chrome25
Latest
Google Chrome receives minor updates across Windows, Linux, Android and iOS
There you were, using that old and busted version of Google Chrome on your Windows or Linux-based PC, iOS or Android device, when Google decided to hook you up with an update, thus validating your previous assertion about Chrome's old and busted-ness. "Hot dog!" you thought, "The Googleplex wants to give me more free stuff!" But what free stuff will you get? Chrome on iOS is moving to the big two five, adding long-press to the back button for exploring your recent history and a handful of other tweaks; its Android cousin is optimizing scrolling for your super fast fingas fingers. On the full computer side of things, both Windows and Linux are getting 25.0.1364.152, which adds the less thrilling "security and stability improvements along with a number of bug fixes." Now that you've got that new hotness, you're feeling pretty good, right? The future! We're in it!
Chrome and Firefox now talking to each other through WebRTC chats (video)
The dream for WebRTC is to offer truly software-independent video and voice chat, but it hasn't worked out that way given limited support. Google and Mozilla have just showed us that it's at last possible to reach across the aisle, provided both sides are running the newest browsers. Should one user run Chrome 25 beta and the other run a nightly build of Firefox, a flag switch will let the two sides hold a video conversation solely through a web app. This doesn't mean we're about to toss out Google Talk or Skype, mind you: even when finished versions of the browsers appear, we'll need both a completed WebRTC standard and the web developer support to see broader usage. Nonetheless, it's clear that cross-browser chat is at least on the horizon.
Chrome 25 beta folds in Web Speech recognition, security whitelists
It's that special time of the season -- the time when Google posts another Chrome beta and teases what more timid among us will see in the stable release. With Chrome 25, the focus is on voice. The new beta includes the Web Speech API and lets us issue voice commands or dictation through a snippet of JavaScript embedded on a given page. Security is tightening up at the same time through support for unprefixed Content Security Policy headers, which let web developers craft a narrow whitelist of pages and resources that are safe to load. As always, the nitty-gritty details of the beta browser (and the browser itself) are ready at the source link; those of us still a bit beta-shy can wait a few weeks to get the more polished code.
