Its a great value add to search, but not everyone is a Google+ user and not everyone likes to have personal search results. Instead, you might want to bring back the Twitter search results. If you’re among those, you’re lucky, coz a Chrome Extension lets you do exactly that.

Sidebar for Google Search modifies your Search results by placing a customizable sidebar on the right. You can choose to display results from Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Youtube, and more.

Not only the Twitter search results are accurate, they are nearly realtime. All the top search results are shown. However, they are rarely ordered by relevance. But in most cases, it serves the purpose well.

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MightyText (formerly Texty) has created an android app that can push notification to your Chrome browser whenever a new sms arrives or you receive a phone call. The SMS is fully synced (two-ways) between the android device and the chrome browser.

The part we love about MightyText is that an incoming SMS messages appear on your screen as a pop-up, giving you the option to read and reply to them without touching the phone. The conversation with your contacts are shown in different threads, just like in some of the native apps on android or iphone, along with full call logs. And of course, its also a good way to backup your sms, call logs, without doing any extra work.

The application is in its beta stages and you can apply for a beta preview here. The app only works with Chrome and Anrdoid 2.2+ device. Go ahead and apply for the beta, you may want to retweet their message to get faster invites.

UPDATE: People are apparently going crazy over the app. I was lucky to nab one early on, but they are trying to accommodate everyone as fast as they can. I’ve been using it for a bit now and it is seriously awesome.

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Google has, quietly, made the necessary upgrades to its webpages to support the new SPDY protocol reducing the page load time of Chrome for pages on its own servers by a stunning 50%. In effect, Google sites should load much faster in Chrome than in any other web browser.

SPDY incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. To demonstrate the productivity. To be more precise, it’s 64% faster made possible as SPDY allows many concurrent HTTP requests to run across one TCP session and to make SLL the standard transport protocol.

Most of the shortcomings of HTTP were identified back in 1995, but little has been done to improve speed. As a result of that, both TCP and HTTP have evolved into a bottleneck of data downloads. HTTP is especially criticized for latency issues since HTTP can only fetch one resource at a time and servers cannot communicate with a client without a client request – and even then it can only support six connections at a time in most browsers. Apart from that, HTTP also uses uncompressed and redundant request and response headers.

SPDY Speed Improvements in Chrome
SPDY supports unlimited connection streams, with provision to proritize certain SPDY requests over others and even allows blocking overloaded channels. It also supports header compression and allows the server to communicate with a client without a client request.

SPDY is not much different, it still uses HTTP methods, headers and “other semantics.”, still using TCP.  The difference is in connection management and data transfer formats.

How to Benchmark SPDY Improvements

You can always see speed improvements by calculating pageloading times. But there’s another way to measure it navigate to chrome://net-internals in a Chrome and Click on “View live SPDY session” to see all SPDY connections.

Google would open source the complete implementation of SPDY, as soon as all looks baked.

In case you wish to test SPDY out, Download any Chrome browser (stable, beta, developer, canary, nightly build) and point it to any Google site, it should be significantly faster.

More on SPDY [official whitepaper]

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Synchronize Chrome Tabs, Session across Multiple Computers

We all happen to use multiple computers and hop all the time. Even if you don’t, its not hard to lose track of last session when there are 30+ tabs, and you are about to open more. Google Chrome provides ability to sync bookmarks, form autofills, extensions, themes, preferences, out of the box but there’s no support for saving Tabs from current session.

Its time for your to save your Chrome Tabs, Session and sync to the cloud so that the next time you login to any other machine (or the same machine), you can select and restore the session.

TabCloud is a great extensions that lets you backup & sync all your tabs to the cloud, so that they are available across any number of computers, on demand.

To get started, install the TabCloud extension and simply click the TabCloud icon on the menu, login the first time to see your current open windows and previously saved windows, you can save open windows, or restore saved ones. You can also delete previously saved sessions.

TabCloud also has a Firefox Extension, that works in a similar manner.

Sync Chrome, Firefox Tabs with Android

This is also one of the killer feature of this extension that allows all chrome, firefox tabs to be synced with Android, using the android app.

Additional features:
- Middle (or ctrl) clicking any tab icon opens just that tab.
- Clicking on an open tab icon jumps to that tab in a browser.
- Dragging a tab icon allows you to move tabs between windows, including to and from saved windows that are not currently open.
- Secure login using your Google account, with the option to logout on the TabCloud menu.
- Click on any windows name to rename at any time.

Going further, extension has some awesome features planned which would include:
- Realtime synchronisation and auto saving
- Some kind of passphrase/PIN based security/encryption
- Optionally use bookmarks to save tabs instead of external service
- Overwrite previously saved windows to update them
- Hold shift to copy tabs or open them in the background

The extension is open source, if you are a developer, go ahead and check it out at http://github.com/Connorhd/TabCloud

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The latest Chrome Dev builds now ”upgrade” from the last Chromium 7.0.548.0 to Chromium 8.0.549.0 fixes just one bug with the sync feature.

