One of the slick visual elements of Google's Chrome browser is pin tabs. They're those compact tabs that're only as wide as a favicon, and they save a ton of space in your tab bar. You could point out that Firefox doesn't have this feature, but I'd give you the Firefox fanatic's standard answer: there's an add-on for that! For Chrome-style mini-tabs in Firefox, grab the Pin Tab extension.

Pinning a tab using ctrl-click shrinks it and moves it to the left of your tab bar. A pinned tab is preserved across all sessions, and you can't accidentally upset it using the address bar. If you enter a new URL while a pinned tab is selected, that URL opens in a new tab instead. You can pin tabs by dragging them to the left of the tab bar, and unpin them by dragging them to the right. Pinned tabs save a ton of space, since they're several times smaller than regular ones, so this add-on is ideal for those who have dozens of sites open at once.

[via gHacks]

UPDATE: The developer of this add-on seems to have taken it down for right now.

When a few blog sites yesterday happened upon Google's YouTube video of the new Dashboard, they moved quickly to pull it down. Though the original video is still MIA, Google made an official announcement of the new feature on their own blog last night and the video above is now ready for public consumption.

While Dashboard is now live -- you can check yours out at https://www.google.com/dashboard -- what's being talked about by most sites is how this move is all about transparency and privacy controls. Heck, even the official post hits on those points: "In an effort to provide you with greater transparency and control over their own data, we've built the Google Dashboard."

The post continues, "Designed to be simple and useful, the Dashboard summarizes data for each product that you use (when signed in to your account) and provides you direct links to control your personal settings."

That's fantastic, and I'm sure it's a big part of the story, but I can't help thinking that there's a tie-in to other Google projects. Perhaps Chrome OS and Android, for example?

The latest Windows version of Google Chrome, version 4.0, is now in beta. It's reportedly a scorching 30% faster than the current release, and it includes a bookmark syncing feature that's been floating around in the developer preview version of the browser for some time.

Activate bookmark syncing on each of your computers, and Chrome will automatically synchronize any changes to your bookmarks across all your machines. It's made possible by the magic of XMPP, which also powers Google Talk. Sound good? Go ahead and download Chrome 4.0 Beta.

This beta version of Chrome is also notable for what it leaves out: extensions support. According to Stephen Shankland at CNET, Google is reworking the extensions interface for Chrome, so that feature is disabled for now. Shankland also tracked down some news on the upcoming Chrome Mac Beta. The team working on it has been instructed to fix all their high-priority bugs by the end of the week, and it looks like getting the Mac version out is near the top of Google's to-do list.

[via CNET]

Thanks in no small part to an errant Gizmodo post this morning, the blogosphere is once again atwitter with musings of a "leaked" Chrome OS build that we can all download and enjoy.

Wrong, wrong, wrong. First and foremost, the "build" they're talking about is a fan-built Linux distro with Chrome bolted on created using SUSE Studio. Second, no official Google project is going to be hosted as a subdomain on Google Sites. No way. They've already got a domain registered for ChromeOS.

Third, it's not really that close to what Chrome OS is going to be.

Don't count on any desktop apps - such as OpenOffice and Gimp - to be included. The aim as I understand it from sources at Google is to provide a portable computing experience that relies very heavily upon access to the cloud.

Google's vision is for you to boot, sign in to the OS using their single sign-on cookie which preps your browser to access all your Google goodies (GMail, Docs, Picasa Web, etc.), and get down to business with the Chrome browser. Sign out of your session on your netbook, sign in on your desktop onto which you've managed to get Chrome OS installed and your desktop will look exactly as you left it on your netbook. Your sessions are saved in the cloud and follow you from machine to machine.

For users who want a fast-booting alternative with quick access to a browser, Chrome OS might be the right choice. Personally, though, my Windows 7 and Fedora installs resume very quickly from sleep and I'd rather have access to my full-blown desktops.

Bottom line: we won't know how cool Chrome OS is until Google gives us a peek - whether that's a genuine leak or a developer build.

If you've been waiting patiently for Google Chrome to come to the Mac, but you're not an early adopter who likes to take chances with nightly builds, you'll be happy to know that the first official Developer Preview of Chrome is out now. Chrome brings speeds comparable to that other Webkit browser you may have tried on your Mac, Safari. It's also got a growing library of themes, in case the default Chrome blue turns you off.

With Safari 4 switching away from the tabs-on-top after trying them out in beta, the orientation of the tabs is Chrome's defining UI feature. Chrome's multi-process architecture also keeps one crashing tab from taking all your other tabs down with it. Sure, you can "restore all tabs" when Firefox crashes, but that's still more of a pain than it needs to be. Chrome is also making strides toward supporting extensions. It'll also import bookmarks and settings from your other browsers, so it's easy to make the switch.

[via Ars Technica]

TechCrunch's MG Siegler got all excited over the weekend about the appearance of a Chrome OS build folder on Google's Chromium.org server. Yes, the snapshots are now being posted - actually, they have been since October 5th, by the look of things - but there's nothing to get excited about just yet. Sorry, MG.

For starters, what's in the folder is what's in the other top level folders - a browser build for a specific OS. This isn't Chrome OS per se, it's the Google Chrome browser build for Google's upcoming OS. You know, like the Mac, Windows, and Linux versions available for download from the very same server.

But let's move on. Assuming you're the easily excited type, the screen above shows what you get when building Chrome for Chrome OS versus Chrome on Linux. My thanks to Johnathan Frederickson, who commented on the TC post and actually played around with Google's .deb packages.

As you can see, there's really not much to look at apart from the clock and the little circle in the top left corner.
When clicked, the circle takes you to a sign-on page, currently only available internally to Google staffers in all probability. I'll wager that has something to do with the single sign-on cookie we read about a while back.

