As thousands of Mac fans and developers gather in San Francisco for this week's Macworld conference, Google is particularly delighted to announce a new beta release of Chrome for Mac. The release includes some of the Google’s most requested features from the Mac community, including extensions and bookmark sync.
You can read more about these features on the Google Chrome blog, or you can try it out straight by downloading the Google Chrome Beta for Mac. If you're already using Chrome, you should be mechanically updated to the new beta within the next day.
Google is excited to introduce a new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows, which includes two of the browser's most recurrently requested features: extensions and bookmark sync.
Extensions permit you to add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting instructions or shopping.
Google previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many latest extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in google extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.
Bookmark sync is a handy attribute for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you generate a bookmark on one computer, it's mechanically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually reconstruct the bookmark each time you switch computers.
You can read more about stable release — including performance improvements — on the Google Chrome Blog. Or if you want a look under the hood at what this update means for web developers (including new HTML and Javascript APIs), check out the Chromium blog.
To those using Google Chrome on Linux, extensions are enabled on the beta channel. And for those using Google Chrome for Mac, hang tight — Google is working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon. Those currently using the stable version for Windows will be automatically updated within the next week (or you can check for updates manually).
If you're on a PC and haven't tried Google Chrome yet, you can download Google Chrome and give all these latest features a whirl.
Google has launched the second version of its Google Voice extension for Chrome which includes innovative click-to-call functionality and easier access to voicemail messages.
The Google Voice extension, released on Friday, adds a button to the toolbar which displays the number of unread messages in a user’s Google Voice inbox – speeding access to their voicemails, which have been transcribed by Google’s speech recognition engine.
The button will also tell users if they have any latest messages and with a click will allow users to make a call, check messages or send a free text message, according to Google.
However, one of the most practical features for Google Voice users on Chrome will be the click-to-call functionality which allows users to just click on any number viewed in the browser to call that number directly from within the browser, if required
The calls will be made from any phones the user has already set up on Google Voice.
Users can download the latest extension from the Google Chrome Extensions page – the voice icon will appear to the right of the search bar without the need for a restart.
Google said it is working on voicemail playback functionality, which will be coming in the near future. The web giant also celebrated that the extension on Macs is still relatively buggy, while switching between tabs in the extension pop up will cause a few problems, as the popup doesn’t mechanically resize to fit at present. Both issues are being worked on.
Do you ever wonder what's going on within the browser when a webpage doesn't load or react as quickly as it should? Many developers do, especially when trying to build influential web applications for their users.
But up until now, it's been complex for developers to identify problems in a slow-to-respond application. Google at Google Campfire One was happy to announce that they are adding a new tool to Google Web Toolkit called Speed Tracer.
Speed Tracer is a Google Chrome extension that allows developers to identify performance problems in their web apps using a "Sluggishness Graph," in combination with many other metrics. In the spirit of clean, easy design, developers need only look at the Y-Axis of their application's Sluggishness Graph to see how they're doing :
If the y-axis is close to zero, then the app is fast
If the y-axis registers around 100%, then the app is, well, sluggish
And in either case, Speed Tracer provides lots of extra data to help identify any particular performance issue.
The developers will find that Speed Tracer looks under the covers of web applications like never before. In fact, Google even used Speed Tracer to optimize the performance of Speed Tracer itself! (It's really an HTML application after all, built with Google Web Toolkit, and deployed as a Google Chrome extension.) If you're a web developer, download and install Speed Tracer on the Google Chrome Developer Channel.
This is one of many other improvements in GWT 2.0 which Google released in Campfire that makes building web applications fast, and the applications you build run even faster. Check out the Google Code Blog for more information and to watch our Campfire One developer announcement.
Google is on the verge of introducing a Web site to showcase its extensions to modify what its browser can do. The company's newest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome currently has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, chrome.google.com/extensions.
Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the banner features of Chrome 4.0. It's existing as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta is intended for December 8 release and the steady release of Chrome 4.0 is due January 12.
A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are obtainable, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Previously this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes prior to the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.
Extensions are a key benefit of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions allow people to customize the browser and add innovative features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is receiving a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 owing in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.
Speed Tracer is a 
