Firefox 3 alpha 2 released

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It’s a great time to be a web user — the new browser wars are meaning more great features for all of us!  Firefox has been hard at work on version 3.1 for a while now, and they’ve just released the second alpha

version of 3.1.  So what does it bring to the table?

 

  • The “video element” of HTML 5, which allows for some cool use of video on a site (manipulate with JavaScript, translucent draggable videos, etc) without using Flash.
  • Web worker threads, that allow complex JavaScript to run in the background and not disrupt the speed of the page you’re on.
  • The highly-touted new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine isn’t yet ready, so it’s not enabled in this release.
  • Dragging tabs between windows no longer results in a page refresh.
The next few months will be interesting for Firefox and Chrome.  Most of these new features (other than the video element) are things that need to catch up to Chrome.  On the flip side, Chomes next big release will likely have a lot of features to try to catch up to Firefox (plug-ins, for one).  By the time they both catch up with each other, we should be looking at two amazing browsers!

Chrome now listed as a browser type in Google Analytics

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As of today, Google Analytics is now showing “Chrome” as a browser type in Google Analytics.  Visits from Chrome users over the last few days will be retroactively updated to show their use of Chrome over the next few days.

We’re showing Chrome usage at over 10% on this blog for the last three days, but webmaster/SEO blogs would certainly be skewed a bit high for something like that.  It’ll be very interesting to see what the numbers look like in a few weeks.

What percent of visitors on your

 blog are using Chrome?

Add your church site search to your Chrome home page

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One of the most talked about features of Google Chrome is the rather innovative home page.  It shows your nine most often viewed sites, along with some goodies along the sidebar.  The sidebar can include quick-search boxes for sites you often search.  As often as I’m searching our church site, I thought it’d be great to have it listed there but I couldn’t make it show up.  After a bit of tweaking, I got it to work.  Here’s what I did.

First, it’ll help if you have a true on-site search of some kind. From what I can tell, there’s no way to add search boxes if you use the Google custom search on your site.  If you find a way around that, let us know.

As for our site, it only took a couple of very small changes:

  • The search needs to produce a GET request, not a POST request.  The difference is that a GET request will put your search term in the URL, which is critical to make this work.
  • You may need to change your search string variable. I noticed that most sites use “s=whatever” when you search, so I changed ours to that to help Chrome easily figure out what we were doing.
  • That’s it!
As for getting it onto the sidebar, here is the two-step process that tends to work.  Try it with our church site if you want.
  1. Perform a search on the site, just like you normally would.
  2. After that Google should recognize that it’s a search and give you a new shortcut.  Start typing the URL of the site in the address bar at the top (“M-T-B-E-T…”).
  3. After a few letters, a small bit of text should appear on the side that says “Press [tab] to search mtbethel.org”.  Go ahead and press [tab] and search for something.
  4. Done!
You should now have a quick-search box for our site on your Chrome start page.  There’s no way to manually remove it, but it will go away by itself after a while.  There seems to be a limit of three search boxes on your page, so if you have three already you may need to repeat step #3 (the [tab] search) a few times to encourage Chrome to replace one of the other ones.
That’s it!  Chome even uses your favicon to dress it up, and they look very nice.  If you have any questions or problems, please let us know in the comments below.

Chrome is now available!

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Google’s new web browser, Chrome, is now available to download.  You can read our previous information about the browser, which explain some of the new features.

I’ve only been using it for a few minutes, but I can sum it up in one word: fast.  This thing flies!  I’m sure some glitches and/or shortcomings will emerge, but so far, so good.  Go get it!

How will “Chrome” affect your church site?

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As you may have heard, Google is releasing a new browser tomorrow called Chrome.  Based on what’s been revealed so far, it should be excellent

, though we won’t know for sure until we get our hands on it.  If nothing else, it’s expected to be very fast and very stable, which are the two main jobs of any decent browser.

But what about us webmasters?  Will we have to start worrying about another browser when building our sites?  Not really.  The great news about Chrome is that it’s built on top of Webkit, which also powers Opera (and a few others).  This means that the basic rendering engine is one that you’ve probably already checked your site against, so it’s nothing new.

Keep an eye on my SEO site

buy online

tomorrow to see when Chrome is available for download.  If you have a Windows machine, it’ll certainly be worth trying, even if it doesn’t live up to the hype.

Update: It’s available!  You can download Chrome here.

Google’s new “Chrome” browser to be launched tomorrow

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Google has accidentally leaked a comic strip that talks about “Chrome”, their new web browser.  Google has confirmed that a browser is coming, and will be lauched tomorrow (Tuesday).  So what’s the scoop on the new browser?  Here’s what we know so far (from TechCrunch and Google Blogoscoped):

  • Windows only.  Mac and Linux support coming soon.
  • It’s open source, based on Webkit.
  • It will support Google Gears.
  • It will be running a new JavaScript VM called “V8”, which will supposedly be MUCH faster than what we’re seeing with current browsers.
  • Tabs will look much different.  Rather than being at the top of the content, they will be at the top of the entire window.
  • It will have an “omnibox”, similar to Firefox’s “awesome bar”, with autocomplete and similar things.
  • The default home page will look a lot like Opera 9, with thumbnails of your favorite sites.
  • Each tab will live in its own “sandbox”, and each will have its own process.  Not only will this help the browser to run more quickly, but if a tab crashes it won’t take down the entire browser.
  • It will have a task manager to help you determine how much memory is being used by each tab and by each plugin.
  • You can open a new tab as an “incognito” window that doesn’t record anything you do there, which is very similar to a similar feature introduced in Internet Explorer 8 beta 2.
  • Chrome will maintain a list of phishing and malware sites to help protect you.  Site owners will get notification if they’re added to the list, to help fix false positives.

All in all, it sounds pretty slick.  Personally, speed and stability are my main concerns with a browser and both of those have improved greatly with Firefox 3.  If Chrome can take it even further, great!

We’ll find out tomorrow…