Google's redesigned tab page annoys some Chrome users

Google last week started rolling out a redesigned new tab page for Chrome, making good on a promise from last month when it offered the revamp to users running rougher-edged versions of its browser.

Most users gave the new look a failing grade. "Fail, fail, fail," said Philip Wright, one of those who commented on the announcement.

Google characterized the addition as a way to speed up search.

"We're rolling out a feature that can make searching faster and simpler with a streamlined New Tab page," said the Chrome team on its Google+ page. "If you use Google as your default search engine, the next time you open a new tab in Chrome the search bar will be front and center ... [and] you'll also be able to check out current Google Doodles."

The new tab page appears when users press Ctrl-T (Windows) or Command-T (OS X) in Chrome. All browsers offer a similar new tab page that, at a minimum, shows thumbnails of the user's most visited websites. The feature, which debuted on Opera, has been copied by all its rivals, including Chrome, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, and Apple's Safari.

Firefox was the last to acquire a graphical new tab page when in June 2012 Mozilla released Firefox 13.

Chrome's new tab page redesign sports a prominent Google search field as the only real difference between it and its predecessor. The page still displays eight thumbnails of the user's most-called-on sites.

But Chrome users just didn't get it.

"If you're on Chrome, why wouldn't you just use the omnibar?" asked commenter Neil Slater, using an alternate name for "omnibox," Google's label for the combined search-address bar at the top of the browser window. "To use this new search box it takes an extra mouse click to put the cursor into the box. The cursor's already by default in the omnibar on opening a new tab."

Many commenters dismissed the change as useless, with some asking how to revert to the previous design. Others were dismayed that Google moved the Chrome Apps button—which calls up a display of the browser's installed Web apps—to the bookmark bar.

Google has faced resistance from Chrome users before when it has proposed redesigns of the new tab page. In April, Google backtracked from a refreshed new tab page that had reduced the number of thumbnails from eight to four, inserted a large Google search box, shifted the Web apps view to a button, and dumped other features, including the ability to view recently closed tabs, from the page.

Most of those changes, however, were implemented in the final new tab page that began reaching users Tuesday. The most visible that did not was the four-thumbnail view.

Users who want to restore the previous design should type "chrome://flags" in the omnibox—minus the quotation marks—locate the "Enable Instant Extended API" setting in the long list, and change it from "Enable" to "Disable."

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Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
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Mobile browsers get a workout, with Google's Chrome leading

Mobile browsing continued to post gains last month at the expense of personal computers, a trend that has put Google into the second spot behind Microsoft as the browser maker with the longest reach, a Web metrics company said Sunday.

According to Net Applications, an estimated 13.4 percent of all users accessed the Internet in August from a smartphone or tablet, breaking a six-month-old record. Most of the rest of the world's online users—85.8 percent—went online with a desktop browser on a personal computer.

The increase in mobile browsing has pushed Google past Mozilla as the browser maker with the second-largest combined desktop-plus-mobile user share.

Google's combined user share of 17.5 percent was earned on the basis of its No. 2 spot in mobile generated by the Android and Chrome browsers. That's in contrast to Net Applications' estimate of Chrome's desktop share of 16 percent, down more than 1.7 percentage points in August.

Apple was the other browser maker that benefited most from mobile, with a combined user share of 12.2 percent, of which nearly two-thirds came from Safari on iOS, the mobile operating system that powers all iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) and Mozilla's Firefox remain the two browsers whose usage shares have been hit hardest by the shift toward mobile, as Microsoft continues to struggle to post global gains in smartphones and tablets, and Mozilla has only recently gotten into the mobile market with its Firefox OS.

IE continued to dominate the desktop, with an August share of 57.6 percent, but its faint appearance in Net Applications' mobile statistics lowered its combined share to 49.6 percent. That's slightly up from March, when Computerworld last visited the subject, but the increase was due to a resurgent IE on traditional PCs, where the browser has returned to levels last seen in April 2011.

