Chromium

Google Chrome has matured from a lightweight and fast browsing alternative into an innovative, standard-bearing browser that people love. It's powerful enough to drive its own operating system, Chrome OS. The browser that people can use today, Chrome 25, offers highly competitive features, including synchronization, autofill, and standards compliance, and maintains Google's reputation for building one of the fastest browsers available.

Chrome 25 represents a major milestone for the browser, but those expecting to see dramatic changes in major version-point updates will be disappointed. For a while now, Google has been pushing features over what it calls milestone … Read more

A recently declassified document on the FCC Web site reveals Sony's first Chromebook.

The legend of the Sony Chromebook stretches back to March of 2011, when Sony Insider first leaked news of its existence with specifications. The rumored features included a 1.2GHz Nvidia Tegra 2 (T25) dual-core ARM Cortex A9 processor; an 11.6-inch (1,366x768) LCD; 1GB of DDR2 RAM; 16GB of flash storage; eight-hour battery life; and more.

A year later, new FCC documents for the Sony VCC111 laptop contain an assortment of photos, showing the device from multiple angles. You may notice the lack of a Windows button on the keyboard.

CNET also showed the images to a trusted source familiar with the matter, who confirmed the slim, ultraportable Sony laptop uses Google's Chrome OS. The final nail in the rumor coffin lies in the actual user manual for the Sony laptop, which clearly discusses how to turn on and operate Chrome OS. … Read more

Google has released a test version of its browser with the ability to run programs written in Dart, the company's language designed to improve on JavaScript.

"This release of Chromium with Dart VM integration is a technology preview, and should not be used for day-to-day browsing. After more testing and developer feedback, we plan to eventually include the Dart VM in Chrome," said Google programmers Anton Muhin, Vijay Menon, and Pavel Podivilov, in a blog post yesterday.

Google developed Dart as a way to improve Web programming, for example with better performance and with a language it … Read more

Android's unbranded browser is coming back into the WebKit fold.

The software--called simply "Browser" on Android phones and tablets--is based on the open-source browser engine called WebKit. It's long been disassociated from it, though, and now Google is trying to reunite the projects in a move that could portend the arrival of a branded Chrome on Android.

"We're looking forward to a much better collaboration with the WebKit community," Google's Andrei Popescu said yesterday in a mailing list message flagged by new Chrome developer Peter Beverloo and spotted by TechCrunch.

Convergence between … Read more

Less than a month after RockMelt threw open its doors to anybody from the public interested in its Chromium-based browser beta, RockMelt is set to break ground on its second beta today as it hopes to continue attracting new users and developing features.

RockMelt beta 2 (download for Windows | Mac) comes with four noteworthy improvements: a new method for integrated bookmarking that will be strikingly familiar to Instapaper and Read It Later fans; a revamped Twitter interface; a new chat notification bar and better support for multiple, simultaneous instant messages; and upgrading the browser's core to Chromium 10.

The … Read more

RockMelt boomed onto the alterna-browser landscape last November, grabbing some notable attention from social browsing competitor Flock but then fading from the limelight. After four months, RockMelt announced today that it's ready for the next step: entering into a public beta. That's right, this entire time the Marc Andreessen-backed, Chromium-based RockMelt beta (download for Windows | Mac) has been restricted to invitation-only.

A TechCrunch story reported that RockMelt is claiming "hundreds of thousands" of active users and that about 20 percent to 30 percent of users who downloaded RockMelt have used it at least once every seven … Read more

In its first two years, Chrome development took a more collaborative approach than most Google projects, but now its leaders have decided on more sharply defined leadership roles to better manage the browser's growth.

Instead of notifying a "watchlist" of programmers who are affected by a particular change to the code, a programmer on an "owners" list must now approve the change, high-ranking Chrome engineer Ben Goodger announced yesterday on the developers' mailing list for the open-source Chromium project that underlies Chrome. Goodger wrote:

Much of Chromium's practices are modeled on Google's own … Read more

Although you can download beta, unbranded versions of Google's nascent operating system now, Chrome OS won't be ready for mainstream use until the middle of 2011. That doesn't mean we can't show you some of what to expect. Check out this gallery for an early look at the cloud-based operating system.

Updated at 1:10 p.m. PT with a statement from Flock on the future of the Firefox-based version.

Flock shifted gears from its Mozilla-powered core to Chromium 6 earlier this year, but only for Windows users. Today, the company released a Chromium 7-based version for Mac users, as well as updating its Windows version to Chromium 7.

Available for Windows and Mac, Flock 3.5 adds LinkedIn support and include a refined login system. If you log in to a social-networking site that Flock supports the browser itself is automatically logged in to it, too. Updating to Chromium 7 … Read more