Chrome for Android:Flash not coming

Google launched Chrome Beta for Android 4.0. While this swanky browser works well for a Beta, we did notice one gaping hole in the feature list and that was the lack of Flash support. While this does help in keeping annoying ads from loading on webpages, other functional components also fail to load, which leave you with big rectangular gray blocks around the web page.

 Adobe released a statement saying that they won’t release a plug-in for Flash for Chrome mobile after all. To quote them, “Adobe is no longer developing Flash Player for mobile browsers, and thus Chrome for Android Beta does not support Flash content. Flash Player continues to be supported within the current Android browser."

Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries (United States, Canada, United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, Australia, Japan, Korea, Mexico, Argentina, Brazil) and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich.
Download Chrome Beta for Android

Features

• Browse fast with accelerated page loading, scrolling, and zooming
• Search and navigate directly from the omnibox
• Open and switch between unlimited tabs in an easy-to-view stack
• Sign in to Chrome to sync your bookmarks and view tabs you have open on your computer
• Send pages from desktop Chrome to your smartphone or tablet with one click and read them on the go, even if you’re offline
• Browse privately in Incognito mode

Speed

With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.

Simplicity

Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. Google reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web. One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier.
And as with Chrome on desktop, Google built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).
Sign in
You can now bring your personalized Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. Sign in to Chrome to bring your open tabs, bookmarks and omnibox data from your computer to your phone or tablet. That way, you have your Chrome, on all of your devices.
If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:

• View open tabs: Need to step away from your computer? Access the tabs you have open on your computer right on your phone or tablet and pick up where you left off.
• Sync bookmarks: Find your bookmarks on all of your devices. Quickly go to your favorite sites, no matter where you are.
• Get smarter suggestions: Take your omnibox everywhere. Visit a site often on your computer and you’ll get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your phone, so you can spend less time typing.
• Send to mobile: Send pages from your computer to your phone or tablet with a single click. You can read them on the go, even when you’re offline.
• Auto sign-in: Automatically sign in to Google sites, like Gmail, for fast and seamless browsing. [source]

Google Announces Plans To Shutter Knol, Friend Connect, Wave, And More

Since Google CEO Larry Page took the helm this past spring, one of the company’s most visible initiatives has been to trim and shut down its products that haven’t taken off. These have included Aardvark, Google Desktop, Fast Flip, Code Search, Buzz, Jaiku, and even Google Labs — and today, it’s announcing a new batch of products that will be shut down in the coming months.
Among the casualties (some of which had previously been announced): Google’s Wikipedia challenger, Google Knol, Google Friend Connect (which is being supplanted by Google+), and Google Wave — which Google ended development on a year ago and will soon close down entirely.
Knol, in particular, comes as something of a surprise to me — because I figured Google had already shut it down. The site first launched back in 2008 to much fanfare, as Google introduced a potential Wikipedia challenger that would allow article contributors to monetize their content (the idea being that if you wrote content worth reading, you could make some money off of it). But the product languished, and back in July 2010 some extended downtime made us wonder if Google had forgotten about it.
Google didn’t seem to allocate many resources to the project, and it certainly didn’t put much emphasis behind it from a press standpoint — I can’t remember the last time I was pitched on a new Knol feature or milestone. Knol will live on at Annotum.org, which is powered by WordPress and was built in collaboration with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite.
Here’s the full list of products being shuttered, from Google’s blog post:

• Google Bookmarks Lists—This is an experimental feature for sharing bookmarks and collaborating with friends, which we’re going to end on December 19, 2011. All bookmarks within Lists will be retained and labeled for easier identification, while the rest of Google Bookmarks will function as usual. As Lists was an English-only feature, non-English languages will be unaffected.
• Google Friend Connect—Friend Connect allows webmasters to add social features to their sites by embedding a few snippets of code. We’re retiring the service for all non-Blogger sites on March 1, 2012. We encourage affected sites to create a Google+ page and place a Google+ badge on their site so they can bring their community of followers to Google+ and use new features like Circles and Hangouts to keep in touch.
• Google Gears—In March we said goodbye to the Gears browser extension for creating offline web applications and stopped supporting new browsers. On December 1, 2011, Gears-based Gmail and Calendar offline will stop working across all browsers, and later in December Gears will no longer be available for download. This is part of our effort to help incorporate offline capabilities into HTML5, and we’ve made a lot of progress. For example, you can access Gmail, Calendar and Docs offline in Chrome.
• Google Search Timeline—We’re removing this graph of historical results for a query. Users will be able to restrict any search to particular time periods using the refinement tools on the left-hand side of the search page. Additionally, users who wish to see graphs with historical trends for a web search can use google.com/trends or google.com/insights/search/ for data since 2004. For more historical data, the “ngram viewer” in Google Books offers similar information. Google Wave—We announced that we’d stopped development on Google Wave over a year ago. But as of January 31, 2012, Wave will become read-only and you won’t be able to create new ones. On April 30 we will turn it off completely. You’ll be able to continue exporting individual waves using the existing PDF export feature until the Google Wave service is turned off. If you’d like to continue using this technology, there are a number of open-source projects, including Apache Wave and Walkaround.
• Knol—We launched Knol in 2007 to help improve web content by enabling experts to collaborate on in-depth articles. In order to continue this work, we’ve been working with Solvitor and Crowd Favorite to create Annotum, an open-source scholarly authoring and publishing platform based on WordPress. Knol will work as usual until April 30, 2012, and you can download your knols to a file and/or migrate them to WordPress.com. From May 1 through October 1, 2012, knols will no longer be viewable, but can be downloaded and exported. After that time, Knol content will no longer be accessible.
• Renewable Energy Cheaper than Coal (RE<C)—This initiative was developed as an effort to drive down the cost of renewable energy, with an RE<C engineering team focused on researching improvements to solar power technology. At this point, other institutions are better positioned than Google to take this research to the next level. So we’ve published our results to help others in the field continue to advance the state of power tower technology, and we’ve closed our efforts. We will continue our work to generate cleaner, more efficient energy—including our on-campus efforts, procuring renewable energy for our data centers, making our data centers even more efficient and investing more than $850 million in renewable energy technologies.

Google Chrome 12

Google Chrome 12

• Pros
  Super-fast JavaScript performance. Excellent security through sandboxing and now download malware warnings. Flash cookie handling. Instant site prediction. Easy installation. Excellent tab implementation. Themes. Extensions for customization. Bookmark and preference syncing. Tab process isolation. Strong support for HTML 5. Built-in Flash player and PDF reader.
• Cons Paranoids won't want to give Google another way to collect data about them. Some occasional minor site incompatibilities.
  
• Bottom Line
  Chrome Instant means your Web page is ready to read before you finish typing the address. This, its speed, minimalist design, and advanced support for HTML5 have been attracting more and more users to the browser. The latest version adds more security options and limited hardware acceleration.
  Google Chrome's speed at displaying Web pages is seemingly only matched by the speed with which its development team adds new features. With Chrome 12, Google has added a couple important security enhancements, and new 3D graphics capabilities. Other browsers like Firefox (Free, 4.5 stars), Internet Explorer (Free, 4 stars), Safari (Free, 4 stars), and Opera 11 have flattered Google's entry by imitating its sparse user interface and lightning speed. Firefox's makers have even emulated Google's fast update schedule. But Chrome continues to lead the pack with its groundbreaking speed, support for new Web standards, and its minimalist application window that lets the Web page shine unimpeded. If you want a fast and fluid Web experience, Google Chrome 12 can't be beat.
  Previous releases have brought new major features, such as bookmark syncing, a bookmark manager, a built-in PDF reader, and extensions, though others have just added speed, stability, and new standards support. Version 9 took a page from Google search, with the remarkable Chrome Instant, as well as from IE9, by including graphics hardware acceleration. Its fine design, compatibility, and especially the speed have impressed the Web community enough to make Chrome 12 the fastest growing browser in terms of market share, recently passing ten percent. Let's take a look at what makes this browser so special.
  Swift Setup
  Even the setup process shows Chrome's commitment to speed: Just click the Install button on the Chrome Web page, and you'll have the new browser up and running in less than a minute, with no wizard to go through and no system restart. The browser's now available for Mac OS X and Linux, as well as Windows. In each platform the browser's up and running before you realize it, and it updates itself automatically in the background.
  