Firefox's total share again suffered from lack of any mobile punch: Mozilla has an Android version of Firefox in play, but its share was so small that Net Applications did not even note it. Mozilla's Firefox OS, a browser-based mobile operating system that has garnered support from carriers in China, Spain and elsewhere, has only recently started shipping on a limited number of phones. For August, Firefox's combined share was 16.1 percent, several percentage points lower than its desktop-only number and down from March's 17.7 percent.

Norwegian browser maker Opera Software bulked up its very small desktop user share with an almost-as-large contribution from its Opera Mini mobile browser. Opera's combined share for August was 2.5 percent.

Mobile browsing overall is on an upswing again after several months of stalled or declining share. August's 13.4 percent was a new record for mobile, cracking the February standard. Projections based on the three-month trends hint that mobile will probably account for 20 percent of all browsing by May 2014.

Net Applications measures browser usage on smartphones, tablets and personal computers by tabulating approximately 160 million unique visitors each month who browse to the sites it monitors for customers.

When desktop and mobile browser user shares are combined, Google takes the second spot from Mozilla, and Apple's Safari is a stronger fourth-place rival than its minor desktop presence indicates. (Data: Net Applications.)

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Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
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Organize your Chrome tabs vertically with Veritabs

Months ago I told you about OneTab, a nifty Chrome add-on that sucks up all your open tabs into a single, thus reducing tab clutter and, theoretically, improving Chrome's performance. (The more open tabs you have, the slower any browser will be.)

I still use OneTab, but recently I discovered another interesting tab organizer: Veritabs. This one is so head-smackingly obvious, I can't believe it's not built into every browser.

Once Veritabs is installed, it presents all your open tabs (not bookmarks, mind you) in a vertical list on the left side of the screen. Or, at least, that's what it's supposed to. I assumed it worked like OneTab in that you'd click the Veritabs icon (which gets added to Chrome's extensions toolbar) to reveal the list.

Nope. What happens is you move your mouse to the left side of the screen. That produces the Veritabs list; now just click any tab you want to switch to.

Veritabs for Google Chrome.

You can also resize this disappearing sidebar by clicking and dragging the handle in the upper-right corner, keep it visible by clicking the icon in the upper-left corner, or change the view to favicons only by clicking the icon in the lower-right corner.

The extension does have a few bugs. On my system, the formatting of the list seemed to get messed up if I clicked certain tabs (probably owing to font-size differences within those tabs). And occasionally the Veritabs sidebar failed to disappear when I moused away from it.

That said, although it doesn't really reduce tab clutter, and definitely doesn't help with performance, Veritabs does give you a much neater way to browse and navigate your open tabs. And it's especially nice to have when you're working in full-screen mode.

Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter (which is included in the Power Tips newsletter) e-mailed to you each week.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
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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.

Contributing Editor Rick Broida writes about business and consumer technology. Ask for help with your PC hassles at hasslefree@pcworld.com. Sign up to have the Hassle-Free PC newsletter e-mailed to you each week.

For more than 20 years, Rick Broida has written about all manner of technology, from Amigas to business servers to PalmPilots. His credits include dozens of books, blogs, and magazines. He sleeps with an iPad under his pillow.
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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.

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Chrome challenges Firefox, may become No. 2 browser

Mozilla's Firefox browser has lost more than 11 percent of its user share in the last two months, giving Google's Chrome another shot at replacing it as the world's No. 2 browser, according to new data.

Statistics from Web measurement company Net Applications illustrated a rapid decline in Firefox and a corresponding upswing in Chrome during June and July.

At the end of July, Firefox owned a 18.3 percent share of all desktop browsers, down 2.3 percentage points in just two months, a decline of about 11 percent. Meanwhile, Chrome's user share stood at 17.8 percent, up 2 points since May and its highest mark since October 2012.

