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Google Chrome 32 Is Out: Noisy Tabs Indicators, Supervised Users 141

An anonymous reader writes "Google today released Chrome version 32 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The new version includes tab noise indicators, a new look for Windows 8 Metro mode, and automatic blocking of malware downloads. You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome."
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Google Chrome 32 Is Out: Noisy Tabs Indicators, Supervised Users

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  • by tompaulco ( 629533 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:26PM (#45958917) Homepage Journal
    I'd like it to block noisy tabs, block metro 8 and block malware. Maybe I should just go back to lynx.
    • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

      I'd like it to block noisy tabs, block metro 8 and block malware. Maybe I should just go back to lynx.

      Or go back to Gopher.

      and the glory which was telnet

    • by icebike ( 68054 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:09PM (#45959471)

      I'd like it to block noisy tabs, block metro 8 and block malware. Maybe I should just go back to lynx.

      This noisy tabs indicator has been running here for weeks.

      But basically I agree. I don't want to just Know about noisy tabs, I want the noise blocked by default
      until I decide I want to listen.

      So close, Google, but you are still protecting the advertisers at the expense of the users.
      Shut them UP.

      • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

        by dresgarcia ( 251585 )

        Its called adblock plus. Familiarize yourself and never go back.
        All this cry-baby complaining had me wondering why I don't notice "noisy ads" or, well, ads at all. I realized its because I never see them.

        https://adblockplus.org/

      • Blocking flash (or simply not installing it) achieves that goal.

        • by icebike ( 68054 )

          And I could not buy a computer at all.
          But there are places I want video. http://www.cnn.com/help/video.html#20 [cnn.com]
          Listen, I want it my way. My computer, my way.

          • Chrome/Chromium allows you to create a whitelist of sites that are allowed to use plugins. Flashblock for firefox does the same thing. Since very few ads use the audio or video tags, blocking flash effectively blocks noise.

        • I don't wanna have to block Flash, or java, or anything else. I just want them de-balled so they can't open popups (still happens), play audio ("I created this web site for the purpose of lightening your wallet with seductive patter."), or initiate a download without my permission, especially something ending in .exe, which someone managed to do to my Chrome browser just last week.

      • by borl ( 586949 )
        About the noisy tab indicator... It would be an far more useful if clicking the indicator presented a volume slider or at least muted the tab. As it is, if you want to continue reading the page sans noise, your options are exactly the same as they were before.
      • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

        So close, Google, but you are still protecting the advertisers at the expense of the users.
        Shut them UP.

        You realize that "protecting the advertisers" really means "protecting Google's revenue stream", right?

        Given Google's got a 95-98% marketshare on online advertising, that ad you're complaining about most likely has been served up by Google or one of the many ad networks they own. Yes, Google, the founder of "ethical" Google Ads, also serves up plenty of popup, popunder ,"rich" (aka noisy) ads, blinking ad

  • by fatgraham ( 307614 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:27PM (#45958939) Homepage

    Noisy tab identification makes up for killing reader. (almost)

    • by sunderland56 ( 621843 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:42PM (#45959115)

      Why just identify the noisy background tab? Is there a setting to say "only play audio from the visible tab"?

      And if you want evil: the "block malware" is presumably done by sending the name/location of the file you want to download to a google server, where it can be preserved forever and delivered to the government on request.... nice.

      • by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:29PM (#45959733)

        And if you want evil: the "block malware" is presumably done by sending the name/location of the file you want to download to a google server,

        Thats not even a remotely safe assumption. For years now Chrome has created temporary files called "Safe Browsing Bloom" under the profile, which are presumably databases of malicious URLs. They could easily do something similar for malicious files. Either way, its something you can easily turn of with one click of a checkbox, and its something that all browsers do-- but apparently Google is the only one who gets flak for it. Nice.

        where it can be preserved forever and delivered to the government on request.... nice.

        I get that some people dont like Google's core business (info gathering / advertising), but this is about the stupidest reason to be anti-google ever.
        They are the ONLY major search provider who fought against China's requests for data on dissident bloggers
        They are the ONLY ones who arent ambiguous about their own privacy policy (Im looking at you, Bing)
        And unlike almost any of the other major tech companies out there, they very frequently go to bat for user privacy and rights-- for example, refusing to provide US authorities user information without court-orders or warrants, providing info through the EFF's chilling effects pages on takedowns, and fighting lawsuits to indemnify users against patent trolls.

        If this isnt "biting the hand that feeds you", I dont know what is. Have fun with Bing, just hope you arent a dissident in some authoritarian country.

