In Google Chrome, the Omnibox feature combines a browser’s address bar and search box into one single area at the top of the browser window. You can also use it to bookmark websites and see security information about your current webpage. Here are all the ways you can use the address bar:

1. Go to web address

Type the URL of the web page (e.g. http://www.chromefans.org), then press Enter key or click the Go to … icon button at the end of the bar.

2. Search the web

Enter a search term there, and you’ll generate a search that hits your default search engine:

3. Create a bookmark

If you come across an interesting webpage that you’d like to revisit at a later point, click the star icon to create a bookmark.

• Edit the bookmark’s name in the Name field.
• By default, the bookmark is filed in the bookmark folder that was most recently used. Use the Folder drop-down menu to choose where you want to store the bookmark.
• Undo the addition of the bookmark by clicking Remove.
• If you want to change the bookmark’s URL, click Edit. Other, click Close to add the bookmark.

4. Search your bookmarks and browsing history

Whenever you type in the address bar, Google Chrome automatically searches your browsing history and shows you websites in your history that match what you’ve entered. The address bar can also automatically show you suggestions of related search terms and websites.

5. See the security status for the page you’re on

Improved search functionality is not where the power of the Omnibox ends, however. It’s also a tool to help you know that you’re surfing on safe websites. For example, if you enter a website that is secured using SSL security, you’ll notice that the “https” that indicates a secure website appears in green. If there’s a problem with the security, you’ll see the “https” in red with a slash through it.

Google has recently released a plugin for Internet Explorer that renders web pages using Google Chrome. The plugin, called Google Chrome Frame, is open-source and the code is publicly available.

By looking at the code, it’s obvious that the plugin is not limited to Internet Explorer. There’s also a NPAPI plugin, which should work in browsers that support NPAPI: Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers. Here’s a comment from one of the Chrome Frame files:

“ChromeFrameNPAPI: Implementation of the NPAPI plugin, which is responsible for hosting a chrome frame, i.e. an iframe like widget which hosts the the chrome window. This object delegates to Chrome.exe (via the Chrome IPC-based automation mechanism) for the actual rendering”.

A post from the Chromium blog explained the purpose of Google’s plugin: “With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5’s offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions.”

Instead of asking users to download a different browser, Google and other companies that develop complex web applications can ask users to install Google Chrome Frame. This way, Google Chrome runs invisibly inside another browser.

source: googlesystem

NVIDIA has been working hard on its Tegra-based “computers-on-a-chip” line, and now it has been announced that as well as the normal mobile platforms like Windows Mobile or Google Android, it has also been working on the up-and-coming Google Chrome OS. Helped by none other than Google itsself.

NVIDIA’s GM of Mobile Business Mike Rayfield made the announcement to JKOnTheRun’s Kevin Tofel: “Nvidia is “working closely with Google,” on the Chrome OS platform”.

Google CEO Schmidt announced that he expects an Apple announcement about a notebook running Chrome OS no later than this year.

It’s an interesting announcement, especially coming from Schmidt, the Google CEO who sat on the Apple board for a while, causing all kinds of rumors, and resigned, again amidst much speculation, earlier this summer. So why would Google be announcing an Apple notebook? Don’t they have their own people to do that?

No need to get too excited, as it’s only an announcement and we’ve seen announcements and retractions before now that times are hard in the economy. Schmidt has an optimistic view of the economy, he thinks the worst is over:“I think the new normal is now,” the Google CEO said at a briefing with reporters, at the Allen & Co media and technology conference in Sun Valley, Idaho.

So is this another attempt at the big Kill Microsoft Plan that many suspect makes Google and Apple such staunch allies? Schmidt didn’t want to get into that:
“I don’t want to talk about Microsoft,” he said, and went on to say that Google did not have any particular goals for Chrome to take market share in the PC business. “We actually don’t look at market share at all,” said Schmidt.

Sure you don’t, honey. That’s why you’re the CEO of one of the biggest companies on the planet.

Google just released an update to its cutting edge developer version of Google Chrome that adds a lot of polish to the way Chrome handles extensions. Interestingly, while the stable versions of Chrome are still stuck with the 2.x series, the versions in the developer channel are now already designated as 4.x versions. At this point, users of the developer channel version can already easily install extensions, change themes, sync bookmarks, and profit from a faster rendering engine, while users of the more conservative stable version don’t have access to any of these features yet.

Among other things, Google has now made extension management a lot easier and if you use the dev channel version, just type in “chrome://extensions/” and the new extension management interface will pop up.

You shouldn’t read too much into Google Chrome’s version numbers. Just because you can now install Google Chrome 3.0, it doesn’t mean that Google wants to appear more mature than it already is. For Chrome, version numbers are just a way to highlight major milestones.

Three months after the first developer preview, Google Chrome 3.0 is out of beta and ready to replace the current stable version. Since Google updates the browser automatically, you might not even notice that you use a version that brings new features.

Even if it’s one of the fastest browsers available today, Google Chrome continues to improve its performance. “We’ve improved by more than 150% in Javascript performance since our very first beta, and by more than 25% since the most recent stable release,” mentions Google.

The new release supports themes so you can customize the browser with one of the 28 new themes. Not all of them are good-looking, but they’re easy to install and you don’t have to restart your browser after changing the theme.