Chrome 7 is targeted to all under the hood enhancements and almost nothing for th user appeal. Chrome 8 will change this. In addition, it will continue to improve the performance with  full hardware acceleration and support for native 3D graphics via the proposed WebGL standard, bringing IE9′s hardware performance out of the context.

WebGL promises hardware accelerated 3D graphics which go deep down the Operating system level (native API) to enable web developers to bridge the gap between desktop and the web when it comes to gaming. So what this means is that Games on the web would be as capable as native Games. All in all, good news for all Gamers, its going to get cheaper, more portable than ever.

Chrome 8 also adds new features to Chrome Labs. Some come especially handy for Chrome OS, like the Background WebApps feature, Remoting and, to a lesser degree, the Cloud Print feature, Chrome Instant – Google Instant in chrome.

Chrome 8 dev is just the preview of some basic features, more stuff is coming as it goes stable. Its going to prove-out to be very interesting release for a couple more reasons, both the Chrome Web Store and Chromium OS are scheduled to launch in the same time period.

Download Chrome Dev 8.0.549.0

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Google has released issued its first beta edition of Chrome 7.0.517.24, (~ Tuesday’s developer-channel release). There are no viusal changes to the user but a lot of stuff is being fueled under the hood. The about:labs adds a new FEature to it: Google Instant search from Chrome’s SearchBar

The new features include the activation by default of the WebGL 3D graphics technology, and some hardware acceleration for some CSS transformations.

As Google states it:
“A lot of the work that’s being done in 7.0 is largely not user facing and in some cases is a legitimate work in progress,” said Chrome team member Anthony Laforge in a response to comments criticizing the version 7 release as insufficiently novel. “With our new release cycle and about:labs, I’d suggest you stay tuned, things are going to start moving quite fast.”

The about:labs feature on Windows presents new experimental options for Chrome users. Also through about:labs, Windows gets an upgrade to the omnibox, the dual-purpose address and search bar, so it shows the search-as-you-type behavior of Google Instant. It’s awkward at this stage–the omnibox drop-down covers the top search results–but it will improve over the course of time.

A lot more hardware acceleration is pending, but its perfectly possible that it would finish full cooked in Chrome 7 stable.

Google is now introducing GPU hardware acceleration from Chrome. This enhancement would speed up the rendering of complex pages by offloading a lot of the processing to a computer’s graphics card.

The strategy is inline with other Popular browsers Microsoft’s IE9, Firefox hardware D2D acceleration.

IE9 is scheduled for first public beta next month, and Chrome seems to have the early basic preview already on the horizon. At this moment, Chrome only uses hardware acceleration for displaying some content and going further, they will have “even more of the rendering from the CPU to the GPU to achieve impressive speedups.”

Going further, they will offer support for accelerated 3D graphics in the browser. to match that of IE9.

How to get Hardware GPU Acceleration in Chrome

To try it out, get the Chromium builds. Once installed, you need to run the application with the –enable-accelerated-compositing flag. To do so, you can either run the program from the terminal and set this switch by hand, or – in Windows – check the properties for the executable and append the flag to the target in the properties dialog.

As of now the differences in page rendering may not be huge but as far as my tests are concerned, they were noticeable for heavy, complex pages. Try it out.

Related: IE9 vs. Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera Performance

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While having a Chrome OS Tablet was bit obvious, it was not sure that what would Google come out with first: Chrome OS Tablet or Android Tablet.

As per the latest leak, DownloadSquad reports that Google is building a Chrome OS tablet. The hardware is being built by HTC, leading to another OEM partnership with HTC after Nexus One.

Since  Chrome OS is a thin-client OS, a Browser, more precisely, it would heavily rely on internet usage being connected all the time. And that’s why they plan to offer it in conjunction with Verizon — Now we know what that Net neutrality move was all about.

Launch Date: Google plans to unveil this gadget on Black Friday – Novemebr 26th to be precise. No doubt, this would be the best day to  launch  a shiny new tablet with nation’s most reliable wireless network – Verizon.

Pricing: Its hard to say how much exactly, but, Google Chrome OS tablet will be heavily subsidized, with a Verizon data contract. It can be as low as $100.

The Hardware: As per the rumors, it will be powered by NVidia’s Tegra 2 platform that would power smooth HD videos and blazing graphics rendering for both gmaes & heavy, Rich web content. The display would essentially be a 720p (1280×720) multitouch display feeding on  2GB of RAM, & will posses large SD card starting all the way from 32GB SSD.

