Three handy (but often-overlooked) Google Chrome features

We are all of us creatures of habit, and those habits can easily extend to our Web browsers, where we're so focused on our usual daily routines, we often overlook certain capabilities that can save us time or improve our productivity.

In Google Chrome, for example, there are three features so neatly tucked away that I suspect many users have never noticed them.

Luckily for you, I have:

Don't overlook these three options in Google Chrome.
1. Other devices

One of Chrome's most powerful capabilities is synchronization--not just your bookmarks and passwords, but also your open tabs. (You can enable this via Settings, Advanced sync settings.)

For example, if you have Chrome installed on, say, another PC, a smartphone, and a tablet, you can use your desktop browser to access the open tabs on all those devices.

To do, so simply open a new tab, then click the Other devices menu in the lower-right corner of that tab. You'll see a categorized list of open tabs from all other instances of your Chrome browser. Easy to overlook, but insanely handy.

2. Recently closed

As you may know, if you accidentally close a tab, you can immediately reopen it by pressing Ctrl-Shift-T. However, what if you need to recall a tab you closed a while back? Or a tab that wasn't the very last one you closed?

What you need is a list of closed tabs, which Chrome quietly provides: While you're down in that lower-right corner, look at the option right next to Other Devices: the Recently closed menu. Click it and you'll see links to your 10 most recently closed tabs.

3. Web Store

Newcomers to Chrome simply may not be aware that Google offers a fairly massive library of apps for the browser, and that it's accessible via the Chrome Web Store.

As you've no doubt spotted, the link resides in that same corner, right alongside Recently Closed. Click Web Store to open the app aisles in a new tab, then browse or search to your heart's content.

Chrome, Firefox edge IE in browser reliability test

Recent versions of Google's Chrome and Mozilla's Firefox are measurably less prone to crashes and errors than Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10, a new analysis by applications testing firm Sauce Labs has found.

If this looks like another stick to beat Microsoft's browser with, it is worth pointing out that the firm's study of around 55 million tests run using the Selenium platform found that all browsers showed extremely low levels of errors, in the order of 0.12 percent or lower for the "worst" performer, Apple's Safari 6.

On the same scale, Opera 12 scored 0.08 percent, IE10 at 0.05 percent, Chrome 27 under 0.02 percent, with Firefox was so low it effectively achieved a remarkable zero, that is to say no errors at all. IE lagged its main rivals but at levels that were already extremely low.

As interesting as the reliability figures was the level of improvement shown by these recent versions, some only months or even weeks old.

Internet Explorer 6 (released in 2001 with XP) and 7 (2007) had previously been the worst performers on 0.3 percent each, behind Firefox on Opera 10 (2009) and Firefox 7 (2011) and IE8 (2009) on just under 0.25 percent. It is remarkable that all of these are still used by small percentages of global browser users, but they are also aging software vulnerable to issues more serious than how often they might crash.

"Half of the browser versions we analyzed had error rates lower than 0.07 percent. That's pretty low, and suggests that browsers are getting more reliable as more versions come out," said Luren Nguyen of Sauce Labs.

Despite lagging slightly, IE had also shown major improvement over time.

"Microsoft has really been pushing their new version of Internet Explorer as the most modern and high-performing version of IE. You've may have seen their nostalgia-tinged IE 10 commercial. The data we have on browser error rates suggests that their claims may have quite a bit of merit," she said.

The absolute level of errors in these tests is an imperfect way to measure browser reliability some might argue (can the errors be proved to be the browser's fault and not the testing suite's?), but the comparative measurement won't be coincidence. Errors, which usually result in a crash of some kind, are caused by bugs in the browser code.

Do error rates really matter? Only when they occur, which seems to be rarely these days. 

The new Chrome App Launcher: Google's backdoor into the offline world

On Friday, Google gave Windows users something that they’ve been pining for: A Start button. And even better than that, Google’s version keeps you on the desktop and actually opens a pop-up menu full of programs, unlike the nerfed Start button that’s slated to appear in the Windows 8.1 update.

No, Larry Page hasn’t decided to jump into the crowded Windows Start button replacement arena. Instead, Google’s engineers quietly dragged Chrome OS’s App Launcher—the Googlefied equivalent of a Start button—over to Chrome for Windows today. The seemingly simple addition is a major step in Google’s push to bring Web standards to walled gardens.

