Category: Chrome

Starting today, the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux will start blocking intrusive adverts on sites to give a better user experience.  Google had announced that these types of ads would be blocked back in December starting today after announcing their agreement with the Coalition for Better Ads last summer.

If you don’t remember, for desktops, ads that do the following risk being blocked:

• pop-up ads
• auto-play video ads with sound
• prestitial ads with countdown
• large sticky ads

For those who have the ad blocker enabled in Chrome on their desktop, you will no longer see these ads.

One of the hidden gems in Gmail are the labs.  The labs are unsupported, experimental features that may make their way into the mainstream support for the email service.  For the most part, I don’t recommend using beta or unsupported features but there is one that has been there a long time and Google seems to continue to improve it.

The feature is the ability to enable an unread message counter on the Gmail tab in the Chrome browser on Windows, MacOS or Linux as well as in Chrome OS.

Unread Counter in Gmail Tab in Chrome

In this How To, I’ll show you were to go in Gmail to enable the feature so you can try it out for yourself.

The Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux has now officially been updated to Chrome 64.  The new build was released yesterday and will be rolling out over the course of the next few days.  The new build is version 64.0.3282.119 for those keeping score at home and has over 50 security and bug fixes in the release.

To force a check for the update, type chrome://help in the browser omnibar and then check for updates.  This will force your browser to get the latest build and, once downloaded and you restart Chrome, you will be on Chrome 64.

[Update 12/20/2017:  It has now been removed.  Microsoft states that the installer violates the store’s policies. ]

Big and somewhat surprising news this morning for Windows 10 users.  Google Chrome is now available for download in the Microsoft Windows Store.  It means that users can now install Chrome on their Windows 10 PCs (except Windows 10S users) without having to side-load it.  This is something that many administrators lock down for security reasons.

Essentially this new app, which is published by Google, is an installer which acts as a shell to go get the browser installed on your PC.  In other words, it is an official channel to go out to the web and download the browser as you would if you were side-loading.

Following the release of an updated Chrome for Android, the Chrome browser for Windows, MacOS and Linux has a new update rolling out today.  The updated version is build 63.0.3239.84 for those keeping score at home and gets desktop users of the browser on the Chrome 63 train.

Along with the updating to the base version of Chrome, this update also brings a lot of fixes.  There are 37 named fixes in this update but the details of exactly how it was fixed will remain confidential for a few more weeks.  This is a normal practice by Google to assure that users have had time to update and are not exposed to the vulnerability.  Most of the have to deal with spoofs or other exploits.

The Flags page in Chrome has been updated too.  Now if you type chrome://flags in the ominbar, you will see the new Material Design inspired look to these experimental settings in the browser.

About a year ago, Google announced that they would be eliminating Chrome apps on the desktop versions of the Chrome browser.  That process has begun today as Chrome apps are no longer available to download from Windows, MacOS or Linux versions of the browser.

You can see in the splash screen above that Apps has been removed.

The move is based more-or-less on the fact that nobody uses Chrome apps.  Google’s own numbers suggest 1% of Chrome users use the apps.  I, as a Chrome user on my Mac and on my Chromebook, can attest to this.  I don’t have a single app installed, especially now on my Chromebook as I’ve been using more Android apps.

Developers have been notified of this change and while their apps will work through the first quarter of 2018, after that, the code will be removed from Chrome all together.

The replacement?  Progressive Web Apps, or PWAs