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Chrome Google Upgrades

Google Adds Speech To Newly Stable Chrome 11, Pays Big Bounty 88

Posted by timothy from the tastiest-part-of-the-operating-system dept.
CWmike writes "Google patched 27 vulnerabilities in Chrome on Wednesday as it boosted the stable build of the browser to version 11 on Windows, Mac and Linux. The company paid out a record $16,500 in bounties to researchers who reported a majority of the bugs, beating the previous biggest payday by several hundred dollars. While Google listed more than 3,700 changes in Chrome 11, the only one it highlighted was the speech input feature. The combination of Chrome and Google Translate isn't flawless. In several quick tests by Computerworld, the browser and service transcribed most phrases accurately, but in one instance heard 'Good morning, sister ship' when the line was actually 'Good morning, Mr. Smith.'"
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Google Adds Speech To Newly Stable Chrome 11, Pays Big Bounty More

Google Adds Speech To Newly Stable Chrome 11, Pays Big Bounty

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  • Lisp? (Score:5, Funny)

    by SIR_Taco ( 467460 ) on Thursday April 28, 2011 @06:56PM (#35970460) Homepage

    Seems that maybe they should have programmed it in Lisp?

    Thanks, I'm here all week!

    • Re: (Score:3)

      by syousef ( 465911 )

      Seems that maybe they should have programmed it in Lisp?

      Thanks, I'm here all week!

      Children's version should be in Smalltalk.

    • Back when I was at University my supervisor was doing Natural Language research using LISP.

      They would type in short stories then ask the computer questions about the stories

      One story included something about John's driving his car and crashing into Mary
      This uncovered a bug in the code where they were try to access the first element of an empty list

      The LISP engine errored with.... drum roll....

      "Illegal CAR usage"

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Seumas ( 6865 )

      Seems like the Leave it to Beaver version should be written in Haskell.

      (Hey, what do you want, all the funny shit was taken.)

  • Error is excusable (Score:4, Funny)

    by Flyerman ( 1728812 ) on Thursday April 28, 2011 @06:56PM (#35970462) Journal

    Sister Ship is a much cooler band name than Mr. Smith.

  • Chrome. (Score:4, Funny)

    by demonbug ( 309515 ) on Thursday April 28, 2011 @06:59PM (#35970486) Journal

    Now it goes to 11.

    I sure hope they don't have armadillos [slashdot.org] in their trousers.

    • I liked the old icon better than the new v11 one.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rwa2 ( 4391 ) *

      Well, that's just one more, isn't it?

      Why don't they just make 10 a little better?

      I guess they just want to drive home the FACT that it's better than Firefox or IE. And maybe that it's almost as good as Opera, which just hit 11 late last year ;-)

  • Nothing new or innovative really (Score:5, Informative)

    by ya really ( 1257084 ) on Thursday April 28, 2011 @07:21PM (#35970612)
    Opera has had a similar feature [opera.com] for years now

    • Re: (Score:1, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      Except no one cares about Opera.

      • Re: (Score:1)

        by Anonymous Coward

        I and three other people care. You insensitive clod.

    • You know it's time to go to bed when the comments start to run together and you think that similar feature is "armadillos"...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      and speech input shouldn't be a part of the browser. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE THE BROWSER KEEP A MIC LINE OPEN.

      anyways, it sucks for using unless you're disabled and if you were then you'd have had this already for years since os/2 warp(and the windows port of the ibm speech stuff, it actually worked pretty well, too bad using voice commands actually sucks big time).

      • and speech input shouldn't be a part of the browser. I DON'T WANT TO HAVE THE BROWSER KEEP A MIC LINE OPEN.

        Google's still living in the late 90's world of "the browser will become the OS." Because you know: if you only have a hammer ...

  • Computer: open slashdot.org Computer: read first article I think we have found a better User Interface replacement for Slashdot 3.0

  • There's absolutely no way no way I tell you to use a hook for a specially delivered payload to turn that ol Microphone on when you didn't know it!

    • Recording audio at all times during web-browsing is clearly for your own good and required for Google to continue providing the best service possible for its users. I can see it now.

    • Also, even if Google are entirely trustworthy, is there absolutely zero chance that it could be subverted by malware?

  • Does it work like this [google.com] yet?
  • 1) Submit code under a fake identity to an open-source project that pays a bounty on security vulnerabilities. (Are any OSS contributors vetted?)
    2) "Discover" the flaw(s) in your code and report it.
    3) ???
    4) Profit

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by BZ ( 40346 )

      > Are any OSS contributors vetted?

      Not necessarily, but their code sure is, before it's included in the product!

  • They're ignoring the largest bug (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Posting=!Working ( 197779 ) on Thursday April 28, 2011 @08:48PM (#35971042)

    Did they fix the bug that makes the bookmarks suck? You know, the one that makes you choose between the incredibly clunky bookmarks sidebar or the waste of space that is a bookmarks toolbar.