On the connectivity front, It would feature WiFi 802.11n, Bluetooth 2.1, 3G EVDO/HSDPA 7.1 Mbps connectivity. There would be a good GPS, camera. The hardware would be good enough to amke everyone happy enough, just like they did with Nexus One.

But will it succeed? Most users would never leave native apps for the web apps? But who knows if google has something really awesome being cooked under the hood. Their acquisitions like BumptTop can bring 3D desktop environment to this tablet.

Even if it doesn’t I see good reasons to hack it to install Android 2.2 Froyo, Ubuntu Netbook Linux & may be Ubuntu 10.10 Multitouch in the future.

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How to Try Chrome OS Apps, Features in Chrome Browser

Step 1. To begin with,  add these command line switches to your Chrome shortcut, without the “quotes”:

“–enable-apps” : turns on extension apps, otherwise you’ll get an error when you try to install them.
“–apps-panel” : (optional) instead of loading the new tab page, Chrome will display a floating panel above the current tab

Step 2. Next we  install  some Google apps:

They’re hiding in a folder called resources — which you’ll find in your Chrome profile folder.

• On Windows, they reside in %localappdata%\Chromium\Application\6.0.428.0\Resources.
• Linux /opt/google/chrome/resources/.

Step 3. Head to your Google Chrome extensions tab (chrome://extensions) and make sure you see the developer mode buttons above. If you don’t, click the plus next to the text to reveal them.

Step 4. Now click “load unpacked extension” and browse to location you found in step 2. Click into the folder of the app you want to install (like gmail_app), then click OK. If the install is successful, Chrome will refresh your Extensions page and you should now see the icon for the app.

Step 5: Loading app: Open new Tab and click one. There you have it — the new tabs that  use full-color .PNG images which are packed with the apps. Overall, the Google apps seem to work the same as a pinned tab — just with nicer icons and ease of access. You can try the same for other apps.

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As we know, Chrome OS is essentially Google’s Chrome web browser running atop a Goobuntu flavor of Linux (Ubuntu). It will not run local applications other than the browser itself. All other apps will be accessed inside the browser. Of course having a browser optimized from kernel level will give out exceptional performance.

Read more: Chrome OS Factsheet, Why its Relevant and Irrelevant

Now as per the latest update form one the Google employees, Chrome OS will provide remote access to “legacy PC applications” through a mystery process the company calls Chromoting.

In a message posted to Chrome OS Google groups, He wrote “We’re adding new capabilities all the time, With this functionality (unofficially named ‘chromoting’), Chrome OS will not only be [a] great platform for running modern web apps, but will also enable you to access legacy PC applications right within the browser.”

Gary, the author, calls this an “official” statement.

Neither Google nor Gary has responded to requests for comment. He’s been at Google since 2006, before which he was with Microsoft.

Chromoting would be “something like” Remote Desktop Connection, the Microsoft Windows service that gives you real-time access to distant PCs. Presumably, this means that Chrome OS will let you access applications running on your existing Windows, Linux, or Mac desktop.

The OS is not due for official release until the end of the year, when it will debut on netbooks.

Chromium OS source code includes references to a “chromoting plug-in,” and Gary mentions chromoting code during recent Chromimum IRC discussions.

Some other clients like Logmein.com, etc do something similar in the browser. Presumably, Google will include this sort of mini-client with Chrome OS as a plug-in, and you’ll then download a larger client on your existing desktop PC in order to access its Remote desktop & applications.

With Chrome OS, Google is intending on keeping everything inside the browser. Apart from what Google says, its a financial interest in moving more activity and more data onto the net: more web activity means more web ads, which mean more revenue.

Recently, we saw Remote printing from Chrome OS by routing jobs through its servers and back down to normal desktop PCs that, unlike Chrome OS, run print drivers.

Apart from Chromoting, Google had bee testing NaCl (Native code execution) by dynamically  compiling javascript, html, css into native code and pump up execution. This could boost web applications to perform as good as desktop applicaitons.

The Native Client called  NaCl is an open source initiative that targets on running x86 native code in web apps. Now Google has taken a  step further by integrating  NaCl into Chrome. Google has blessed the browser space with a unique feature that could pave future of Chrome OS, by running applications on the net.

Google intends to align web apps closer to native apps on a typical x86 operating system – Sincerely, I see this as the first step to Chrome OS.

> More at Google Chrome gets Native Code Execution with Native Client

Some might call this progress. Others might call it a workaround, we’ll have to wait a little longer before we can conclude.

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ANGLE or Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, is an Open Source Project to make it possible to run WebGL, a driverless API to DirectX 9. The project is still-developing cross-platform Web standard for accessing low-level 3D graphics hardware based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that can be implemented directly in a browser without a plugin.

