Google Chrome : Lighter, Faster and Great Extensions/Plugins

Google Chrome is a Web Browser developed by Google and released in Sept '08.

It was released at a time when Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer made up more than 90% of the market share. Still Google Chrome went on to become a huge success and is currently the third largest web browser in the world.



For people who have not downloaded Google Chrome yet, you can do it from here.

This is how Tech-Keeda look on Chrome.

Once you install Chrome and run it for the first time, the first thing that you will notice is that its incredibly light and amazingly fast. I for once was a die-hard Mozilla Firefox user until I checked Chrome out. Although Firefox is fast, but its not a match for Chrome.

After using Firefox for some time, the general complaint that people have is that it takes too long for Firefox to start up initially. Well, If your one of them, then try opening Chrome even when you have a lot of applications going on in the background, I bet you will be amazed to see how fast it opens.

OK enough of me going on and on about how fast Chrome is, lets now talk about the other thing about Chrome that I liked.

Google Extensions also known as Plugins is another great thing about Chrome. Google Plugins are basically extensions or small in built apps that you can install on your Chrome interface to enhance your browsing experience.

Google offers a wide array of plugins that users can download like Twitter, URL shortener's, Translate and many other useful apps. These apps are really wonderful and what is more wonderful about them is that they can also be developed by third party people.

Once you have Google Chrome running on your system, you can install plugins for Chrome here.

These plugins have practically no noticeable impact on Chrome's speed. Google has made a portion of Chromes source code available to developers so that they can also develop apps and plugins for Chrome. By making Chrome open source, Google also got the opportunity to make Chrome available to Mac users with the help of the open source community.

By my normal standards, this post has gotten a bit long. But still I thought it was important to write about Chrome as I write for complete non-geeks/non-techie people and many may not be knowing the potential of the Google Chrome browser. I try to make my posts as simple as possible to read and comprehend.

Enough of bragging about my self, do check my next post.

Google Nexus S Finally Comes to India

The Nexus S has finally arrived in India. This phone is considered to be one of the best android phones available in the market and its finally here.

The phone's manufactured by Samsung and runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread. Unlike the ones sold outside India, Samsung has decided to give the device a Super LCD screen rather than a Super AMOLED one.  The phone has a 4 inch display.

Now coming to the pricing, which is very essential for any phone to succeed in India. At FlipKart the Google Nexus S can be purchased for Rs 27,999 and at Infibeam for Rs 26,999.

The pricing seems to be OK for a phone that comes with such a good reputation. But I do think that it will come down to a shave above Rs 20,000.

I will be doing a detailed review of The Google Nexus S in my coming posts. This blog is basically India specific so I usually review devices that are or will be launched in India.

Now users can block certain websites from their Google search results

Google in its effort to remove unwanted pages from your search results has ushered in a new update to its search engine.

Now users will have the choice to block a page permanently from their search results. When people click on search results, they many-a-times find the page of no use and it contains irrelevant matter not related to their search, now users will have the choice to block such pages from their results page there after.

This move comes as another hit to 'content farms' which Google has been trying to remove from their search results.

When you visit a link on the results page and come back to the results page, there will be a small option next to the cached option saying 'block all xyz.com results'.

However it is still not clear as to what effect this will have on a website's Google Page Rank. Meanwhile the folks at Google have said that they may consider this as an option after seeing the data that's generated after some time.

Currently this new feature has been rolled out only on google.com in English people using Chrome 9+, IE8+ and Firefox 3.5+.

Click on the image below to have a look at this new feature.

Google Doodle on 100th anniversary of International Women's Day

Google is honouring women on the ocassion of International Womens Day in its own unique way.

Google has put up a Doodle to celebrate the 100th anniversary of International Women's Day. The Doodle highlights all events organised by Google last month in collaboration with Women for Women International: Join me on the Bridge Campaign. In this campaign, men and women from 50 countries will gather on nearly 300 bridges to celebrate womens achievments.

Finally a stable version of Chrome is out !!!

Google today finally launched a stable version of its popular web browser, Chrome. After releasing 10 beta versions of Chrome(The latest being early this year),the company has released a stable version.

The company claims that Chrome boosts speed by a considerable 66%. The browser also has a much simpler settings interface and a whole lot of other features.

You can download the stable version from here.

Do check the new Chrome Video.

Google's new 404 error page

Google has finally changed over to a new generic 404 error page.

Check this Google's new 404 error page

Google Glitch causes 150,000 gmail accounts to be deleted

150,000 Gmail accounts have been disabled by a glitch in the Google System. People woke up in the morning to a rude shock, their gmail id was no more. All attachments and even chat history erased. According to Google - "less than 0.08%” of all Gmail users were affected by the bug, which completely reset accounts, even down to the detail offering a welcome message to those users when they first logged on today"

Just to check whether your not one of the 0.08% users, log into you account right away(but do come back :p). So what's the way forward for these 0.08% people who have lost their online address. Well according to Google - "Google engineers are working to restore full access. Affected users may be temporarily unable to sign in while we repair their accounts.”

Many people have also complained to Google about missing emails, attachments. Some of their earlier emails have also gone missing. The engineers at Google are surely having a hard time restoring everything back to normal.

To save your self from the horror of having to wake up some day and find that all those important conversations of your have been wiped out by a silly bug, I would advice you to backup your Gmail right now.

Google Social Search

Google social search is one of the many new services provided by Google which people hardly take note of. With Google Social Search, one can find relevant content from your social connections. For the layman this means that if you’re logged into your Gmail account and then you search for something on Google, you will get results that will highlight relevant content by people from your social connections.

Lets say you search for a review on that latest cell phone you intend to buy and you of course would Google it, and you find that there’s a review by your dear friend on that same phone that you want to buy. Now this would be really helpful as nothing is better than the experience of someone you know.

I strongly believe if Google pursues with this so called experimental service, it will prove to be a great prospect for them in the future. Just to clarify, Social connections mean some one from your contacts attached to your Gmail id or someone from social sites like Twitter. You can also change who is part of your social settings.