    No?

    I'll wait for Chrome 12 and hope they've fixed it by then.

    Bookmarks are probably the best example of a drop down menu usage - a menu you occasionally want, and once you make a selection, it goes away.

    I've seen so many people try Chrome and delete it because of it's stubborn idiocy in handling one of the most commonly used functions in a web browser.

  • Still a shit browser (Score:5, Informative)

    by Snaller ( 147050 ) on Thursday April 28, 2011 @09:33PM (#35971312) Journal

    "Are you sure you wanna leave this page?"

    Yes! Why the fuck can't I disable that crap?

    Shitty browser. And you still can't zoom the font size, only the whole damn page as an image.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by Asdanf ( 1281936 )

      And you still can't zoom the font size, only the whole damn page as an image.

      Really? ctrl-+ is working fine for me.

      • Which scales the entire page, not just the text - exactly what he was complaining about.

        • Re: (Score:1)

          by Asdanf ( 1281936 )
          Oh. He said "as an image", which is not the case and threw me off. Yes, it does scale the whole page, seemingly as if the developer had been a good person and specified their layout in ems instead of pixels. Seems like a really good feature to me.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by adolf ( 21054 )

            Seems like a good feature to me, too. Just about every browser behaves this way, these days.

            It's been awhile (long enough that I am perhaps showing my age), but IIRC some of the last useful versions of pre-AOL Netscape browser zoomed text alone, instead of text+images.

            This may have even lasted into the next iteration: I seem to recall a special method or add-on for early Mozilla or Firefox which added the ability for the browser to zoom both text and images at the same time. (I also seem to recall instal

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by dOxxx ( 8571 )

              There are still designers who size text as if everybody has perfect 20/20 or better eyesight. The images are fine, I just want to make the damn text bigger so I don't have to squint.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by adolf ( 21054 )

                My eyesight is somewhere in the neighborhood of 20/300 on that scale. Corrective lenses (disposable contacts, in my case) work fine: I can see pixels on an iPhone 4 pretty plainly, despite what Steve Jobs might say about that. My vision has, pretty much, always been shit: I got glasses at around age 8, and contacts at 10. Perhaps I'm just lucky that my vision is usefully-correctable, but I digress:

                I run my PC displays at absurdly-high resolutions (1920x1200 on a 15.4" laptop at the most extreme), and a

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )

      you know the only way google could get a browser on the market that didn't have a one click disable for google ads..? exactly..

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by bheer ( 633842 )

      > you still can't zoom the font size, only the whole damn page as an image.

      Indeed. That bug's been marked as WONTFIX [crbug.com] for 2 years now.

    • No usable AdBlock. No way to easily find all hidden ads and trackers. No way to sanely manage cookies. Slow like hell on slow machines (being faster without ads blocked doesn't mean shit to me). Crashing when the last tab is closed (with a "successful" return code). Self-DOSing once it sees several errors on a page in a row (ERR_TEMPORARILY_THROTTLED, currently "temporarily" fixed but they want to break this again).

  • I have no idea how can google release a set of bugfixes and update the major version.

    And when are they going to:

    1. Allow stopping animated GIFs or make them play once. Makes my laptop drain much faster than firefox.
    2. Fix tonnes of memory leaks which make it eat 2GiG of RAM with only few tabs open. Makes my system crawl because it goes low on memory.

    You can search issues page to get more info on these issues.

    Every time I install chrome and use it, I end up uninstalling it.

  • Wonder if they have fixed their flash implementation so that it stops randomly turning that part of a web page into a window through to applications/windows behind Chrome.... This is my biggest problem with the browser on OS X, and I wish I could find a way to reproduce it reliably.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Zebedeu ( 739988 )

      In Ubuntu, if I load a page in the background with a flash animation on it, I get a weird semi-transparent/screen corruption on the top left corner of whatever page I'm looking at, until I open the tab which contains the flash animation.
      Then it all goes back to normal.

      I've also had numerous instances of flash crashing every tab in the browser (but not the browser itself). I thought they'd found a way to sandbox the flash plugin, but apparently it's not perfect yet.
      This is Chromium, so it might differ from t

  • Emacs is at 23, with 24 in beta... and comes bundled with a text editor and an operating system. Still some way to go, Google !
  • I was wondering what speech recognition engine they were using. So I dug around a bit. At first glance [google.com], it appears they record some speech, convert it to flac, and then send the speech off to google servers to do the actual transcription.

    There are some interesting privacy implications for this new feature, if it is indeed sending all of your speech to a server.

    Does anyone have a clearer picture of how it works and/or what engine google is using?

  • Is this the version where they finally, FINALLY, implement Print Preview [google.com]?

    • I was able to use your link and in about 30 seconds find the following setting (write up here [thechromesource.com]):

      Type about:flags into the omnibar. Click Enable under Print Preview.
  • Speech input? Is anyone going to use this? Still no way to customize the address bar btw.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

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