One ring to rule them all, one ring to find them, one ring to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them.

There was no “Download Day”, no server downtime, no record to set… It all happened without much fanfare. Just a small statement in the most visited page in internet. “New! Download Chrome (BETA) - the new browser from Google”

Google calls it Chrome, People call it “Google OS”, Open Source Community will have its “Chromium”, IE would call it “Nightmare come true”, Opera would cry “copy cat”, Apple would say “Just another Safari“, Privacy Advocates will cry “Foul”, Some call it start of “Web 3.0″ or “Web 3.0 beta”, FireFox is just recovering from the “shock” and I just call it “cool“…

Imagine the simplicity and minimalistic colours of Google in a browser and you got “Chrome”. The way you had imagined and used tabs are going to change. The tabs are going to the top floor instead of being below the address bar. You can still switch tabs! You can kill the tab from the tab strip or from the process manager. When you kill the tab, you see a “sad tab.” If you reload the page, Google Chrome will even remember the scroll position.

New tab page shows most frequently visited page, most frequent searches, bookmarks, and recently closed tabs. You can choose whether a bookmark strip follows you as you surf (in case you want to save screen space).

Geeks, use the Task Manager to get details about a specific process running in Google Chrome, or to force a misbehaving tab or application to close. You can use the keyboard shortcut Shift+Esc to quickly open the Task Manager. For each active item in Google Chrome, you can monitor the amount of memory taken up, the amount of CPU used, and the network activity (bytes sent and received). To force a misbehaving webpage or application to close in Google Chrome, select the web page, then click the End process button. For those who need to go the extra mile, you have “Stats for Nerds”

More news for the techies, Google Chrome uses WebKit, not a new rendering engine to the web. It renders just like Safari. It multi processes all its tabs with separate threads making it more stable and resource efficient in long run. Chrome uses V8 virtual machine to execute javascript. According to one source, “V8 executes JavaScript much much faster than current technologies.” Chrome is open under a BSD License. The name of the project to open-source Google Chrome is Chromium.

The official Google blog announced the Chrome project being available to general public from today. For now only Windows users. Mac and Linux users watch out for updates. You can also check out the comic book explaining Google Chrome from Google.

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Yesterday, Matt officially announced the release of WordPress 2.6 codenamed “Tyner” to the blogging community. WordPress release codename’s are named after jazz musicians and continuing with the tradition, 2.6 has been named after McCoy Tyner. It contains many new features that makes WordPress a more powerful  CMS (Content Management System).

One of the most important features of this release is Version Control System which enables Wiki-like tracking of edits similar to Wikipedia. This would be a very handy feature which enables the users to just undo and go back to a previous version of the post.

Another major feature introduced in this version is display of captions alongside the images. The example can be seen in the WordPress logo displayed in top of this post.  [Looks like alignment of captions has an issue. I am not just able to get it aligned]

Theme previews would be loved by any serious WordPress user. It was a long awaited feature. It enables to preview the theme, tweak and correct your mistakes before the whole world sees it.

WordPress uses Gears (previously known as Google Gears), an open source browser extension project started by Google. It is primarily for developers to manage offline storage thus enabling you to get a little extra juice. It maintains a cache or keeps a copy of commonly-used Javascript and CSS files on your computer, which can speed up the loading of some pages by several seconds (they just pop right up!). You can install Gears for Firefox or Internet Explorer, with support for Safari and Opera pending. WP 2.6 only uses the cache concept and the future versions are promised with more features in collaboration with Gears.

Other notable features in this release of WordPress are

• Word Count are displayed in the side bar when writing or editing the posts.
• You can reorder the gallery just by drag and drop.
• Bulk management of plugins. Just enable or disable all plugins in a single click.
• “Press This” bookmarklet which enables you to blog from anywhere just by clicking a boomarklet in your browser.
• More advanced image control enabling easy insertion, resizing.  Also shifting from Flash uploader to the classic uploader is easy.
• Full SSL support in the core, and the ability to force SSL for security.
• A number of proactive security enhancements, including cookies and database interactions. Version 2.6 fixes approximately 194 bugs.
• Stronger better faster versions of TinyMCE, jQuery, and jQuery UI.

With all these new features, I decided to jump the bandwagon without having to wait for my Hosting company to update the Fantastico which will help me automatically upgrade my WordPress installation. Now bit Feed is powered by WordPress 2.6

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For the people who have been using Google Maps or Reader, Google Profiles might be an old news. Today I was trying out the new Google Mapmaker and was surprised to find my Profile page was revamped. There was also a seperate link for my profile page. Looks like Google is going to consolidate all their services to reflect on a single profile.

According to Google,

A Google Profile is simply how you represent yourself on Google products — it lets you tell others a bit more about who you are and what you’re all about. You control what goes into your Google Profile, sharing as much (or as little) as you’d like.

For now Profile is visible in Google Reader, Google Maps and Google’s Shared Stuff. Google has already announced these profiles would be searchable.

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With the everybody getting ready for Firefox 3 release tomorrow, Google silently seems to have updated their Toolbar extension to accommodate the latest version. Even though according to the version info in the official site is still carrying the old version number of 3.0.20070525, the version that is being offered for download is 3.1.20080605W

There has been no significant changes in the layout or any new features in this release but still for those who jumped the wagon with Firefox release candidates and had been handicapped without this, it would be a relief.

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Google kept up its word about releasing new features for Gmail today. A few experimental features for the web interface have been introduced under the banner of Gmail Labs. According to the official Gmail Blog, some of these features might be incorporated permantely or retired based on their usage. For now there are 13 features which will be expanded slowly. You can activate these features from your Gmail settings Labs tab. In case of any problems you can revert back to the original Gmail interface via a URL. Presently these are available for US and UK editions and other local editions need to wait I guess.

Some of the features worth checking out are

• Quick Links : A box in the side menu which can hold any Gmail URL. It can be useful for your constant searches or views. Something like “in:inbox is:unread” search would yield all unread messages in inbox.  It can be done for all the labels and different search queries.
• Random Signature : Can be used to load signatures randomly from an RSS feed.
• Star Icons : For those who star their conversations a lot, this will be very handy. After enabling this feature remember to add the extra icons in the setting menu.
• Mouse gestures : You can use your right mouse button and a upward mouse gesture to go to inbox and left to go previous conversation and right gesture to next conversation.
• Snakes Game : For who love the classic snake game just press “&” to bring up the game.
• Custom Key Shortcuts : You can map your own keyboard shortcuts which can replace the present forgettable default key shortcuts.

There are also few other features which one can check out provided you have switched over to Gmail. If you enable these features and if something goes wrong, you can temporarily disable Gmail Labs and enter in safe mode by visiting http://mail.google.com/mail/?labs=0.

via : [Official Gmail Blog]

Update on 17th June 2008 : Acccording to the Official Gmail Blog today, there is a Labs discussion forum where one could discuss and give feedback about the labs feature in Gmail and even suggest new ones.

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It’s been a long time since Google Talk got any attention from Google… For regular users who are accustomed to using the invisible mode in chat widget inside Gmail now it has been ported to Google Talk Labs Edition and Talk Gadget for iGoogle.

So hopefully we can see this feature in full fledged GTalk application too. Would be helpful for all those GTalk addicted “worker drones” aboard all the cubes…

For those who use Google Calendar regularly try the Labs edition which has the reminders and notificaitons with Snooze options. For Orkut users you get scrap notifications (Not for those who are stuck up inside UAE’s “moral” proxies)