Google Chrome 0.4.154.25 is now available. Aside from having a nearly impossible to remember version number, the latest version of Google's web browser also has a few important updates, the most noticeable being the inclusion of a bookmark manager.

The bookmark manager allows you to import and export bookmarks in HTML format, which makes importing your bookmarks from Firefox or another web browser a snap. Of course, you run the risk of realizing just how out of date your bookmarks are when you do this, but that's another story for another day.

Google has also changed the way its pop-up manager works, by displaying the number of pop ups minimized in the corner of your screen. Google Gears and the V8 JavaScript Engine have also been updated in this release.

[via WebWare]

Welcome to Googleholic, your weekly fix of everything Google!

In this edition:

• Google SearchWiki lets you customize results
• Google adds new features to BlackBerrys and iPhones
• LIFE Magazine's photo archive comes online
• GrandCentral App comes to Mac
• Google plans to work with OEMs to pre-install Chrome
• Access Google Docs within Gmail

Mozilla has added a tab tearing feature to Firefox 3.1 beta, which can best be explained by saying, "watch the video above." But in a nutshell, what tab tearing lets you do is drag and drop tabs, not just within your browser window, but outside of it as well. For example, you can click and drag a tab outside of your Firefox window and it will open a new browser instance. Or you can grab a tab from one browser window into another browser instance.

Now before you say anything, yes, I know that the Opera web browser has been able to do this for ages, and Google Chrome has supported similar behavior since it was launched. But that doesn't make mean it's not nice to see the feature come to Firefox. It takes more than innovation to make a good web browser. You also have to be willing to recognize good ideas where you find them and be willing to implement them in your product.

[via Mozilla Links]

If you ever get tired of flipping back and forth between two browser windows or tabs when what you really want to do is be able to read two articles at once, (or read one article while composing a blog post or email in another window), there's a Firefox plugin called Split Browser that can help. But what if you're not using Firefox? What if you're using a browser like Google Chrome, which doesn't even support plugins?

Then you can use a Javascript bookmarklet called Google Chrome Dual View. Just drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark toolbar and when you hit the button Google Chrome will ask you to input two web addresses. It will then open them up side by side in a single browser tab.

No, it's not the most elegant solution. But it works. As an added bonus, the bookmarklet works in Firefox (and possibly other web browsers) as well. I just don't see why you'd choose to use it instead of Split Browser.

[via gHacks]

There's a new version of Google Chrome available for download. Well, sort of. It'll be a few days before Google pushes version 0.3.154.9 out to users, but you can download it today from FileHippo.

The update brings a few security enhancements, including a fix for an exploit that could be used to redirect your browser. There's also a new warning message that pops up asking if you're sure you want to download any file that could be executed (like .exe, .dll, or .bat files).

There are a handful of other bux fixes and new features, but nothing too impressive. I'm still waiting for full screen zoom capabilities. Text-only zooming is so 2007.

If you want to use Google Chrome but are concerned or have questions about Google's policies for collecting usage data, you might want to give Iron a try.

Iron, developed by German software company SRWare is Chrome stripped of all the user ID information that gave the German government cause for concern.

I don't speak German, but the guys at the Incomplete-News Project have helpfully published an English translation. According to them, Iron is essentially the Chromium source code, with the following modifications:

• No unique user-ID
• No user-specific information is sent to Google
• No alternative error messages
• Crash information is not sent to Google
• No Google updater

I personally don't have a problem with having my search data transmitted to Google (as I'm sure it is in Safari and Firefox with my search bars now), but I do understand the concerns about data-collection potential.

I downloaded Iron, and other than featuring the same squished blue logo that CodeWeavers uses in its version of Chromium on the default tab page, everything worked exactly as expected.

XP and Vista users can download Iron from SRWare's site.
[via the Incomplete-News Project]

There are plenty of things that set Google Chrome apart from Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer. It uses a different rendering engine. It places tabs at the very top of the screen, not under the location bar. It has a single location/search bar. And each browser tab is treated as a separate process by your operating system. Another thing that separates Chrome from the competition? It's not as extendable... yet.

You can install add-ons for web browsers like Firefox that do everything from turn the browser into an FTP client to provide email notifications. And there are user scripts that will let you change the way you interact with web pages. Google Chrome doesn't currently support either type of extensions. But it will.

At the Web 2.0 Expo in New York, Google's Ojan Vafai indicated that Chrome wll support both eventually. But first, the developers want to make sure that add-ons don't cause the browser to become unstable. Firefox add-ons, for example, can bog down the application, making it take longer to launch and more likely to crash.

While you're waiting for Google to figure things out, there are always workarounds that let you install user scripts or block ads in Chrome.

More than 1.9 million people visited the "thank you" page that pops up after you've downloaded and installed the Google Chrome web browser between September 1st and 7th, according to Nielsen. If that number doesn't sound impressive, let's put it another way: Almost 1.4% of everyone in the United States who went online at all during that week saw the thank you page. Not bad for a brand new web browser.

Of course, installing isn't necessarily the same as using. I'm fairly certain that a hefty number of people who installed Google Chrome were doing so just to check it out. Many probably played around with it for a few minutes and then ditched it to go back to Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, or whatever it is they used.

