I love that you finally added previews for each of your tabs, that amazing Windows 7 feature that all of your competitors adopted before you…

But what the light is this?  Why on earth are there this mini-windows, and why are the preview windows themselves so faded out?  Not to mention it doesn’t even WORK when you have Chrome minimized…

I love you Chrome, but you need to fix these in the next dev release.  NEED.

Visit my Sandbox to see the code in action, or continue reading for some code excerpts.

One interesting thing about this new API is that it not only requires a user to authorize it, but in order for an authorization click to appear, the user has to do something.  You can’t make it appear as soon as the user visits the page, they have to click something or trigger an event.

For the sake of this example, lets say the user clicks a link that triggers the JavaScript function “notification();” and we want to show a notification onscreen.

Code block
   
function notification()
{
	if(window.webkitNotifications) // If we have the Notification API
	{
		var nc = window.webkitNotifications; // Set the API to nc for easy access
		if(nc.checkPermission()) // 1 = Not Allowed, 2 = Denied, 0 = Allowed
		{
			nc.requestPermission(myNotification); // Request Permission with a callback to myNotification();
		} else { myNotification(); }
	}
}
function myNotification()
{
	try
	{
		var nc = window.webkitNotifications;
		var notif = nc.createNotification(null,"Notification Title","Notification Body"); // Parameters: string URL_TO_IMAGE, string Title, string Body
		notif.show(); // Show Notification
	} catch(Err) {
		alert(Err.message); // Will output a security error if we don't have permission.
	}
}

As you can see from the code, its a fairly straightforward API for showing desktop notifications, and once the user has given the website permission, they can be triggered any time. Up to five notifications can appear, and the rest will be kept in a queue until the others are dismissed, either by the user or by calling .cancel(); on the notification variable (notif in this case).

Thanks to twitter user @paperfairy, a bug was discovered on my Command Line Twitter Client, TwCLI.

For some reason, when submitting a command in Chrome for Linux, the page would simply refresh, and the command would never be sent.  At first, I had no possible way to track down this bug.  I didn’t have a linux box (with a GUI, anyway) so I simply told him that it was unfortunate, but it’d have to stay a bug.  Until a recent post on lifehacker brought my attention to Portable Ubuntu. I immediately installed it, opened up the Chrome website in Firiefox, installed Chrome Beta, and headed over to TwCLI to see what was amiss.

Of course, it was a single line in a detection script to send Geo-Data to Twitter (as long as the user approved it, of course):

else if(google.gears) {

This single line was throwing an exception I hadn’t encountered in other browsers – Google wasn’t defined.  Oddly, I thought it would handle that properly, since google wasn’t defined, it would just skip over it, but instead it threw an error and halted all further javascript code.

The fix was simpler than tracking down the bug, I simply had to add this to the start of the javascript code:

try{ if(!google) { google = 0; } } catch(err) { google = 0; }

And voila, I had both a check for google, and a catch if it decided to throw errors while checking for it.

Whether this is a Chrome bug or not, I don’t know – I simply don’t know enough about JavaScript in order to say so either way.  But, are undefined variables supposed to throw errors, or are they simply supposed to return false?

Tab Previews

In order to better compete with Microsoft’s new version of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows 7, Google needs to add previews for all open tabs on the web browser, allowing a user to quickly select the tab they want right from the Windows taskbar.

Status Indication

When Google Chrome is running in the background with that huge demo version of Adobe Premier Pro downloading, you really have no clue how far the download has gone without checking up on your downloads bar.  A quick fix for this would be easily adding the status in the Chrome icon like Windows Explorer does.

Other Things

What else do you think Google Chrome needs to add in order to fit in with the Windows 7 Operating System that will better improve its functionality?

As you can see, it supports Tasks, Shows you what you recently closed, and gives you a list of your most visited websites for easy two-click access!  And don’t worry about something bad showing up.  If you want to get rid of something, just right click and “Remove from this list.”

You can also PIN any item you wish to the list! 

Good going Chrome!

I clicked to install it, and Java gave me this interesting “Java for Chrome” page, quoted below:

Google Chrome requires Java 6 Update 10 or greater (Java 6u10+), as indicated in the Google Chrome Help Center. The Chrome browser is new and not officially supported by Sun for Java 6. However, you may be able to use Chrome with Java 6u10 at your own risk. Sun will continue monitoring the acceptance of Chrome in the marketplace.

Sun will continue monitoring the acceptance of Chrome in the marketplace?  That sounds funny to me,m and not funny ha-ha, funny “Wow, okay big brother.”

I think if there are enough chrome users that you needed to make that page, there are enough that you should officially support it.

Around the release of Google Chrome v0.4.154.22 (Dev Channel) something magical began to happen; I stopped having JavaScript problems on Facebook.

All of MouseHunt started to work again, the bookmarks worked on every page, the chat worked on every page.  It was pure, unadulterated magic.

What I can’t yet figure out though, is if it was Facebook’s doing, or if it was Google’s.  Does anyone else know?

• Close Google Chrome
• Navigate to your Application Data folder
• XP Users:
• C:\documents and settins\%user%\Application Data\
• Vista Users:
• C:\users\%user%\appdata\
• In the Application Data folder, navigate to:
• local\google\chrome\user data\default\cache
• Delete all the files (in that caché)

Fixed!  Open up Chrome and continue on and have fun ^_^