        • They are the ONLY ones who arent ambiguous about their own privacy policy (Im looking at you, Bing)

          I don't know if you've heard about DuckDuckGo, but --

      • by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:41PM (#45959925)

        I just did some research; No, they do not submit it to Google. From their docs:
        https://developers.google.com/safe-browsing/ [google.com]

        The Safe Browsing API is an experimental API that enables applications to download an encrypted table for local, client-side lookups of URLs that you would like to check. ...
        The Safe Browsing API v2 has the following advantages:
          * Better privacy: API users exchange data with the server using hashed URLs so the server never knows the actual URLs queried by the clients.

        And of course, you can actually see said database tables under your profile as files beginning,..
        "C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Safe Browsing*"
        And if you were truly paranoid and / or wanted to stop spreading FUD, you could wireshark your connections to confirm that they do not, in fact, send those URLs to google to block malware.

        • by chihowa ( 366380 ) *

          But they're comparing the hash that you send with the hash that they have generated from a list of malicious sites, right? So the server certainly knows which site you are visiting if it's on the "malicious" list. Which is good, because you want a YES or NO on whether the site is malicious.

          So the only thing that Google, indexer of the internet, needs in order to know all of the other sites you visit is a hash of every other URL on the internet. It is not at all unreasonable to assume that they have this, si

          • Theyre not comparing anything. Safebrowsing protocol has your computer download their database, and you do the comparison locally. The server never knows anything except that youre using safebrowsing.

            That sort of makes most of your post irrelevant.

            • by chihowa ( 366380 ) *

              In the post that I replied to you quote, "Better privacy: API users exchange data with the server using hashed URLs so the server never knows the actual URLs queried by the clients." This is specifically describing the Safe Browsing Lookup API, which does send hashed URLs to their servers.

              The link you provided says that, "The Safe Browsing Lookup API is a new experimental API that enables applications to simply look up URLs from our Safe Browsing service and get the state of URLs (e.g. phishing, malware) di

              • Yes, and that protocol has NOTHING to do with chrome. That is used by websites, if you read their usage examples.

                In fact, the SafeBrowsing2 protocol-- which I described-- specifically mentions that it is used by firefox and chrome.

                You can rightfully mention that the lookup protocol has privacy issues; in fact they specifically go over the privacy implications of that. But to criticize them for merely offering that service is a bit crazy, and its offtopic in a discussion on chrome because it is not used in

                • by chihowa ( 366380 ) *

                  Relax, please. I'm not criticizing your precious Google.

                  My post was only intended to "rightfully mention that the lookup protocol has privacy issues", which are not entirely explored in the docs. The Lookup API is certainly related to Chrome, because it will almost certainly be added to Chrome when they're happy with it (why else would they be developing it?).

                  Anyway, intentionally or not, you're the one who brought the Lookup API into this conversation.

      • by zlogic ( 892404 ) on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @02:35AM (#45962315)

        Background sound is a big thing for online radio and music players. What would be nice is an option to disallow sites from playing music until they're approved, kind of like Chrome does with webcam access.

    • Indeed. I get to uninstall a plugin tonight, and get to enjoy my memory footprint dropping accordingly.

  • Chrome 64 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:32PM (#45958985)

    How long until the 64-bit version is released?

    • Re:Chrome 64 (Score:5, Insightful)

      by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:38PM (#45959065) Homepage Journal

      How long until the 64-bit version is released?

      A more worthy question!

      The world continues to wait.

    • How long until the 64-bit version is released?

      "apt-cache show chromium-browser|grep ^Architecture:" says "amd64" for me.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by donaldm ( 919619 )

      How long until the 64-bit version is released?

      On my machine (Fedora 20):

      13:15:29 > file /opt/google/chrome/chrome
      /opt/google/chrome/chrome: ELF 64-bit LSB shared object, x86-64, version 1 (SYSV), dynamically linked (uses shared libs), for GNU/Linux 2.6.24, BuildID[sha1]=74ebd85bfc06b9bb44a2dac8f221edef5b09dbcc, stripped

      Been running 64 bit Chrome and Firefox for some years now. As for a 64bit Google Chrome running on a 64 bit Microsoft OS (you can't expect 64 bit binaries to run on a 32 bit OS) I can't say and really don't care.

  • by ackthpt ( 218170 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:37PM (#45959049) Homepage Journal

    When you can do a bunch of code to detect which tab has the auto-page refresh which brought up an auto-play blatherskite advertisement.

    • I just use flash block, nothing makes noise unless I let it.
      • this.

        flashblock and the other adblockers make 'nosy tabs' 100% unnecessary.

        all flash should be left dormant unless the user clicks on it. and that is exactly what flashblock does.

        I never have my sound card 'connected' to my browser anyway. if I want to play music, I'll unmute the sound output and re-bind it to audio. having a few diff sound devices also helps (the default built in audio is never connected and that's the 'live' audio connection as far as linux or windows is concerned. my real audio 'card

      • block plugins until clicked is a menu option in chrome
  • Only indicators? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by StripedCow ( 776465 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @07:41PM (#45959101)

    Besides an indicator, I'd expect a per-tab _mute_ button.

