Chromium Blog: February 2010

Google Chrome Frame Developer Updates

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Since Google Chrome Frame was released in September we've published regular updates to improve stability and integration with Internet Explorer. Today's update continues this work but also contains two key changes that developers should be aware of.
First, until now Google Chrome Frame has used the <meta> tag for invocation.

<meta equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">

Unfortunately, doing this had a few potential problems, including some challenges for sites which couldn't place the <meta> tag early enough to trigger Google Chrome Frame reliably.
As of today, Google Chrome Frame additionally allows sites to serve an HTTP header for invocation. Use of the <meta> tag is still supported, but sites can take advantage of the new trigger by specifying an equivalent HTTP header:

X-UA-Compatible: chrome=1

This has the following benefits:

Sites that detect Google Chrome Frame can serve content with standard MIME types (including application/xhtml+xml), which Microsoft Internet Explorer does not natively support.
The HTTP header will always be detected, no matter how many other headers are served.
The HTTP header passes the W3C validator (which the <meta> tag syntax did not).
HTTP headers can be centrally configured in your web sever for blanket rollout of Google Chrome Frame support. For example, to enable GCF site-wide for browsers that support it, in Apache (with mod_headers and mod_setenvif enabled) specify a header directive like:

BrowserMatch chromeframe gcf

Header append X-UA-Compatible "chrome=1" env=gcf

</IfModule>

Secondly, today's release also renames the "cf:" protocol to "gcf:" and disables "gcf:" by default. You can enable it on your local system for testing by adding a REG_DWORD value named EnableGCFProtocol with a value of 1 to the following registry key: HKCU\Software\Google\ChromeFrame.
This change will help avoid misuse of this development-mode feature and will reduce the number of spurious compatibility issues reported.
Your copy of Google Chrome Frame should be automatically upgraded with these changes. To learn more, ask questions, or get involved, visit our site or join the Google Chrome Frame discussion group.
Posted by Alex Russell, Software Engineer

Extending Google Chrome 25,621 Miles

Thursday, February 4, 2010

At the end of 2009, we traveled around the world — to the Czech Republic, Russia, and Argentina — meeting with developers and talking to them about Google Chrome Extensions and HTML5.
In the first leg of our trip, we headed to Europe for Google Developer Day Prague and Google Developer Day Moscow on November 6th and 10th. Google Developer Days are one-day events featuring seminars and office hours about Google developer products like Android, Google App Engine, and of course Google Chrome! More than 800 developers were on hand in Prague and more than 1,500 in Moscow to learn, among lots of other things, how to develop extensions for Google Chrome. Below is video of the talk Brian gave about extensions in Moscow. You can also watch video of this talk translated into Russian or video of a similar talk from Prague and view slides from Prague or slides from Moscow.

Our next and last stop was Buenos Aires for Google DevFest Argentina. Google DevFests are more focused versions of Google Developer Days. On November 17th, another 800 or so developers attended this event. There, we covered the Google Chrome platform in a couple sessions — on HTML5 and extensions. Below are slides from the talk Mihai gave on HTML5. You can also view slides from the extension talk.

HTML5 and Google Chrome - DevFest09

View more documents from mihaiionescu.

For us, the best part of being at these events was seeing and hearing about all the interest in Google Chrome from developers everywhere and all the cool things those developers are building with the browser. If you'd like to get involved too, there are a bunch of community-organized Google Chrome events going on now. Check out the Google Technology User Group site to find a group or Meetup to find an event near you. And if there isn't a nearby group or event already, why not create your own! We have a collection of hackathon-in-a-box resources to help you do so.

Posted by Brian Kennish and Mihai Ionescu, Developer Advocates

40,000 More Extensions!

Monday, February 1, 2010

One thing that got lost in the commotion of the extensions launch is a feature that is near and dear to my heart: Google Chrome 4 now natively supports Greasemonkey user scripts. Greasemonkey is a Firefox extension I wrote in 2004 that allows developers to customize web pages using simple JavaScript and it was the inspiration for some important parts of our extension system.
Ever since the beginning of the Chromium project, friends and coworkers have been asking me to add support for user scripts in Google Chrome. I'm happy to report that as of the last Google Chrome release, you can install any user script with a single click. So, now you can use emoticons on blogger. Or, you can browse Google Image Search with a fancy lightbox. In fact, there's over 40,000 scripts on userscripts.org alone.
Installation is quick and easy, just like installing an extension. That's because under the covers, the user script is actually converted into an extension. This means that management tasks like disabling and uninstalling work just like they do with extensions.
Note that user scripts are powerful software and have full access to your private data on any web site. So, for example, they could read all your web mail or access your online bank. Be sure to read the comments on any user scripts in order to decide whether you trust the author with this power.
Also keep in mind that some user scripts won't work in Google Chrome yet, because of differences between it and Firefox. Based on some analysis that the current maintainers of Greasemonkey did, I expect between 15%-25% of scripts to not work in Google Chrome. If you find such a script, you should consider letting the author know. There may be something he or she can do to easily fix the problem. In the meantime, we'll keep working on bugs on our side to bring our implementation closer to Greasemonkey.
Have fun trying out the thousands of available scripts. And don't worry - If you get bored, there's lots more extensions at Google Chrome's extension gallery.
Posted by Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer

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