  
  
  Built-in Flash and PDF Support
  Chrome 12 is the only browser to come with Adobe Flash built in, rather than requiring a separate (and annoying) installation. And not having to perform the frequent required updates of the Flash plugin separately is another boon—it updates automatically with the browser. With version 10, many of the security issues with Flash (famously bemoaned by Apple's Steve Jobs) went away, thanks to running the plugin in an isolated sandbox so that it doesn't have access to critical system areas. But note that this sandboxing only applies to the Windows 7 and Vista versions of Chrome 12 at this point.
  Chrome 12 boasts a PDF reader as well, so you don't have to worry about installing any Adobe plugins for viewing specialized Web content. When you load a PDF, an intuitive toolbar shows when your mouse cursor is in the southeast vicinity of the browser window. From this, you can have the document fill the width of the window, show a full page, or zoom in and out. By default, you can select text for cutting and pasting, but I couldn't copy and paste images. You can print the PDF as you would any Web page.
  Interface
  Minimalism has been a hallmark of Chrome since its first beta release. Tabs are above everything, and the only row below them holds the combined search/address bar, or "Omnibar." Optionally you can display bookmark links in a row below this. And the control buttons on the top-right of the browser window have been reduced to the absolute minimum—just one. Google has removed the Page icon and placed some of its functions under the Wrench choice. Some Page options have been combined into buttons on one line in the new menu, such as Cut, Copy, and Paste. I like what Google's done with the Zoom choice on the menu, adding plus and minus buttons that save you from having to fly out another submenu.
  Another theme in the Chrome interface is that everything looks like a Web page, displaying in the main browser window, rather than in separate dialog boxes. This includes the interfaces for History, Extensions, and Bookmarks. With version 10 the Settings page got this same treatment.
  Chrome Instant
  This is one of the niftiest things to be added to Chrome in a while. Start typing a Web address in the Omnibar, and before you're even done, a page from your history or a search result page is displayed below in the main browser window. I just type "PC," and PCMag.com is already loaded. The idea was first implemented in Google search's Instant feature, but I think it's even more useful in the browser than in search, where I usually ignore it and finish typing my query anyway: Most sites we visit, we've visited before, so having them ready to go before you even finish typing is a big speeder-upper.
  Tabtastic
  Chrome 12 also still sports excellent tab implementation. Tabs are prominent at the top of the browser window, and you can drag them out to the desktop to create independent windows (and drag them back in later) or split them side by side à la Windows 7 Aero Snap.
  Google has put considerable thought into Chromes's new tab page, which shows links to your most-visited pages, Web apps, and recently closed tabs. All but the last can be expanded to large thumbnails, which you can move around and pin in place, or remove if you don't want them to appear.
  In Chrome 9, Google added the Apps section to the new tab page, showing any Web apps you've installed, along with a link to the Chrome Web Store, but as with any section of the page, you can click an X to its right to turn it off. If you've synced Chrome on different computers (see below), the Apps section with be the same on all. For more on the store, check out the Chrome App Store section of my Hands On with Chrome OS. Any apps you've added on a Chrome OS machine will also appear in the browser on any other computer you log into Chrome on, and vice versa. But you're not likely to have a Chrome OS machine at this point.