Google Chrome 3.0 has an updated new tab page that lets you customize the pages reordering them using drag and drop, by pinning the pages you use frequently and removing the pages you no longer visit. Google simplified the page by removing the list of search boxes and the recent bookmarks.

(Tip: you can still use the previous new tab page design, by appending this flag to a Chrome shortcut: –old-new-tab-page.)

A feature you won’t probably use too often, at least for now, is the support for the HTML5 video and audio tags. Like Firefox 3.5, Chrome includes video codecs that allow you to embed videos without using slow and unreliable plug-ins like Adobe Flash. You can test this feature in TinyVid.com, an experimental Ogg video uploading site, or in YouTube’s HTML5 demo page, which uses an H.264 video.

One year after the first release, the numbers are impressive: “51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bugfixes”. Google Chrome’s market share is 2.84%, according to Net Applications, but the browser’s impact was even more significant: Chrome set a high standard for browsers by focusing on speed, a simplified user interface and by handling web pages as if they were applications. Safari 4, as well as the the next versions of Firefox, are influenced by Google Chrome’s simplicity.

In other Chrome news, the documentation for creating extensions is now available and the support for extensions is enabled by default in the dev channel. If you use the stable version of Chrome, you need to wait a little bit.

Thanks to a full year of great feedback from our users, we’re kicking off our second year of Google Chrome with a brand new stable release. This stable release incorporates many of the improvements and features that we tested out in our most recent beta release, including a 150% increase in Javascript performance since our very first beta, a freshly redesigned New Tab page, an improved Omnibox, Themes capability, as well as HTML5 features. You can get the full, play-by-play details on the Official Google Blog.

If you haven’t tried Google Chrome recently, we invite you to give it a whirl. Many of the improvements in this release were inspired by the responses from users, so we’re all ears if you have any feedback. If you’re already using Google Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated to this new version soon, but if you’re itching to try this right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.

Google released the Chrome browser on September 2, 2008. Now that Chrome has been out for about a year and it’s been almost six months since I last looked at Chrome’s market share, let’s take another peek.

For the last 30 days, here are my Google Analytics stats for mattcutts.com:

For me, 8.97% of my readers run Chrome, up from 7.04% in March 2009.

Some different browser marketshare numbers:

- Net Applications says that Chrome went from 2.59% to 2.84% from July 2009 to August 2009.

- StatCounter gives daily stats. I’m seeing 3.31% on Saturday August 1st to 3.59% on Saturday August 29th.

- Clicky says that in the last 60 days, Chrome has gone from 3.376% to 4.004%

So after one year, three different sources report market share of 2.84%, 3.59%, and 4.004%. That’s pretty good for 12 months. More importantly, Chrome has pushed all browsers to be faster, more modern, and generally better.

I’m also looking forward to some of the fun things coming in Chrome. Features like bookmark syncing and themes in the latest developer or “dev” release of Chrome are quite nice. If you’re adventurous, you can also try dev versions of Chrome for the Mac and Linux too. And if extensions are your thing, those are coming along as well.

Good news for extension developers: as of today, extensions are turned on by default on Google Chrome’s dev channel.

Extensions are small pieces of software that developers can write to customize the way Google Chrome works. We’ve been working on enabling extensions for a while, but until now, they were hidden behind a developer flag. As of today, this is no longer true. If you’re on the dev channel, you can try installing some of our sample extensions.

Removing the flag is the first step in our launch process, and it means we’re ready for a few more people to start using extensions– the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel. For this release, we focused on getting most of the basic infrastructure and security pieces in place, in particular our new permission system. However, you should still be cautious and only install extensions from developers you trust.

Going forward, we are working hard towards a release on the Beta Channel. The UI is likely to change as we bring it up to Google Chrome’s high standard, and we’re still finishing up a few APIs. We’ve also enlisted some help to get extensions up to speed on Mac and Linux.

From the beginning, we’ve strived to make extensions super easy to develop. If you’d like to give it a try, you’ll find everything you need to get started in our brand new documentation. If you’ve already written an extension, make sure to read this post about some recent changes.

Support for extensions to customize Chrome, the top-requested feature for Google’s browser, has begun arriving for adventurous users.

Previously, extensions worked only for those who enabled the feature with a command line switch. Now the feature is enabled by default in the developer preview version of Chrome on Windows, Aaron Boodman, the Google engineer who oversees the extensions work, said in a blog post Wednesday.

“We’re ready for a few more people to start using extensions–the kind of adventurous people who populate the dev channel,” said Boodman, who earlier in his career developed the Greasemonkey tool that permitted extensive customization of Firefox.

Work is already under way for some popular extensions, including Yahoo’s Delicious for social bookmarking and Xmarks for bookmark synchronization.

Extensions are enabled by default only for Chrome’s Windows users right now. “We’ve also enlisted some help to get extensions up to speed on Mac and Linux,” Boodman said.

The extension-programming interfaces have been changing, and more changes are coming to the user interface. Those who want to start developing extensions should look at the new Chrome extension documentation.

Chrome extensions are written with the same programming technologies as are used for Web pages themselves–HTML, CSS, and the like. Mozilla has a related extension effort called Jetpack under way for Firefox.