The half-percentage-point gap between Firefox and Chrome was the smallest since May 2012, when it appeared certain that the latter would overtake Firefox to become the No. 2 browser behind Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

In fact, Net Applications for a few hours in early June 2012 reported Chrome ahead of Firefox, but retracted the claim after revised numbers showed Chrome trailed Firefox by just one-tenth of a percentage point.

That was Chrome's moment in the spotlight: Starting in June 2012, Google's browser began shedding share, falling to a low of 15.7 percent in May 2013. Firefox fared slightly better, but has also lost share in the last 12 months.

Most of the losses posted by Firefox and Chrome have gone to a resurgent Internet Explorer (IE). In the past year, IE has climbed 2.7 points to a 56.6 percent share, an impressive 4.7 points above its all-time low in December 2011.

Analysts have credited IE's comeback to IE9 and IE10, the popular 2011 and 2012 editions, and the widespread adoption of Windows 7, which can run both those browsers.

If Firefox and Chrome continue the trends they've set in the last 90 days, Chrome will bypass Firefox this month; the longer-range 12-month trend would delay that until April 2014.

When mobile browsers are combined with those on the desktop, Google has already stolen second place from Mozilla.

According to Net Applications, about 12.4 percent of all users reached the Internet in July from a mobile browser, the highest percentage since February. Google's browsers—Chrome on desktops and mobile devices, and the stock Android browser on smartphones—accounted for a combined share of 18.7 percent. Mozilla, which has no measurable share on mobile—though it offers Firefox on Android—owned 16.1 percent of the overall browser market.

Another Web measurement firm, Ireland's StatCounter, long ago called Chrome the winner over not only Firefox, but also IE. For July, StatCounter pegged Chrome with a 43.1percent share, with IE and Firefox far behind at 24.5 percent and 20.1 percent, respectively.

Unlike Net Applications, which calculates browser user share by tracking unique visitors, StatCounter measures page views. The two methodologies have generated increasingly-divergent figures for IE and Chrome. StatCounter's data, however, may indicate that Chrome users browse the Web more often or for longer periods than those who rely on IE or Firefox.

Chrome's in hot pursuit of Firefox for the No. 2 spot in browser user share. In July it closed to within half a percentage point of Firefox, the narrowest gap in over a year. (Data: Net Applications.)

Gregg Keizer covers Microsoft, security issues, Apple, Web browsers and general technology breaking news.
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Bogus Chrome, Firefox extensions pilfer social media accounts

Trend Micro has found two malicious browser extensions that hijack Twitter, Facebook and Google+ accounts.

The attackers plant links on social media sites that, if clicked, implore users to install a video player update. It is a common method hackers use to bait people into downloading malicious software.

The bogus video player update lures people in a macabre manner: it says it leads to a video of a young woman committing suicide, according to Trend's description.

The video player update carries a cryptographic signature that is used to verify that an application came from a certain developer and has not been modified, wrote Don Ladores, a threat response engineer, with Trend.

"It is not yet clear if this signature was fraudulently issued, or a valid organization had their signing key compromised and used for this type of purpose," he wrote.

Hackers often try to steal legitimate digital certificates from other developers in an attempt to make their malware look less suspicious.

If the video update is executed, the malware then installs a bogus Firefox or Chrome extension depending on which browser the victim uses.

The malicious plugins try to appear legitimate, bearing the names Chrome Service Pack 5.0.0 and the Mozilla Service Pack 5.0. Ladores wrote that Google now blocks the extension that uses its name. Another variation of the extension claims it is the F-Secure Security Pack 6.1.0, a fake product from the Finnish security vendor.

The plugins connect to another website and download a configuration file, which allow them to steal the login credentials from a victim's social networking accounts such as Facebook, Google+, and Twitter. The attackers can then perform a variety of actions, such as like pages, share posts, update statuses and post comments, Ladores wrote.

Send news tips and comments to jeremy_kirk@idg.com. Follow me on Twitter: @jeremy_kirk

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