WebGL is implemented in many browsers but has direct dependency on OpenGL drivers on each Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. On the other hand, the competing graphics API is Microsoft’s Direct3D, which is part of the company’s DirectX graphics technologies. Microsoft’s DirectX technologies have increasingly become dominant in PC gaming and have almost ruled out OpenGL on windows.

The challenge with WebGL is that many Windows machines  can’t (Mac, Linux can) render WebGL content because the OpenGL drivers aren’t installed, even though the computer has powerful graphics hardware (GPU to be precise).

ANGLE will allow Windows users to overcome this problem and run WebGL content without having to find and install new drivers for their system. Because ANGLE aims to use most of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, it may help developers working on mobile and embedded devices as per Google.

“ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop”

Access ANGLE on Google Code

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The list of changes so far is fairly small for PC users. But the javascript performance improvement is again noticeable. On the contrary, Mac users will notice a bit more of a difference, with fixes addressing plugin stability and crashing while dragging tabs, a slightly improved cookies manager, and minor tweaks to Chrome’s task manager.

On the performance ( the thing that matters most) Chrome 5 speeds-up Javascript execution by upto 22% as per the Sun Spider Benchmark done on Windows 7:

This Makes Chrome 5 dev “World’s Fastest Browser”.

Detailed Results:

TEST                   COMPARISON            FROM                 TO             DETAILS

=============================================================================
** TOTAL **:           1.22x as fast     1116.6ms +/- 1.6%   914.2ms +/- 2.3%     significant
=============================================================================
  3d:                  1.14x as fast      169.8ms +/- 8.9%   149.0ms +/- 9.9%     significant    cube: +/- 15.7%    54.8ms +/- 19.9%     morph:             -                   60.4ms +/- 18.9%    55.6ms +/- 21.8%     raytrace:          1.34x as fast       51.6ms +/- 5.3%    38.6ms +/- 14.5%     significant
  access:              -                   98.6ms +/- 1.9%    95.4ms +/- 6.5%     binary-trees:      -                    4.6ms +/- 36.3%     4.6ms +/- 52.7%     fannkuch:          -                   40.0ms +/- 7.9%    39.0ms +/- 9.3%     nbody:             -                   42.8ms +/- 13.2%    41.0ms +/- 5.3%     nsieve:            -                   11.2ms +/- 24.1%    10.8ms +/- 9.6%
  bitops:              1.18x as fast       95.8ms +/- 13.1%    81.2ms +/- 12.6%     significant  3bit-bits-in-byte: ??                   7.0ms +/- 12.6%     8.0ms +/- 45.3%     not conclusive: might be *1.14x as slow*    bits-in-byte:      -                   16.8ms +/- 9.6%    16.0ms +/- 11.0%     bitwise-and:       -                   29.8ms +/- 23.9%    27.4ms +/- 20.2%     nsieve-bits:       1.42x as fast       42.2ms +/- 20.3%    29.8ms +/- 13.0%     significant
  controlflow:         -                    6.4ms +/- 17.4%     6.0ms +/- 41.4%     recursive:       -                    6.4ms +/- 17.4%     6.0ms +/- 41.4%
  crypto:              1.24x as fast       68.6ms +/- 5.4%    55.4ms +/- 7.9%     significant    aes:               -                   23.6ms +/- 12.7%    21.8ms +/- 14.8%     md5:               1.28x as fast       23.0ms +/- 13.2%    18.0ms +/- 15.4%     significant    sha1:              1.41x as fast       22.0ms +/- 13.3%    15.6ms +/- 21.5%     significant
  date:                1.27x as fast      125.4ms +/- 4.1%    99.0ms +/- 6.8%     significant    format-tofte:      1.34x as fast       61.6ms +/- 8.9%    45.8ms +/- 18.7%     significant    format-xparb:      1.20x as fast       63.8ms +/- 5.4%    53.2ms +/- 7.3%     significant
  math:                -                  113.4ms +/- 10.5%   101.6ms +/- 8.9%     cordic:    1.25x as fast       45.4ms +/- 15.7%    36.4ms +/- 7.1%     significant    partial-sums:      -                   49.2ms +/- 12.9%    47.4ms +/- 16.7%     spectral-norm:     -                   18.8ms +/- 3.0%    17.8ms +/- 24.9%
  regexp:              ??                  37.2ms +/- 9.3%    40.0ms +/- 15.4%     not conclusive: might be *1.08x as slow*    dna:               ??                  37.2ms +/- 9.3%    40.0ms +/- 15.4%     not conclusive: might be *1.08x as slow*
  string:              1.40x as fast      401.4ms +/- 3.3%   286.6ms +/- 5.7%     significant    base64:            1.45x as fast       46.4ms +/- 8.6%    32.0ms +/- 15.8%     significant    fasta:             1.52x as fast       62.0ms +/- 7.4%    40.8ms +/- 18.7%     significant    tagcloud:          1.21x as fast       89.8ms +/- 6.2%    74.0ms +/- 9.8%     significant    unpack-code:       1.28x as fast      130.4ms +/- 16.4%   101.8ms +/- 21.0%     significant    validate-input:    1.92x as fast       72.8ms +/- 13.8%    38.0ms +/- 10.6%     significant

