Chrome on Lin's Blog

Starting 8/1, Google Drops Support for Old Browsers. Are You Still Using IE6 or Firefox 3.5?

Mon, 06 Jun 2011 19:31:14 +0000

According to the latest news on Google’s official blog (see this page), Google plans to stop fully supporting old browsers starting on 8/1. The reason is that these older browsers don’t support the latest technologies well. For example, HTML5 and CSS3 aren’t supported, and they may run JavaScript too slowly. As a result, Google’s services (Gmail, Google Reader, and so on) run into many problems on old browsers, so Google has decided to stop supporting them.

RockMelt - A Social Browser Built on Chromium (Facebook)

Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:47:34 +0000

Besides the browsers we all know, like Opera, IE, Firefox, and Chrome, there's a group of less famous browsers that use one of the four browsers mentioned earlier as their core, then improve the interface or features on their own. For example: TheWorld Browser and today's RockMelt both belong to this category.

Today’s RockMelt is a social browser built on the Chromium core. You can think of Chromium as basically Chrome, with no big difference between them. What sets RockMelt apart is that it’s a social browser: it’s integrated with Facebook and Twitter, so you can use those two social tools right inside the browser. Because it’s built on Chromium, it has almost all of Chrome’s features too. For example, extensions and themes work. However, RockMelt doesn’t support sync, which is a major shortcoming.

Google Chrome 7: GPU Hardware Acceleration Support

Sun, 24 Oct 2010 15:30:53 +0000

Google Chrome 7 has officially launched! The main feature of Chrome 7 is GPU hardware acceleration. Besides this new feature, it also fixes some bugs from Chrome 6. The speed is said to be 60 times faster. However, hardware acceleration in Chrome 7 isn’t enabled by default. You have to use a special method to turn it on.

So what are the benefits of GPU hardware acceleration? Simply put, once you turn it on, games you play in the browser run much faster. On some older computers, Facebook lags noticeably, and turning on GPU acceleration makes that less likely. So I recommend that friends who like browsing (Facebook~) and playing games in the browser should definitely turn this on.

Google Chrome 5 Beta: Major V8 Engine Upgrade and Built-in Flash Player

Sat, 08 May 2010 16:46:32 +0000

It’s been several months since Google Chrome 4 came out, and Chrome 5 has finally arrived! This update brings some changes. For example, the V8 JavaScript engine has been upgraded again, which makes Chrome 5 browse much faster. I don’t find the difference very noticeable myself, but according to SunSpider tests, it’s about 30% more efficient than the previous version. Chrome 5 also extends the Google account bookmark sync feature to more settings (themes, the home page, and so on). And Chrome 5 also has the Adobe Flash Player built in. If I remember correctly, it’s the first of the three major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome) to include a built-in Flash player. Below, I’ll walk you through the new features of Google Chrome 5 Beta.

Pro Tip: Using Google Chrome as a Calculator

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 13:25:55 +0000

Before I start, I should say that I don't know whether other people already know about this trick. I just stumbled onto it, so I'm sharing it here. If you already know it, feel free to skip this post. And please don't leave comments calling it a rehash!

I discovered this while doing some calculations. Sometimes you need to work with big numbers, and you reach for a calculator. But most calculators require pressing buttons, which is fine for short sums. For a long expression like 14896875478, though, you’d be pressing buttons for a long time, right?