In other Chrome news, Google seems to have issued an update to the browser today. If you click the "about" button in the browser, a message will pop up telling you that an update is available. I have yet to find a changelog showing what's new in version 0.2.149.30. I'm guessing mostly bug fixes.

[via CNET]

One of the nice things about the Google Chrome web browser is that all you need to do to backup your profile information is locate the folder where your user data is located and copy the data. If you're using Windows XP, that directory is probably in the Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data folder.

But if you're looking for a simpler solution, you might want to check out Google Chrome Backup, a free utility that lets you create, backup, and restore profiles.

Backing up a profile works the way you would expect it to. Google Chrome Backup will attempt to locate your existing profile and all you have to do is right click on it and select backup and choose a destination directory. A much cooler feature is the ability to create new profiles. Just click the new profile button and you can create a new profile with separate settings and browser history. You can later choose between profiles by launching Google Chrome Backup and selecting your profile from the application.

[via gHacks]

It's been about a week since Google launched the public beta of its open source web browser, Google Chrome. While the browser certainly ain't perfect by a long shot, it does render pages quickly and has a few innovative features like an unconventional placement for tabs and a unified search box/location bar.

Over the past week there's been a flurry of activity surrounding the browser. Not from Google developers, but by third party developers who have done their best to make Google at least as useful as Firefox or Safari. A few folks have taken a different approach and tried to make Firefox look and feel a bit more like Chrome. Here are a few of our favorite Google Chrome updates from week one.


Themes

If you like Google Chrome's layout but can't stand the bland light blue color scheme, you're in luck. It turns out that all you need to do to change the browser's theme is replace a single default.dll. Your first step should be to the ChromeSpot message boards where dozens of users have posted custom themes. You can also find custom themes at Google Chrome Themes. (Link removed due to allegations that the developers were stealing themes without crediting the authors).

One you find a theme you like, you should backup your default theme by making a copy of your default.dll file. It's located in \Documents and Settings\[username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes in Windows XP. Then just download the theme of your choice and unzip the new default.dll location to the same location.

If you're using Windows Vista the path should be \Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes\

Unfortunately since Google hasn't yet built a theme manager for Chrome there's no simple way to switch between mulitple themes from within the browser settings. If you're looking for an easier way to switch between themes you can try the Chrome Automatic Theme Switcher, but it won't work with the latest build of Chrome.

[via Lifehacker and Google Blogoscoped]

So you've tested Google Chrome and decided that you like it. You say you'd switch, but there's no adblocker? Fortunately for you, there are several free, tiny filtering proxy applications available that can do the job.

The best part is, they'll help block ads in any browser - including Chrome.

Before I get into a list, it's important to know that several of these apps haven't been updated in ages. However, content filtering is a pretty straightforward operation, so even the old ones work just fine - and you can always tweak the blocking rules yourself.

CyberGuard WebWasher Classic is another great option. It's small, fast, and very customizable. It's got additional capabilities to block popups, scripts, referrers, cookies, and prefixes. New filters are incredibly easy to set up, and there's no noticeable lag in load times. Of the apps I tested, WebWasher was my favorite.

Proxomitron has a god awful GUI, but it works well enough that its appearance can be overlooked (you can create your own bitmaps if you really hate it). It offers extremely flexible bloxing rules, and the default set is extrmely effective. Blocked ads are replaced with [red text in brackets], and pages load times weren't adversely affected.

Welcome to Googleholic, your weekly fix of everything Google!

In this, "Happy 10th anniversary, Google" edition:

• A decade of Google
• Germany hates Google Chrome
• Picasa and Picasa Web Albums get updated
• Gmail code base updated for IE 6
• Google tips for testing on all browsers
• Google launches its own satellite

Although no release date for the Linux and OS X variants of Chrome has been announced, some details about the Mac version of Chrome are starting to emerge.

Yesterday, Amanda Walker, a Google software engineer, laid out some of the basics on the Official Google Mac Blog.

While individuals who excel at Mac development are building the Mac version of Chrome (and Linux developers are focusing on the Linux version), the different platforms are not operating on different teams -- everyone is part of the same group and working off of the same Chromium source tree.

As I discussed earlier, Chromium is available for developers to build on OS X -- the UI layer does not exist right now, but you can run tests in the TestShell.

When it comes to a release date for either Mac or Linux, Amanda won't give an estimate. In the blog entry, she writes, "we're not setting an artificial date for when they'll be ready--we simply can't predict enough to make a solid estimate." Fair enough, though obviously lots of Mac and Linux fans hope that it is sooner rather than later.

More details, at least about who is working on the Mac version, have also started to emerge. Mike Pinkerton, the project leader for Camino, posted in his blog that he is working on the Chromium project as a Mac developer. For anyone unfamiliar with Camino, it is a native OS X Gecko browser. Think the rendering engine of Firefox 2, with the interface and Cocoa-goodness of Safari. Up until FireFox 3, Camino was pretty much the only Gecko-based browser I used on my Mac. Interestingly, Pinkerton's former co-lead on the Camino project, Dave Hyatt, currently works at Apple on the Safari and WebKit teams.

Knowing how successfully the Camino team adapted Gecko to OS X, this gives me a lot of confidence in Chrome for OS X.