    • by ackthpt ( 218170 )

      Simply put, if the offending tab in the window, is not the one to the fore it should clam up.

      • by Anonymous Coward

        I'm not sure I agree. I like to have music running in a background tab in a window I don't necessarily have focused. However, I don't like having random videos/music start up just because I either start my browser or open a tab that I'll check at some point later. Nothing should auto-play unless I intend it to.

      • by gman003 ( 1693318 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:39PM (#45959911)

        I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.

        • Not really. Mute background tabs by default (with a mute icon already "clicked") on the tab, then you can click it if you want sound from that tab if it is in the background. If you don't like it on the actual tab, put it next to the bookmarks/download/home icons
          • That could work, but I think that might still be too extreme a break in what the user expects. Unmuted by default should probably be the default, for now at least.

            Or perhaps it could default to muted unless you do something to trigger the sound (pushing "play" on a video, for instance). That would cut out the annoying autoplay ads, at least.

          • by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            Not really. Mute background tabs by default (with a mute icon already "clicked") on the tab, then you can click it if you want sound from that tab if it is in the background. If you don't like it on the actual tab, put it next to the bookmarks/download/home icons

            Except Safari on Mac used to do something similar. In an effort to save CPU cycles and give a better user experience, when a tab was idle, Safari stopped running plugins.

            It lasted for all of a few months because feedback was immediate - people were

          • by Megol ( 3135005 )
            You are assuming that your preference is the common one. It isn't mine and it sure isn't for all normal people I've interacted with (judging by use patterns).
          • There's enough people using browser based music players (Google Music, Amazon) or podcasts that this is just too much of a hassle. Honestly I legitimately listen to something from a background tab far more frequently than random stuff starts playing and that's the case for more and more people as applications become more web based.

            I'll agree that it should be a configurable option, but the default should be to play with the option to mute.

        • by Rich0 ( 548339 )

          I see a lot of people playing music in a Youtube (or whatever) tab while doing other things in the other tabs. Automatically muting any background tabs will break that usage.

          Yup - I know somebody who went nuts over the fact that he couldn't get his Android tablet to do that no matter what. There was what amounted to a podcast in video form that he wanted to listen to, and the video was superfluous. He wanted to still do other things on the tablet while it was playing. It was impossible, because he couldn't find an app that would let you play a video in the background.

          Granted, this was a few years ago - perhaps the situation has changed since. I haven't gone looking for vide

  • The noise indicators are nice, I would have preferred a small control to stop playing, stop recording.

  • How are they automatically blocking malware without submitting every link you try and download from to Google's servers first?

    I personally turn off all the intrusive features I find on any browser and this seems like another one.

    • Re:Automatic? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by LordLimecat ( 1103839 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:35PM (#45959845)

      Id imagine they download the file into "C:\Users\[USER]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Safe Browsing Download" like theyve done with the rest of their safe-browsing features for the last 5 years.

      But hey-- why be informed when you can complain about issues that dont exist?

  • If you're a user of startpage.com (google-based search that doesn't track you), you'll no longer be able to use the "POST vs GET" option, which I believe is the default, and which keeps websites from tracking your search terms.

    For whatever reason, chrome 32 with POST vs GET will cause startpage searches to redirect back to the startpage.com home page with no results.

    To use the previous version of chrome on Windows, look in your %APPDATA%/Local/Google directory. There should be an old_chrome.exe that you ca

    • by icebike ( 68054 )

      So how is startpage.com (acting like a proxy and therefore tracking you any better than Google tracking ?

      I know what Google is going to do with the tracking.
      I have no idea what startpage might do. Their Privacy policy is no more impressive then Google's.

      There is also http://www.epicbrowser.com/ [epicbrowser.com] they beat google with google's own stick. (they support either a direct mode or a proxy mode, and you can switch with one click).

    • by Anonymous Coward

      Websites? The only website that can see your POST/GET request is the one you send the request to. Although if you mean intermediate network devices, then both GET and POST are equally visible to anyone who is in position to intercept your network traffic.

      Of course, this only applies if you aren't visiting an encrypted page. HTTPS completely obfuscates all headers and content, including the request path.

      • It's a referer thing.

        If you use GET, the search query is in the URL, thus when you click a link on the result page, the website can get the search query from the referer header (at least in typically-configured browsers -- naturally if you turn off referer sending, this doesn't happen). If you use POST, the search query is in a field, thus it's not available via the referer header.

  • PLEASE let me have the options of deciding how long I want cookies saved for. Firefox has an "Ask me everytime" options for cookies - I want and need it. Chrome for some reason still doesn't have that (to the best of my knowledge - I check from time to time after updates).