Apart from performance on Windows, there are two key updates. First, Chrome will now use your default downloads folder (i.e. Username\Downloads on Vista and Windows 7)

Now user has more control over the content Chrome displays and executes. User settings for cookies, pop-ups, plugins, scripts, and images are being moved to their own panel. In addition, user can choose to hide Extension buttons from the bar.

You can download the dev channel build .

Update: Opera 10.5 Beta is the NEW Fastest Browser on Earth

We write latest and greatest in Firefox, Chrome, Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Android, Open Source, Latest in Tech @taranfx on Twitter.

Today, Google introduced a new stable release of  Chrome for Windows, which includes Extensions and inbuilt Bookmark sync. Till now they were part of beta/test releases only.

• How to write Chrome Extensions
• Best Google Chrome Extensions Top 15
• More Extensions

As per today, there are over 1,500 in the official extensions gallery .

Though Xmarks is the most popular Bookmark sync extension around, google recommends use of inbuilt bookmark sync that uses your Google account. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it’s automatically added across all your computers.

Here are other Key Improvements:

• Chrome now introduces the Web SQL Database API, which allows user to store data in a structured manner on the user’s computer. In particular, Google is working on Application Cache which gives you the ability to serve HTML and JavaScript that references content in the Web SQL Database. SessionStorage, the little brother of localStorage, is coming soon as well.
• Support for WebSockets: This is a new API for sending data over a persistent bi-directional communication channel, designed to be easier, more powerful, and less resource intensive than using XHR.
• (Windows only) the new notification API that allows you to present information to users, such as event reminders or status updates, via a panel in the user’s status-bar area.
• Integrated a number of new HTML5 APIs in this stable release, including LocalStorage, Database API, WebSockets, and more.
• Improved performance  by 42% over our last stable release and 400% since our first stable release last year.

Download Google Chrome

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Taking the step further, Google has now come up with official Chrome Google Voice extension. If you are a Google Voice user, you will find it extraordinary.

The extension is pretty nasty on features, it adds click to call functionality to web pages. So if there is a phone number on a web page, like a Online directory, or Email page or your online address book, it will now have a hyperlink. Click it and Google will throw you a pop up window asking which phone you want to use (Home, mobile, work, etc.). It tehn routes the call as per your preference.

In addition, it adds a small button besides the addressbar. You can type in a name or phone number and call or sms it from the browser, and read recent text messages and transcribed.

voicemails.

As far as I tried, I found it working on all three popular platforms: Windows, Mac and Ubuntu.

On the Integration front, lack of  an API for Google Voice makes it hard for 3rd party applications to use it via web. To harvest anything useful, it needs to take user credentials, everytime. This Firefox add-on integrates with Google Voice using same concept.

It won’t be long before Google integrates Google Voice with Gizmo5 and Gtalk. Probably, after that having a voice mobile subscription would make no sense. All you need would be a smartbook/smartphone with data-only subscription to do all your voice calls.

We write frequently about Google, Telecom,android, iPhone, Gadgets, Chrome, firefox, other latest Tech news @taranfx on Twitter.

Google just announced Launch of Chrome for Mac and now Chrome Extensions gallery goes live! Available here.

If you are a developer/programmer you can checkout Google Chrome 4 Extensions: How To Create – Twitter Client[Tutorial] and contribute to Open source community

Some of the Other Google Products launched this week:
Google SPDY, Google GO Programming, Google DNS, New Google Search Caffeine, Google Chrome OS, Google Liquid Galaxy,  Google Real Time search, Google Goggles Visual Search. My o My, what’s next?

Future of Google Search

Earlier we had benchmarked various browsers on Mac platform to see how has Chrome beta come along, and Chrome was winning already.

Now comes the Official Public Version which is much more stable and faster. You can Download Chrome for Mac here. (You must be running Mac OS)

New Chrome extensions are coming on the horizon with release of Extensions gallery scheduled for launch this week. Meanwhile you can checkout Top 15 Best Google Chrome Extensions. If you are a developer/programmer you can checkout how you can create your own extension for Google Chrome in easy steps.

Google is seriously on Fire on this holiday season, Here is their Technology making us  nuts: Google SPDY, Google GO Programming, Google DNS, New Google Search Caffeine, Google Chrome OS, Google Liquid Galaxy,  Google Real Time search, Google Goggles Visual Search. My o My, what’s next?