The Chrome App Launcher is exactly what you’d expect: A taskbar icon that lets you quick-launch Chrome browser apps, such as Gmail, the Play Store, Angry Birds, and yep, even Chrome itself. Simple, right? But the little launcher is a Trojan horse for much bigger ambitions—especially when paired with packaged Chrome apps.

Packaged apps are available now, but since Google has yet to highlight them in the Chrome Web Store, you might not be familiar with them. Packaged apps are programs built on the bones of the Chrome browser. They use traditional Web languages such as HTML5 and CSS, but they run as separate, standalone software that can also be used offline, unlike traditional browsers.

You could consider packaged apps to basically be desktop Web apps, as odd as that sounds.
“For quite some time, we’ve had a dichotomy between Web apps and native apps, and one of the things that sets them apart is the ability [for native apps] to be launched from the desktop and have a degree of persistence and independence from the browser,” says Ross Rubin, principal analyst at Reticle Research. “The availability of the Chrome App Launcher for Windows helps to further blur the line.”

Hey, who put Chrome OS’s Start button where my Windows Start button used to be? The apps without tiny arrows in their lower-left corner are all packaged apps.

  With the arrival of packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher, no longer will you need to connect to the Internet, open the Chrome browser, and launch the Web app you want to use. Now, there’s a Web-app Start button right on your taskbar, and the packaged apps don’t even require an Internet connection.

“Clearly, one of the missions of the whole Chrome initiative is to serve as an incentive for people to adopt HTML5 and create cross-platform or Web applications,” says Rubin. “People want to interact with their Web apps as easily as they do with their desktop apps. Having the [Chrome App Launcher] available helps to ease the transition.”

Each packaged app runs as its own instance, not as part of the main Chrome browser, as this look at several packaged apps in the Windows fast-switch interface shows. (Click to enlarge.)

It’s made even easier by the App Launcher’s Chrome tie-in. All your Chrome apps seamlessly travel with you to any Windows PC on which you’ve installed the Chrome App Launcher, even the locally stored package apps (though those take a few moments to download to new installations). Download a Chrome app once, and it’s available anywhere.

What’s more, the Chrome App Launcher lets you pin shortcuts for specific apps to the Windows taskbar or the desktop—mimicking native software functionality even further. It doesn’t matter whether the app is packaged or a Web native, either. Blurring the lines, indeed.

As a Web-focused company, Google gains whenever more people start using the Web more often. But beyond generally coaxing the world to Web services, Google has a direct interest in getting people in front of Google’s Web services. That’s the reason the Chrome App Launcher comes chock full of links to YouTube, Chrome, Gmail, Google Drive, Google Search, and the Chrome Web Store (whose third-party apps often include Google Ads).

”It looks like Google is defining the Chrome platform as what I’d call ‘Web Platform Plus,’” says IDC’s Hilwa.

  More notably, though they may appear as standalone offline programs, packaged apps can work only if you have Chrome installed. Not only are they built on top of the browser, but some of the advanced features being packed into packaged apps—such as in-app payment support or the ability to play nice with Fitbits and iTunes libraries—come courtesy of proprietary Google APIs, not open Web standards.
That’s a price you have to pay for running those apps closer to the metal, so to speak.

“[Packaged apps] provide APIs for accessing device capabilities, which is something that’s been lacking in Web applications for browsers,” IDC analyst Al Hilwa told TechHive earlier this year. “This brings web-app capabilities closer to the level of what some native platforms offer.”

It also means that while the Chrome App Launcher is indeed a force to spur general Web adoption to traditionally offline platforms, packaged apps in particular are inextricably tied to Chrome—which, in turn, makes Google’s browser-centric Chrome OS more appealing, too.

Creating Web app shortcuts with Chrome App Launcher. Hey, you’re not supposed to be able to do that! (Click to enlarge.)

  “It looks like Google is defining the Chrome platform as what I’d call ‘Web Platform Plus,’ and intends for Chrome OS and the Chrome browser to be a ‘platform on a platform’ on any device it is permitted to run on,” Hilwa told PCWorld in a separate interview.

