Chromium 15.0.860.0

Chromium is an open source web browser that was designed in order to provide for all users a safer, faster and more stable way to experience the web. In the long term, we think of Chromium as a tabbed window manager or shell for the web rather than a browser application. We avoid putting things into our UI in the same way you would hope that Apple and Microsoft would avoid putting things into the standard window frames of applications on their operating systems. The tab is our equivalent of a desktop application’s title bar; the frame containing the tabs is a convenient mechanism for managing groups of those applications. In future, there may be other tab types that do not host the normal browser toolbar. Enhanced functionality through HTML 5: offline modes, background processing, notifications, and more. Better access points and discovery: On Chromium-based browsers, we’ve addressed the access point issue by allowing applications to install shortcuts on your desktop. While the tab bar is sufficient to access existing tabs, we are creating a new primary access point that provides a list of frequently used applications and tools. Search as a primary form of navigation Chromium’s address bar and the Quick Search Box have simplified the way you access personal content and the web. While we’re not a natively-themed application, we do wish to fit within the operating system so that our app doesn’t look out of place. This affects our choices of: – interface icons (Vista makes frequent use of a certain back/forward icon style) – color – perceived depth, thickness – border shape, width and styling – font choice – blurriness – Windows tends to be more bitmappy than OS X, preferring to align everything along pixel boundaries Single-word searches are hard for us to distinguish from single-word URLs – previous solutions have relied on synchronous DNS lookups to figure out if a user was typing a single-word URL, but such lookups add an unreasonable overhead to the search experience and don’t always lead to an expected result. For example, if you wish to look up what ‘localhost’ means, but you have a local webserver running, the result can be infuriating. In Chromium, we decided that consistency and speed was best, and given that the range of ‘single-word inputs meant as searches’ dwarfs the number of ‘single-word inputs meant as URLs’, we default to displaying web search results while doing a background DNS lookup to figure out if a local host exists – if it does, we display a “Did you mean https://input/”