Google Chrome beta due in days

Google will soon begin distributing a third beta version of its Chrome Web browser, a release that takes on bugs, performance, and security weaknesses.

"You will automatically get updated in the next few days," Chrome program manager Mark Larson said in a mailing list post Wednesday night announcing the new version. People can check if a new version is available by clicking the wrench menu and selecting "About Google Chrome."

On the security front, Google Chrome version 0.3.154.9 stomps a security problem in which a site--if it convinces a user to open a pop-up window--could show a different Web address than the one that actually supplied the information.

"This flaw could be used to mislead people about the origin of a Web site in order to get them to divulge sensitive information," Larson said.

Found in the new beta: better performance and reliability for plug-ins such as Flash and Silverlight; support for scrolling with a touchpad; and better performance and reliability for people who browse the Web through a proxy intermediary. More details are expected to become available in the Chrome release notes page, though at present that page hasn't been updated.

Also, although Google aggressively promotes search technology to make people's lives more convenient, the company concluded it's not a good idea to index the contents of Web pages that were accessed over a secure connection. "You can still search your history for the site's address, but not the contents on the page," Google said in a Chrome release notes blog post Wednesday.

Other changes:

• The spell-checker underlines misspelled words in text-input boxes now, and users can right-click words to add them to a dictionary.

• Google, with some outside help, tidied up the process for launching regular and incognito windows, moving the option from the "control the current page" menu to the "control Chrome" among other changes.

• When users download executable programs, such as those ending with .exe or .dll extensions, Chrome now gives them dummy filenames until users confirm they really want to download the files. Unconfirmed downloads are deleted when Chrome exits.

Google released the first Chrome beta in early September and quickly followed up with a second release to fix serious security problems.

Google also offers a faster moving but less-well-tested developer release of Chrome. The newest beta version is the same as the most recent developer version except for one new feature: translation of text such as dialog boxes and menu commands into 42 languages.

I've been testing the Chrome developer releases, and one thing Google didn't mention in its release notes is better JavaScript performance over the earlier Chrome releases. Fast JavaScript is a key part of Google's ambition to use Chrome to spur faster Web application development.

Chrome is an open-source project, and Google maintains a Chrome issues list for those curious about new priorities. It's still only available on Windows, but Google is working on Mac OS X and Linux versions.

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Blackberry Storm, get hit by the Storm!

The Blackberry Storm looks and sounds like a businessman’s dream, featuring almost real touch screen buttons, and according to a Youtube video I watched there is a docking station that turns it into an alarm clock while charging.

Some features:

* camera (don’t all smart phones have cameras?)
* Bluetooth
* GPS
* Wi-fi
* music playback
* browser uses real HTML
* handles Blackberry mail

Now all that’s needed is Gmail on the Storm and some of the cool features it brings like the new ability to add gadgets like GCalendar and GDocs to Gmail’s left navigation area where you find Chat and Labels. How cool would it be if Blackberry and Google worked out a deal to get Android on a Blackberry? Maybe someone out there can customize Android for the Blackberry? I know the $10 million prize was for Homebrewed Android apps, but maybe some heavy-hitter in the Open Source community wouldn’t mind doing the legwork and I’d love a complimentary Storm on Android for authoring the idea… although I’m sure its either not too original or not possible so I probably won’t get one. Oh well, here’s a cool Backberry Storm video:

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Adds Calender & Doc Gadgets To Gmail

Gmail Labs has been a really fun way to easily try out new ideas and get some of our pet feature requests implemented quickly. We wanted to take this to the next level and let you start adding your own stuff to Gmail. Today we're launching a few Labs experiments that let you add gadgets to the left-nav, next to Chat and Labels.

To get you started, we've worked with the engineers from the Calendar and Docs teams on two highly requested features: a simple way to see your Google Calendar agenda and get an alert when you have a meeting, and a gadget that shows a list of your recently accessed Google Docs and lets you search across all of your documents right from within Gmail.

There's a third Lab that allows you to add any gadget by pasting in the URL of its XML spec file (e.g. http://www.google.com/ig/modules/youtube_videos.xml). We realize this isn't very user friendly right now; it's a sandbox mainly aimed at developers who want to play around with gadgets in Gmail. We're not tied to the left-nav as a primary way to extend Gmail -- in fact we think it is relatively limited and doesn't offer scalable real estate. There are also some downsides to the iframe-style Gadgets we're using today -- they can sometimes slow down the page. We're fanatical about speed, so we'll be keeping a close eye on performance.

This is also a chance for us to test the developer infrastructure involved. We're using common gadget infrastructure, such as the Apache Shindig project, and working with other gadget containers to make gadgets more portable.

We're looking forward to your comments in the Labs forum, so send us your ideas, let us know how you like the Calendar and Docs gadgets, and if you've written a gadget that you think works well in Gmail, post it and let us and other users try it out.

A couple of notes:
(1) Try out Anatol's Navbar drag and drop Labs feature so you can easily re-order all the boxes on Gmail's left hand side.
(2) Not all gadgets are fully compatible with https, so if you're connecting to Gmail via https, you may see mixed content warnings caused by parts of the gadgets being served over http. We're working on fixing this where we can.

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HOW TO REPAIR MISSING ISNTLDR

Every once in a while I note, in the forums where I participate, series of questions that appear over and over again. So is the case with the “NTDR is missing” when the user attempts to boot their system. Below are some ways to fix or repair the problem so your system should boot up properly.

1. This is the first thing to look at. Is your system trying to boot from a CD or floppy disk that is non-bootable? Remove the CD or floppy and try again.
2. Have you added a new hard disk with another copy of Windows installed on the new disk? Have you confirmed that the drives are set properly as Master and Slave?
3. If steps 1 and 2 do not apply,then it is time to pull out the big guns. Follow steps 4 through 10.
4. Insert the Windows XP bootable CD into the computer.
5. When prompted to press any key to boot from the CD, press any key.
6. Once in the Windows XP setup menu, press the “R” key to repair Windows.
7. Log into your Windows installation by pressing the “1″ key and pressing enter.
8. You will then be prompted for your administrator password; enter that password.
9. Copy the below two files to the root directory of the primary hard disk. In the below example we are copying these files from the CD-ROM drive letter “E.” This letter may be different on your computer.
copy e:\i386\ntldr c:\
copy e:\i386\ntdetect.com c:\
10. Once both of these files have been successfully copied, remove the CD from the computer and reboot.

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