
Google Chrome Releases: Stable Channel Update - Uncle_Sam
http://googlechromereleases.blogspot.com/2011/08/stable-channel-update.html
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Pewpewarrows
The important news from this update (for me at least), is a much smarter
Omnibox that actually attempts to fetch matches from anywhere in the string of
histories (middle of a url or word, etc). It's getting much closer to
Firefox's Awesomebar in that regards.

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Perceval
That's definitely something that's kept me from adopting Chrome full time. A
lot of people grouse about the AwesomeBar, but the Omnibox has taken a very
long time to achieve feature parity, and still isn't there yet. Using the
AwesomeBar is my preferred mode of searching through my history for things I
half-remember reading, and it usually more convenient than either the Omnibox
or Safari's history full text search.

That said, even the dev channel release of Chrome still doesn't get this
right. If I want to go to the ESPN NFC East blog
(<http://espn.go.com/blog/nfceast>), I usually type "nfcea" into the
AwesomeBar and it pops up as the first result. The Omnibox suggests searching
for "nfc east blog" but doesn't show the appropriate URL from my history.

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paulirish
There are always a few experiments related to the omnibox in about:flags that
you can try out to see where things may be headed.

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Perceval
Thanks, I enabled _'shortcuts' in the omnibox_. We'll see if that improves my
results.

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rednaught
The Instant Page feature sounds interesting. Has Google released any findings
on bandwidth usage during typical browsing scenarios with this feature? How
severe is this going to be for users with restrictive data plans?

I don't see an obvious way to turn this feature off. There is an option to
uncheck "Predict network actions to improve page load performance" but this
says it is only doing dns lookups and then navigating based on IP address.

I'm also curious how this will affect analytics. As a website owner, I now
have to use their PageViews API to accurately track my hits from Google? Can
websites opt-out of this service?

~~~
skymt
The "predict network actions" option you mention is indeed the option to
disable prerendering. [0]

If you use a third-party client-side analytics package, they've probably added
support for the Page Visibility API [1] already, and you don't need to do
anything. Server-side analytics will have problems, both with this and with
HTML5 prefetching in recent versions of Firefox. I'd like to see opt-out
available through an HTTP header (or even just a header to let the server know
the page is being prefetched), but that's not anywhere in the spec right now.

[0]: <http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/prerender.html> [1]:
[http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibility.htm...](http://code.google.com/chrome/whitepapers/pagevisibility.html)

~~~
jonknee
A problem with a header solution would be the user does frequently then see
the requested content. Google's pre-fetching only kicks in if it believes
you're going to visit, so most of the time it does end up getting shown to the
user.

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MikeCapone
Is it my imagination or are the navigation buttons now a bit paler? The
arrows, home, wrench, etc.. All seem a paler shade of gray to my eyes.

I could be imagining it, though.

~~~
callahad
Nope, you're right. It's particularly noticeable if you have something like
the 1Password extension installed, whose icon used to perfectly match the
shade of the wrench menu. That's no longer the case.

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Joeri
They still haven't fixed that ugly icon. I'll never get used to it.