Yes, folks, between the App Launcher and packaged apps, soon every notebook can be a Chromebook, even if it’s not a Chromebook. (The Chrome App Launcher was recently added to the OS X version of Chromium, the open-source version of the browser.)
Rubin sings a similar tune.
“The adoption of HTML5 and Web standards is the larger mission,” he says. “But of course, Google wants Chrome and the implementations of Web technologies that it has bet on to be the means of access. By making available the Chrome rendering engine, Google can integrate the technologies it’s endorsing or helping to develop, like the new Blink browser engine—particularly on Windows or OS X, where it helps further the implementation of those technologies where [Google] can’t control the default browser.”

In other words, the Chrome App Launcher is a way for Google to have its cake and eat it too. Google wants as many people as possible to embrace open Web standards, no doubt at least partially motivated by the desire to bring its services (read: ads) to as many eyeballs as possible. Open standards tend to be used by everyone, after all. But packaged apps bind their users to Chrome specifically, though Chrome is available far and wide and across multiple platforms.

That seems slightly ominous in the wake of Google’s transition from the open Google Talk to the proprietary Hangouts protocol.

But fear not: Chrome isn’t going to devour the desktop and the Web overnight. Google hasn’t even publicly published the Chrome for Windows App Launcher in the Chrome Web Store, and packaged apps are similarly obscured for everyone but developers. You need to have a direct link to find anything. Talk about obscure.
If you’re interested in seeing what the low-key yet portentous hubbub is about, you can download the Chrome App Launcher here. Once that’s done, head to Pocketables for a long list of direct links to Chrome packaged apps. Give some a whirl; it’s so seamless, you’d never even know that you were helping to tear down the wall between the online and the offline. 

Infiltration complete: Google's Chrome app launcher lands on Windows

After months of behind-the-scenes teases, Google appears to have quietly introduced the Chrome App Launcher in the stable version of Chrome for Windows. The Chrome OS feature—ported over to the Chrome for Windows developer channel in February—wasn’t available through a search of the Chrome Web Store or advertised on the site’s front page at this writing, but Windows users can install it now by navigating directly to the Chrome App Launcher page inside Chrome’s app store.

First spotted by Engadget, the new feature is Google’s incursion into the desktop PC, creating a self-sufficient Chrome ecosystem inside Microsoft’s OS. The Chrome App Launcher lets you directly fire up any Chrome Web app or packaged app right from the Windows taskbar—even when Chrome itself isn’t running.

Packaged apps are HTML 5-based standalone desktop apps based on Chrome that don’t look anything like your Web browser. There are no tabs, URL address bars, or bookmarks, but these apps do rely on Chrome’s underlying infrastructure and are installed via the Chrome Web Store.

Play Cut The Rope on your desktop with the Chrome packaged app. It’s still early days for packaged apps, but there are a number you can try out, such as a generic text editor and an IRC client, as well as known quantities like Cut the Rope, the Economist, and Weather Bug. For a list of interesting packaged apps to test see this post from Pocketables.

Like the app launcher, anyone using the stable version of Chrome will have to navigate to each packaged app directly, as they were not discoverable in the Chrome Web Store at this writing.

Google added a packaged apps section to the Chrome Web Store in May for anyone running the dev channel version of Chrome. But that section of the Web store had yet to go live Friday morning, despite the soft launch of the Chrome App Launcher.

The two features go together like peanut butter and jelly, so it’s odd that Google has made the app launch available without the new packaged apps section in the Web Store. Perhaps the search giant plans on officially rolling out the app launcher and the packaged apps section of the Web store later on Friday.

Launch Web sites and packaged apps even when Chrome isn’t running. Actually installing the Chrome App Launcher is a lot easier than it was when we first looked at the new Chrome feature in February. All you have to do now is agree to install the launcher and almost automatically it will show up in your taskbar. Earlier versions required you to install a packaged app first before you could install the app launcher.

So far the Chrome App Launcher is only available for Windows users in official builds of Google’s Web browser. In May, the search giant added the launcher to Chromium for Mac (the open source version of Chrome), while Linux users are still left on the sidelines.

