linked to Scott McCloud the creator as attribution for his work on every page the comic screenshot was displayed on from day one. I asked if this comic was released under Creative Commons, and the reply was:

____________
“I believe that the link to the Creative Commons license may not have been showing on the online version of the comic book. This has now been corrected, and here is the link: http://www.google.com/googlebooks/chrome/small_00.html. I’ve checked with the team, and they do not want to allow uses of the comic book per the license at this time.”
____________

After checking the main comic page, Google has just added a link. This part i do not understand, it was released under the Creative Commons but they don’t want to let people use it under Creative Commons at this time. Does anyone understand that statement?

I’m no law expert by any means I’m simply a person who took an interest in the Google Chrome Browser and wanted to develop for it, blog about it, promote it and share information that may help people.

So if you want to help Google develop Chrome and come up with new functionality to assist them gain market share in the browser space, i suggest you use the following logo and remove the ThinkFree Office text so you don’t impose on “Google’s” mark.

Go Figure.

Google has made an update available for Chrome, the upgrade can be accessed by clicking the Wrench Icon then by going to ‘About Google Chrome’. Or if you aren’t running Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome by visiting the Chrome Download Page

The update fixes several bugs along with some more security thrown in for good measure. One fix was to prevent Chrome from indexing the content of secure pages such as banking information which could later be obtained by anyone using your Chrome installation.

The changes in 0.2.149.30

r1927 - Stop adding content from HTTPS sites to the searchable index.

Google Chrome keeps a searchable history of pages you visit. This history is only stored locally on your computer. Previously, this searchable history included the text from secure sites, such as your online bank (any sites using SSL for security). Google Chrome no longer saves text from secure pages in its local history. The address bar and local history search page will no longer find data from secure sites you have visited.

Note: After installing the update, you may have to clear your browsing history to remove copies of secure pages indexed prior to the 0.2.149.30 update.

r1978 - Don’t send sensitive URLs to search suggest services.

Google Chrome stops sending data to a suggest service if the typed URL:

• Contains a username:password field (http://username:password@example.com/)
• Has query parameters (the trailing ?param=data following the URL)
• Is an https URL with any path component (any part following the hostname, such as /path in https://www.example.com/path)

Other Fixes:

r1848, r1943 r2003 - Fixes to the Google Chrome updater to make updates more reliable.

r1859 - Fix problems with Flash not playing video if too many connections are opened. For example, using the slider to advance video on YouTube could cause video to stop playing.

r2059 - Allow JavaScript to communicate with Java applets. Fixes bug 580.

r1299 - JavaScript: Dispatch context menu events after mouseup events. This fixes the right-click menu not working on Google Spreadsheets. Fixes bug 745.

r1692 - Fix crashes with some plugins –3dvia was the most widely reported– when they return an error for NPN_GetValue. Fixes bug 493.

One Firefox addon i used quite often was a Context Search and what this done was added a selection of Search Engines and useful sites that would enable you to highlight text or a domain on a webpage then launch a search for the selected text on the chosen website.

It was a great time saver because you didn’t need to open another tab for the particular site, then copy and paste your text in to the search box and hit search. This is what it looked like on the right click context menu in Firefox:

This is one extension i miss, so i thought i would “kind of” make a fix for Google Chrome. When i say kind of, these are Bookmarklets which aren’t quite as convenient as having the functionality built directly in to the right click menu however they are still easier than going about things the old fashioned way and will suffice until we get an API for extensions or addons.

So to use these, drag the links below to your Bookmarks. Then whenever you highlight a piece of text on a webpage, click the corresponding bookmark and it will automatically conduct a search on the site you have chosen. So i have done the sites in the Firefox addon, and a couple of other useful searches.

Here they are:

Google Search Selected Text

Google Search Selected

Google Blog Search Selected Text

Google BlogSearch Selected

Google Images Search Selected Text

Google Trends Search Selected

Google Trends Search Selected Text

Google Trends Search Selected

Yahoo Search Selected Text

Yahoo Search Selected

Live.com Search Selected Text

Live.com Search Selected

MSN.com Search Selected Text

MSN.com Search Selected

Wiki Search Selected Text

Wiki Search Selected

Amazon Search Selected Text

Amazon Search Selected

Answers.com Search Selected Text

Answers.com Search Selected

CreativeCommons.org Search Selected Text

CreativeCommons Search Selected

Ebay.com Search Selected Text

Ebay Search Selected

Dictionary.com Search Selected Text

Dictionary.com Search Selected

Google Text from Current Website

Google Text from Site

This one above will limit the Google search to just the site you are on, for example if you highlight the word “Bookmark” on this site and click the bookmarklet link it will show all pages listed in Google from ChromePlugins.org that contain the word “Bookmark”. This is quite useful if the site you are browsing doesn’t have a search feature, but they have a great article and you would like to find other similar articles on the site.

Also yesterday i published a whole stack of these in the forum that duplicate the functions of the Google Toolbar, as well as the functions of SEOQuake which is a popular Firefox tool for webmasters and SEO folk. You can view them in the post titled Google Toolbar for Chrome

If you don’t know how to make these site searches for highlighted text and you would like one for a particular site, for example search the highlighted text at AOL.com then just leave a comment below with the site and i will make one and add it to the list for you.

Yes, split Google Chrome down the middle in one tab. For the multi-tasking type this will enable you to create 2 side by side “panels” in Chrome in the same tab so you can browse two sites at once side by side.

Why not switch between tabs?

A few reasons, maybe you want to compare search results on both Google and Yahoo or do side by side comparisons of products. Maybe you want to reference something in the left panel and type about it in the right and switching tabs is a pain.. Well this will enable you to do just that. See examples:

A comparison search for Chrome on Google and Yahoo

Click for larger view

Reference content in one panel, write about it in the other

Click for larger view

To use simply drag and drop the following in your bookmarks…

Chrome Dual View

When clicked, a pop-up box asks for the first URL which will be the left panel and the URL you are currently on will be entered by default however this can be changed so in my dual search i entered Google.com for this one. Once you ok it, it will ask for the second URL which is the right panel and i entered Yahoo.com for my search comparison.

Simple, Google Chrome split down the middle with a double panel all in one tab.

Enjoy, also check out the Chrome Forums for a bunch of things like this.

Also here is an experimental translate bookmarklet:

Google Translate