HitChrome

Google is actively expanding the functionality of its open source Chrome browser, which launched earlier this year. The latest features under active development are made available through the developer update channel prior to public release.

The latest developer channel builds include a full bookmark manager with a built-in search feature and support for organizing bookmarks into nested folders. I tested this feature by importing my Firefox bookmarks. The new bookmark manager appears to be loosely modeled after the one in Firefox. Like the rest of Chrome, it is still relatively minimalistic but it gets the job done. The sidebar displays the expandable folder heirarchy and the main pane shows a list of all of the bookmarks in the selected folder. Unlike Firefox, Chrome’s bookmark manager does not have an editing panel. You can modify a bookmark through the bookmark manager by right-clicking and selecting edit.

Chrome users who want to help test and get an early look at new improvements can use the Chrome channel chooser to select the developer channel. Instructions on how to do this are available at the Chromium documentation web site. For more information about the latest features and bugs, see the developer release at the Chrome release blog. Keep in mind that the developer channel versions are unstable testing builds and aren’t intended to be as robust as official releases.

Google’s ironically named Chrome browser, which launched last month, advanced the notion that browsers ought to be neither seen nor heard. Like operating systems, they should sit obediently in the background and make sure that the applications on top of them run quickly, reliably and safely.

Flock took the opposite approach, insisting that the browser should provide a lot of upfront functionality on its own, not fade out of sight. Tonight’s Flock 2.0 release - brings the Mozilla-based browser up-to-speed with Firefox 3 technology and adds new support for MySpace and media RSS - reasserts this notion by giving the browser an even higher level of visibility than before.

Flock 2.0 has taken advantage of media RSS, a standard developed by Yahoo that syndicates rich content like photos and videos much like regular RSS syndicates blog posts. Now Flock users can add media RSS feeds to their My World start pages from any website that provides them, such as 12seconds.tv and Qik. VP of Marketing and Business Development Dan Burkhart describes media RSS as the quickest way for small to medium sized startups to integrate with Flock. Read the rest of this entry »

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I don’t blame them to feel that way, what do you think folks? Your turn to talk., come on let’s talk…