Google speeds up Chrome for iOS with new data compression feature

Google's Chrome Web browser for iOS devices has been updated to include several enhanced features, including data compression designed to speed up page loading.
Reducing data consumption and improving the speed of Web performance on mobile devices is something Google has been working toward in recent months. At the company's I/O developers conference in May, new file compression formats for images and video were announced for Android-powered mobile devices, drawing partly from capabilities already present in Chrome for the desktop.
The latest Chrome update, released Wednesday, brings some of those concepts over to devices powered by Apple's iOS.
The data cost savings, the company said, will reduce data usage and speed up page load times. Users can view their data savings in the app's bandwidth management settings. These data-reduction features will be available to all users over time, Google said.
The update also builds in interoperability with other Google apps, giving users the option to open links for YouTube, Maps, Google+ and Google Drive in the app instead of in the browser. In the update, there are also voice search enhancements to provide text-to-speech for all variations of English, Spanish, German and several other languages. Users can also now access their full browser history to view a list of websites the person has visited while using Chrome in standard mode.
On the whole, the new features are not groundbreaking, but the more interesting development is the expansion of the bandwidth management features, said Brian Blau, an analyst with Gartner. "Google is working to make the Web experience better even as it promotes its own app store," he said.
"Web tends to get left behind on mobile, but it's an important platform for communication and information," he said.
"Anything the operating system or distribution platform owners can do to curtail data traffic, while preserving the integrity of mobile data experiences, is a good thing," agreed John Jackson, an IDC analyst. That's especially true as mobile devices move toward becoming the mainstream, if not dominant, platform for consuming content.
"There's a case to be made that Google has an interest in Web-ifying apps, or app-ifying the Internet," he said.
Google's Chrome browser has seen a steady rise in usage rates over the past couple of years, Google executives said at the I/O conference. At the time of last year's show, there were 450 million monthly active users, and as of this past May there were more than 750 million users, according to the company.
"Our goal is to make the Web better, both on the desktop and mobile," said Linus Upson, VP of engineering for Chrome, at the conference.
The Chrome software is overseen by Sundar Pichai, who also heads Google's Android mobile operating system. The executive is meeting with members of the press next week at an event in San Francisco, but it is not clear whether any new Chrome product will be announced then.

Chrome rich notifications go live for all Windows users; good luck using them

Richer notifications are now available in the latest stable version of Chrome for Windows, version 28.

Chrome has offered notifications outside of the browser window for some time, first introducing the feature for Gmail in 2011. The difference now is the richer-notifications feature lets developers of Chrome apps and extensions send interactive pop-up notifications to your desktop. Hangouts could, for example, send you a chat pop-up notification with options to reply, email, or call the person you’re chatting with.

The new feature also adds the oft-discussed notification center to Chrome for Windows, which allows you to get updates on the desktop from online services—even when the full Chrome browser isn’t running.

Although richer notifications and the notification center are activated by default, you won’t see anything new unless you’re using a Chrome app or extension that has enabled the feature.

Google did not provide a list of which apps and extensions the feature currently works with, but after publication, a Google representative contacted us to offer three specific examples of Chrome apps with rich notifications that Windows users can try out.

A Google spokesperson told PCWorld that richer notifications have to be enabled on a per-app basis. You can enable Gmail, for example, to send desktop notifications by clicking on the gear icon on the right-hand side of your inbox and selecting Settings>General.

Scroll down to “Desktop notifications” on the next screen and turn on notifications for mail and chat. These are the same settings that have been around for two years, so most users probably already have enabled them.

A Google spokesperson said the richer notifications should appear by activating this feature but, in my tests Wednesday, I couldn’t see any interactive features in the Gmail version.

I also tried getting notifications using the Hangouts extension for Chrome that puts Hangouts in the Windows taskbar. But again, no richer notifications. Checking out forums and sites around the Web, it seems other users are also coming up empty in the search for richer notifications and the notification center.

Update: After this story went live, a Google representative contacted us to offer three specific examples of Chrome apps with rich notifications that Windows users can try out. They are:
Ouistiti: A simple example application that prompts you to take a photo with your Webcam every day.Checker Plus for Gmail: Desktop rich notifications for new email.Checker Plus for Google Calendar: Desktop rich notifications for calendar events.