    Haven't been able to find any plugins that add that functionality, either.

    I really want to switch to Chrome. It's so much zippier that Firefox. But not without my per-session cookie settings...

    • by Kelson ( 129150 )

      Do you actually need that question *every* time, or do you just want to build a list of sites that are allowed to persist cookies and let the rest drop off at the end of your browsing session?

      Chrome doesn't have the ask-every-time option, but you can set it to only keep cookies until you close your browser, then add exceptions for the sites you want to persist. It's a bit clunkier to build up the list, but unless you're adding to it frequently, once you have the list it'll just stay out of your way and wor

      • by Jethro ( 14165 )

        It's a heck of a lot clunkier, so yeah, I'd prefer to be prompted every time. Especially since that's how I set it up for less technologically inclined people, and I can't really put them in charge of whitelisting stuff...

      • "keep cookies until you close your browser" means you can't elect to keep a cookie. I for one don't want to type in my Slashdot login every time, yet I don't want to allow 95% of sites to set permanent cookies. In Firefox, you can do it (clunkily) even with no extensions, or comfortably (defaulting to session cookies) with Cookie Monster.

        Chrome has no equivalent for this functionality, with or without extensions.

  • by Megawatt-hour ( 9425 ) on Tuesday January 14, 2014 @08:09PM (#45959473)
    You know those little arrow buttons at each end of the scroll bar? The ones that scroll the content one line at a time? Gone as of Chrome 32. Anyone else think this is a terrible idea? Bug report here [google.com].
    • You could just use the arrow keys to go up and down one line at a time...

      • by Anonymous Coward

        http://xkcd.com/1172/

      • I hope the thumbwheel is still there (the little drag rectangle in the scrollbar you grab with the mouse and drag up and down). I like to make parts of certain pictures as big as possible to barely fit onscreen, and I need that to fine-control the vertical and horizontal alignments for maximum aesthetic appreciation.

    • by RyoShin ( 610051 )

      Not only did they remove them, but in the process they broke much of the scrolling functionality for some users: https://code.google.com/p/chro... [google.com]

      I've received at least one complain from a user of our small company website, then found out that a few of our office folks were having the same problem (they primarily use Chrome, I primarily use FireFox.) It was double fun because I have auto-updating turned off for Chrome and, when I went to update, I wasn't affected by the issue so I had to find someone else's

  • Does Chrome still spawn a new instance of itself for every tab you have open and every extension you have running? I like Chrome and I use it, but I upped my system to 12GB ram in order to use it to the extent that I need to. I realize that they do this so if one tab crashes, it doesn't take down the whole system. But the only thing that makes Chrome unstable in the first place is this behavior. Don't believe me? run this command:

    ps -eo pmem,comm | grep chrome | cut -d " " -f 2 | paste -sd+ | bc

    Now start
    • Because all other browsers are furiously trying to implement the exact same thing because its a zillion times better for stability. It does increase memory usage, but do keep in mind that a lot of the memory usage is due to the sheer complexity of pages today. If you compared memory usages for X tabs across browsers, I think youd find that they were roughly the same-- perhaps one would be higher or lower, but generally in the same ballpark.

      • by wjcofkc ( 964165 )

        but generally in the same ballpark.

        Not remotely. But I still use Chrome due to its advantages for my work. Hence the 12GB of memory. And yes, I have compared them all.

    • This is an unfortunate result of the sandboxing. This is really "the big trade off" between firefox and chrome beside all the little things. Do you want memory usage or sandboxing?

      Its pretty rare that I find Chrome with 5+ tabs using less than about 1GB of ram. I have an image somewhere in which when firefox is prompting to close 157 tabs, it is using ~1.5GB.

      • by wjcofkc ( 964165 )
        I have hit 10GB of memory usage with Chrome. I use it due to its many advantages for my work, but before I upped my RAM to 12GB Chrome would elegantly crash once it started scraping swap space. The logic behind the trade-off needs further consideration. Regardless, I still use it.
  • by RR ( 64484 ) on Wednesday January 15, 2014 @12:18AM (#45961557)

    I had been using Chrome in Metro mode, because I wanted to have experience in Metro, and I had to go back to desktop with this release.

    The new Metro mode doesn't integrate well with the rest of Windows 8. It doesn't resize with Snap View, so you have to keep it full-screen. It adds an app switcher bar, but the bar only switches between Chrome apps, which I generally don't use. It has an app launcher button, but if you use a mouse then the Windows Start button appears and overlaps it.

    Furthermore, the latest version of Chrome crashes more. So, I not only have to be in desktop, but I have to be in Firefox. Sometimes I wonder if the Chrome team runs their own product on Windows.

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