Future of Google Search

How to Install Chrome OS [VMWare VirtualBox]

Tip: If you are totally new to chrome OS: What is Chrome OS – Everything you need to know.

If you have tried Virtualized version and doubted the speed, you must give the USB version a try:

Download [torrent]

Here’s how to Write the Image on the USB:

For Windows:
Unzip using WinRar, Download Image Writer and launch it, select the image (chromiumos.img) and your USB drive letter from the drop down box. Click “Write”. The install image will then be copied to the drive. Once it’s done, close the program and you can then boot from the USB drive.

For Mac:
Firstly, unmount the drive you want to install Chromium OS to. Place the downloaded file onto your desktop. Open System Profiler, click USB on the list at the side and then select the entry that represents your USB disk. Now look for the BSD Name column (http://bit.ly/5mG4WK). Remember what is written here. In my case, it is disk1, but in yours it may be different. Take care here as if you get it wrong, it could seriously mess things up. Once you have this, open up Terminal and
type the following commands.

cd Desktop
tar -zxvf chromiumos.tar.gz
cd chromiumos

For the next command, replace X with the name of the disk you found earlier, ie disk1.

sudo dd if=chromiumos.img of=/dev/X bs=4m

This command will ask you to enter your password (the same one you enter when installing
software for example), type it in and press enter. This command will take a while to run,
about 20 minutes for me, and then will give you your shell prompt back once it has finished.
Once it has, you can remove your USB drive and boot from it (but not on your Mac because
I’ll tell you now that won’t work, yes I tried it)

Troubleshooting:

If It says “Resource Busy“!, You forgot to dismount the drive. Do this, then retype the command and you should be fine.

For Linux:
Extract chromiumos.img and run the following command in the same directory as the file, where X is the device name of your USB drive.

sudo dd if=chromiumos.img of=/dev/X bs=4M

Once the command finishes, you can then boot from the USB drive.

[credits: hexxeh]

Whatever the case is, we now know that two upcoming technologies: Android and Chrome OS are going to converge at some point in the Future.

Photo credit: engadget

How to Install Chrome OS [VMWare VirtualBox]

Still, it’s hard to wonder where Android and its growing application base fits into Google’s long-term OS strategy especially after seeing several ARM-based smartbook prototypes running Google’s smartphone OS. Fortunately, Sergey Brin shed some light on this topic in a candid statement following the Chrome OS event.

According to CNET, Brin said that Android and the Chrome OS “will likely converge over time,” noting the common Webkit and Linux foundation of both operating systems.

On the contrary, listening to Google CEO Eric Schmidt attempt to explain the difference between Google’s operating systems in a recent CNET interview leaves us wondering if the correct message is delivered within Google itself. I might be wrong at this but they don’t seem to have a clear idea of its target markets as smartphone and laptop functionality continues to converge across devices.

Schmidt affirms that it’s too early to tell how the OSes will be used and prefers not to “prejudge the success” of each. “The future will unfold as it does, and the open-source community will determine the natural fit.” Indeed, I loved that answer more than any other. Let Open Source world do it, their own way.

Checkout the video:

What do you think ? Does he have a point there?

What is Chrome OS – Everything you need to know.

Now the curiosity rises to try the OS yourself. As Google announced, it needs special hardware which will be available at end of next year. For the meantime, you can Virtualize the OS and run it under VMware or Virtualbox.

You can either download the source (Download) and trying building it (if you are an developer) else download binaries directly and run them under VMWare/Virtualbox.

Step 1. Download The Image from this torrent or this one. You can also try out the build that GDGT has uploaded. The former way needs registration.

Step 2. Download VMWare Player or VMWare Fusion or VirtualBox and run it.

Step 3. Unzip the downloaded image. In VMware/VirtualBox and create a new virtual machine. One of the options will be to use an “existing virtual disk.” (In VMware Fusion, this is the last option below, “use operating system disk” and “use OS disc image file.”). Make sure your VM is set to use bridged networking, rather than NAT.

Step 4. Login to Chrome OS with username and password which is nothing but  your Google account!

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Chrome OS will come a year from now. So,  Here’s what we know:

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks” and “most of the user experience takes place on the web.” That is, it’s “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel” with the web as the platform. It runs on x86 processors and soon on ARM processors too. It’s more secure than any Browser has ever been.

What Exactly it is

• Basically, just a browser: There are no native applications, everything is the browser. It’ll be based around preexisting web services like Gmail, Google Docs, and so on. There are going to be no conventional applications, just web applications—nothing gets installed, updated, or whatever. Seriously.