Examples of desktop rich notifications for Checker Plus for Gmail (giving you the chance to mark the message as read or delete it), left, and Ouistiti (giving you the chance to take a webcam shot or to remind you to take it later).
Richer notifications, once they do work, are part of a larger push from Google to take features from Chrome OS and put them in Chrome for Windows and Mac that create a mini-OS inside your PC’s regular operating system.

Beyond richer notifications, Google is working on bringing packaged apps to Windows, which are Chrome-based apps that act as regular desktop apps. Packaged apps also come with a separate app launcher that allows you to launch specific Chrome apps right from the taskbar. This feature currently is only available to users in the Chrome Dev update channel.

Another long-anticipated service expected to land on Chrome for PCs is Google Now, the company’s take on a personal digital assistant that delivers information as you need it. The service can, for example, alert you when to leave for an appointment across town based on current traffic conditions, or let you know about the flight status for an upcoming trip. Google Now was spotted in Chrome Canary, the alpha build of Chrome, back in March, but was not operational.

The Richer notifications feature isn’t the only significant change to the latest stable edition of Chrome for Windows. The new build is also using the Blink browser engine first announced in April after Google split with WebKit. The new version of Chrome also fixes more than 15 bugs and security fixes affecting Windows users.

By now, most people should be using the updated version of the Chrome browser. If you want to verify you’re on the latest build, type chrome://chrome in your browser’s address bar. The version number at the top should be 28.0.1500.71m.

Google's future Office killer now available in Chrome OS dev channel

Google now offers the ability to edit Office documents within Chrome OS, although the new feature is currently far less capable than the document-editing capabilities of Google’s own Google Apps.

 

However, there’s one reason why this is worth checking out: the service is the first time that Google’s QuickOffice has made an appearance.

 

In June of 2012, Google bought QuickOffice, an office suite for Android and iOS, for an undisclosed sum. “Today, consumers, businesses, and schools use Google Apps to get stuff done from anywhere, with anyonem, and on any device,” Google Engineering Director Alan Warren explained then in a company blog. “Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats, and we’ll be working on bringing their powerful technology to our Apps product suite.”

 

That sums it up quite nicely: for now, Google Apps provides the functionality and QuickOffice provides the compatibility aspect. Since the purchase, Google has worked to bring the QuickOffice technology to its other properties, namedly Chrome OS.

 

Over time, analysts have suspected that QuickOffice will become the face of Google Docs. Before the Google I/O developers conference in May, Google sources said that the company has been “dog fooding,” or internally deploying, QuickOffice within a browser.

 

Sundar Pichai, Google’s Chrome chief, said at the launch of the Google Chromebook Pixel. that it would take two to three months to add QuickOffice to the Chrome OS-powered Pixel, but that it would eventually arrive. That time, apparently, is now.

 

Microsoft has already taken aim at what it perceives as compatibility problems with Google Apps, even before Microsoft released Office Mobile for the iPhone.

 

What makes QuickOffice such a threat to Office? If QuickOffice comes close enough to the functionality that Microsoft Office itself offers, users may begin to question why they’re paying hundreds of dollars for dedicated Office suites or for an Office 365 subscription.

 

Google isn’t close at all to this point yet. Not only is QuickOffice available in the unstable “developer” channel of Chrome OS, but the functionality is far behind what even Google Docs offers. It sure looks pretty, though.

 

Compare this QuickOffice screenshot:

Google QuickOfficedocument editing within the Chrome OS Chrome browser.

with the standard Google Apps screenshot:

A standard Google Docs document.

You’ll notice immediately that Google Apps contains many more editing options than the current QuickOffice version, which lacks support for tables and graphs, as well as support for scripts.

 

Users can also view and edit Excel documents within the browser, according to The Next Web, which earlier reported the news, citing developer Francois Beaufort as the original source. So far, PowerPoint compatibility has not been included.

 

To try it yourself, you’ll need to own a Chromebook or Chromebox. Make sure you’re on the dev channel, with version 29.0.1547.2 or later. (Note that the dev channel is considered “unstable,” so odd things could happen if you use it. Then type in “about://flags” (no quotes) into the URL line, which should bring up a long list of options. “Enable document editing” will allow you to edit the documents after a quick restart.

 

Eventually, these changes should come to the main (stable) channel of Chrome, meaning that most users will be able to natively edit Office documents. At that point, if Google increases QuickOffice’s capabilities, look out.