A number of Download Squad readers have been echoing the same sentiment in recent posts about Google's browser: as soon as LastPass is available, we're leaving Firefox for good.

Well, gang, grab your parachutes, it's time to bail! The LastPass crew has released an alpha version of their Google Chrome extension, and it rocks. Check out the screens after the break!

Just about everyone has a usb flash drive by now. Apart from all that data you're packing (which you no doubt have encrypted in case your drive gets lost -- but that's a post for another day), why not pack up your favorite web browser and take it along for the ride.

There are a lot more options than you think - here are 13 different options for users of Windows PCs. Don't see your choice on the list? Share it with us in the comments!

Mozilla

Portable Firefox (current) [download] and Portable Minefield [download]
John T. Haller's Portable Apps project is always right on top of the latest Firefox updates, so it's the place to go if you need the Fox in your pocket. The most recent unstable branch is provided as well, in case you want to test it without installing.

PocketFlock v2 [download]
The kicked-up Firefox remix for social networking types is also available in a portable version, thanks to enthusiast Dave Ferrite.

Mac users are tired of hearing about how Chrome is the greatest thing to hit the web since, well, Firefox. While Windows users have been happily using Chrome for a year now, the Mac version of Chrome is only now starting to reach a usable beta state. Unfortunately, Google tends not to update the official Chrome beta for Mac very often, at least compared to the multiple-builds-per-day that are occurring to Chromium, Chrome's developer build.

The latest versions of Chromium are quite usable, but you can get out of date in a matter of mere hours. Fortunately, the folks over at TechCrunch hacked together a script with an Automator process for the purposes of checking for and downloading the latest Chromium build.

The net effect is that you can now download a small app called Chromium Updater who's sole function is to update Chromium, then launch it. Of course, all the scary hand-waving beta software warnings apply: don't use a beta browser for mission critical tasks, etc. But if you feel comfortable dealing with beta software, you will probably be pleasantly surprised by the current state of Chromium, and the rate at which it improves.

After doing an install from Buildbot's snapshots, I checked Chromium's about screen. Lo and behold, build 23129 is tagged as 4.0.202.0. While it's just a number, it means, of course, Chrome will likely hit v4 long before Firefox ever does.

Other than the version number I haven't noted any obvious changes as of yet.

Technical Program Manager Anthony LaForge posted a note to the Chromium-dev board announcing that the move was made to reflect the code freeze on Chrome v3. "There is still a bit of work that needs to be done for 3.0 in terms of stability and fixes," he wrote. "To that end we will be pulling changes into the 195 branch (what will become the stable release)."

This isn't the first quick version-to-version jump Chrome has seen. Chrome 3 hit the dev channel less than a week after Chrome 2's release back in May. Looks like I was off the mark about Chrome hitting version 8 or 9 before Google ditched the beta tag on GMail...

The Mac version of Google's Chrome browser, although not yet officially released by Google, is getting nightly builds in the form of Chromium. As Chromium adds more features that are already available in the Windows version of the Chrome, it makes that it would also get its own portable version. Like Portable Google Chrome for Windows, which we've reported on in the past, Portable Google Chrome for Mac is a version of the browser that you can load up from a USB key.

The portable version of Chromium loads from a ChromeLoader app that makes sure your settings save on your portable media, so you can take them with you anywhere. It's a good time to try Chromium, since important features like Flash, popup blocking and full screen mode have been implemented over the past couple of weeks. The developer's blog is in German, so you may find it helpful to try this version, via Google Translate.

Whoa. After long periods of speculation, Google enters the operating system space, for reals.

Chrome OS will be "fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds." Targeted at Netbooks, Chrome OS will be available on new systems by the second half of 2010. "The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web", according to the Official Google blog.

And, lest you think "Chrome OS" to just be fancy rebranding of Google's Android mobile OS, Google's VP of Product Management makes it abundantly clear in the release, "Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems."

Corporate espionage being what it is these days, there have likely been some sleepless nights around Redmond recently. With the full faith and credit of Google behind a radically new "cloud" OS -- relieving users of tedious things like backing up files, or installing applications -- Microsoft's quest to tie up the netbook market, without allowing it to compete for the low end of desktops, could face significant challenges in the years ahead.

Non-Windows users have been poking and prodding Google for quite some time now, wondering when they would be able to get their hands on an actual Google-branded browser for their operating systems. You may not have to wait too much longer

Google has taken the wraps off the alpha versions for Mac and Linux! In the official blog post, however, Google advises that you don't download the alpha unless you have a browser deathwish. Which you do, so the download links are at the bottom of this page.

I'm wondering what took so long, especially on Linux where the coders behind the PPA for Ubuntu Chromium have been hard at work. The open source project has been usable for quite some time, and I've been running it in Crunchbang and Ubuntu for almost two months. Considering its supposed alpha state, the core of the browser is very stable and feels just as fast as its Windows cousin.

Sandboxing has caused a bit of a hangup on Linux, plugins are not yet supported, and the options screen is MIA as well. Ok, so there's plenty of work to be done, but it's serviceable, and has been fun to use for weeks.

Those same features won't be working in Chrome, either, so don't expect to be able to do all your typical web browsing. No plugin support means no Flash, so YouTube and most of our addictive Time Wasters are all out of the question. Update: the options page is there in Chrome, and it's (partially) working!

It's a start at least, and shows that Google is, in fact, going to deliver a finished browser at some point.

Hey, they only promised "sometime in the middle of 2009," after all, and we're not quite there yet.

Linux gallery coming up after the break!

[via CNet]