• Runs web apps, only: It’s going to integrate web apps into the operating system deeper than we’ve ever seen before, meaning that a) they’ll seem more like native apps than web apps and b) they’ll be able to tap into local resources more than a typical web app in Firefox, for example. They’re web apps in name, but they’ll have native powers. If you run some hardcore apps like Photoshop, Eclipse, VisualStudio, forget chrome os.

• How, exactly?: With HTML 5, and other marvelous features of Chrome. This is the next version of HTML, which gives the browser more access to local resources like location info, offline storage—the kinds of things you’d normally associate with native apps. More on that here.

• “Chrome” Experience: The user’s experience with Chrome OS will basically be synonymous with their experience on Chrome Browser. Technically speaking, Chrome OS is a Linux-based OS, but you won’t be installing Linux binaries like you might on Ubuntu or some other Linux distribution. Any “apps” you have will be used within the browser. Chrome OS is effectively a new version of Chrome, that you can’t leave. There are a few reasons Google’s pushing this, which we’ll get to in a bit.

• And as you’ve probably guessed, it’s super-light. It starts up in a matter of seconds, and boot straight into the browser.

• Normal hard drives not supported, just solid state storage. Hard drives are dying, sure, but this is pretty bold. Hardware support sounds like it’ll be pretty slim, because:

• Chrome OS Hardware: You might be able to hack this thing onto your current machine (atleast for now), but you won’t just be able to install it to replace Windows, or opt for it on your next laptop, for example. You’ll have to buy hardware that Google approved and consulted on. With a small hack, we would be able to run chrme OS on VirtualBox.

• For now(atleast), it’s for dedicated netbooks. It’s not intended for desktops, to the point that Google is saying that the first generation of Chrome hardware will be secondary machines. But a hack will make it possible on any device.

The User Interface

• It looks like Chrome browser—specifically, like the leaked shots we saw before. As in a browser, you have tabs—these have to serve as a taskbar as well. To the left of the tabs, you have a sort of start menu, which opens up a panel full of shortcuts. These are your favorites. These are your apps. (Get used to this weird feeling, btw. That Google whole point here.

• You can pop-open smaller windows integrated into the main window like chat windows or music players, to sit above your tabs at all times. Just like you do it in GTalk web chat

• Apart from Tabs, you get virtual desktops. This means is multiple “windows” of Chrome OS to switch between, each of which is a different set of tabs.

When

Google’s on talking about dates yet—it’ll be sometime next year (mid or late). Executable builds will start appearing online, soon and for the time being, it would work in a virtual machine app like VirtualBox.

Verdict

With Chrome OS, Google is taking (or forcing) the operating system to go totally online in the Cloud. The idea here is to make the browser powerful enough to render the rest of the operating system, and its native apps.

It’s more pure than a lot of people expected: When Google said that Chrome OS would be centered around the web, I think most people just assumed it be a lightweight Linux distribution with deep integration for Google web services. It’s not that. It’s nothing more than a browser for a normal user.

But it’s a browser that runs different processes for each tab, that will have access to local OS resources, will to some extent work offline with caching. It’s not really a “browser” in the sense that we use the word. More verdict after a break.

[via]

What do you think ?

Google is hosting a press event at  its Mountain View, Calif., headquarters to update the world on its plans for world domination via the release of its second operating system (after Android), the Google Chrome OS. Google VP Sundar Pichai and Engineering Director Matthew Papakipos will reveal technical details and launch plans, and will have demos. Google will be streaming the announcement.

Webcast starts: November 19, 2009 at 10:00 AM PT

WATCH NOW or If you are on Windows Click here to Open in Media Player

After a long wait since July, this is company’s first talks over Chrome OS. The potential plan is to lay some technical background and excite the community with demos.

Google’s VP of Product Management: Sundar Pichai,  and Matthew Papakipos, will be seen as the engineers on stage.

From the last week, we had been hearing about Chrome OS launch this week. This still may be the case at this event, but it looks for now that the more complete launch will in fact take place next year. And if they are holding this event now with a complete overview, you can probably expect beta launch to be sometime on Jan or Feb.

Google first announced Chrome OS in July, but gave very few details about it. It seemed the idea there was more to drop a nuclear bomb on Microsoft, which was just about to announce its online free version of Office. In the subsequent months, interest has remained high for Chrome OS, but about all we’ve seen is what the OS’s browser may look like.

Chrome OS Factsheet, Why its Relevant and Irrelevant

The Verdict – The Future of Chrome OS and Windows.

Meantime get a glimpse of all our posts on Chrome OS under “suggested reading”

We’ll update you with more details on Thursday. So don’t forget to subscribe to us below:

So, after recommending great Firefox addons, we finally compiled the Best extensions you can gift your Chrome with (Don’t forget, she likes surprises ):

Note: All extensions need a Developer version of Chrome (Chrome 4)

15. Minimize to Tray [download]
Want some extra room on your taskbar? Install Minimize to Tray and the Chrome is discretely tucked away into the system tray.

14. SmoothScroll [download]

Yet another Firefox favorite that users demanded for Chrome. If you find Chrome’s default scrolling a bit too choppy, this extension will make it silky smooth. If you happen to use Opera 10, you know what I’m talking about.

13. WOT/ WebOfTrust [download]
This is another extension I was glad to see arrive on Chrome. WOT provides community-powered trust and safety ratings for web pages. Not only will WOT mark links for you as safe and unsafe, it’ll also block potentially harmful pages with a large, red warning screen if you happen to wind up on one.

12. Chrome Touch [download]

This beautiful extension gives acceleration to your scroll. Scroll like you do on iPhone.

11. Save Page as PDF [download]

This Google Chrome extension enables you to save the web page in the PDF format. Just click on the extension to save the currently viewing web page in the PDF format. After you click it the web page will be converted into PDF format and a saved in a file after a moment you will be asked to save the PDF file onto your system.

10. Google Chrome Dual view [download]

This Chrome extension enables you to view two different web pages in a single tab. The single tab will split into two from the middle in such a way that in each half you can see them side-by-side. Recommended for comparisons, reading two things side-by-side. Or Twitter on one side and a normal blog on other.

9. Google Wave Checker [download]

A simple extension that will display the unread Google Wave messages in the Google Chrome statusbar and next to addressbar.

8. Bubble Translate [download]
A number of the blogs I read link to non-English sites. Unfortunately, like Corbin Dallas my linguistic skills are mostly limited to English and Bad English. Bubble Translate taps into Google’s multilingual conversion engine and translates selected text on any web page into your selected native tongue (set it in the extension’s options screen). You can also customize the bubble and text color to your liking.

7. AdSweep or AdBlock+ or FlashBlock: These are among the first extensions that appear for any browser. All three extensions do pretty much good job at cleaning all the ads present in the web pages.

6. XChrome [download]

This is a theme manager for Google Chrome web browser. Like Firefox themes you can also install and load new themes in Google Chrome and change as often as you like with this new Google Chrome extension.

5. Mouse Stroke [download]
Chrome on Steriods, mouse stroke,  gives your chrome mouse gesture support. With this extension you can perform a variety of browsing tasks effortlessly using only your mouse.

Tablet and touchscreen users: you may also want to take a look at ChromeTouch. It’s made to let you take advantage of your screen’s touch.

4. LastPass [download]

LastPass is, simply put, one of the best secure password managers and generators around. This exists on Firefox as well, and had gained a lot of popularity.I highly recommend it for hassle free secure way of storing passwords.

3. Session Saver [download]
Chrome does automatically restore the tabs from your last bit of web browsing, but what if you want the ability to restore a sets of tabs from a specific session? Session Saver allows you to manually save an entire set of Chrome windows and tabs (or just the current window) for easy restoration at any time.

2. TwitterFx [by Taranfx] [download]

Okay, I`ve written this one, so I won’t praise it and it’s in it’s alpha stage. Jaxov writes about this plugin.

“TwitterFx is extremely cool twitter extension for Google Chrome which allows you to tweet right from your Google Chrome toolstrip. You can also read tweets of the people you follow without even opening twitter.com. All tweets scroll in your toolstrip just like a news feed. ”

If you are a web developer and want to learn about this, follow:  Google Chrome 4 Extensions: How To Create – Twitter Client [Download] [Tutorial]

1. Xmarks [Xmarks beta register & download]
This is one addon I can’t live without. Xmarks has become an incredibly popular bookmark syncing tool. It’s a longtime favorite of Firefox users and the Chrome version – though only in alpha testing – looks like it will be every bit as good. Sync your bookmarks, Bookmark toolbars, (and passwords on Firefox) across multiple Browsers, PCs.

Breaking News! Google is now getting ready for an official repository for Chrome Extensions. Stick with us by subscribing below. Bet on us, you won’t miss any important Tech news.

The Update rolled out by Microsoft to fix IE8 security rips apart Google Chrome performance. The update (MS09-054 /  974455) is supposed to fix two critical flaws in IE 8:

But unfortunately, it effects all versions of chrome to behave unusually. Chrome becomes unresponsive, sluggish and slower by factor of 10x times (of the order of IE8). The KB articles detail out the fixing of the flaw related to VBScript and javascript, however it modifies Chrome’s Javascript execution engine.

The case was reported to Chrome development community and was brought to forum as well, where it was confirmed that the Update was the root cause. Uninstalling the Update, however, fixes Chrome again.

Was it  Microsoft’s attempt to cripple Google‘s Chrome business? Or Something that went un-noticed?

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