If you ever share a computer with a friend or family member, you’ve probably experienced the challenge of remembering who is logged in to accounts on Google or other services. User’s of Google’s excellent Chrome browser will be happy to hear that now in the works is a simple feature that will allow multiple browser windows to run different Google Profiles with a simple click of a button.

The feature is not yet available but was spotted in developer documentation and first reported on by the watchdog blog Google Operating System. While this might seem like a simple matter of convenience, it also represents the convergence of a number of other trends in online computing.

Above, a mock-up of how the Mac version of Chrome might display which account is running in a particular window. New browser windows will use the same account that the last active window was using, and all browser extensions will be common across all windows regardless of account.

Incidentally, speaking from one ad-supported company to another, it’s hard not to notice that there’s Ad Block Plus running in the mock-up screenshot of this browser. Thanks, Google.

What it All Means

Computing in the cloud. The browser as a key to identity. Personalization of the computing experience. Those are the kinds of things we see here and in many other developments on the web, to put this news in context.

It would be great to see different browser window identities entirely partitioned off from each other, with different sets of cookies, so that you could run different accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other services at the same time too.

Consider this in conjunction with Chrome’s plan to experiment with predictive background tab preloading for “wicked fast navigation” and I think you’ll agree – the world of the browser looks to be very different in the future.

What’s Google’s economic incentive to develop features like this? The nicer it is to browse, the more you’ll do it, and the more you browse – the more ads you’ll see. That’s not the whole story, but it is the part that pays the bills.

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TechCruch just posted about the news that Adobe and Google are going to be collaborating a bit around Chrome and the Flash Player. The basic gist is that Chrome will start integrating the Flash Player directly into the browser so that users will always have the most up to date versions and anyone who downloads Chrome won’t need to also install the Flash Player. I think that’s good, but the much bigger news in my opinion, is that we’re working with Chrome and Mozilla to revamp the plugin architecture. This has huge implications.

We’ve been using an old-school plugin model for a long time. In fact NPAPI, the plugin interface, stands for Netscape Plugin Application Programming Interface. And as the Wikipedia entry states, it’s so sucessful because it’s so simple. The API basically lets plugins associate themselves with a content type (like a SWF file) and then puts that plugin in charge of all the rendering. There’s not a lot of integration between the plugin and the content in the browser which means the plugin lives in its own little world and it’s tough to break out. You can do things like ExternalInterface but it’s still pretty hacky.

But under this new plug-in, we’ll have much closer integration at the browser level. There’s a great summary of what this means at the Chromium blog:

Improving the traditional browser plug-in model will make it possible for plug-ins to be just as fast, stable, and secure as the browser’s HTML and JavaScript engines. Over time this will enable HTML, Flash, and other plug-ins to be used together more seamlessly in rendering and scripting.

Think better access to the hardware APIs via this new plug-in model, better access to the DOM, and a generally much better, more stable experience. The Flash Player in the browser has always felt a little like a black box largely because ofthe constraints in the plugin model. Certain things didn’t work quite as you’d expect in a regular HTML site. Hopefully this changes that. In theory this could make it possible to use the save-password feature with your Flex/Flash apps, or make Flash SEO a lot easier, and it allows us to innovate around HTML-Flash integration. If you’ve used AIR, you’ve seen what’s possible when you have complete control over both technologies. This new plugin work makes that easier to do across all browsers that support it. I don’t know when/if we’ll see it, but it’s easier now.

Another benefit is that the API is going to be OS and Browser neutral so you won’t see such wildly different performance on different platforms. The hooks that we can use to make the browsing experience better will work across all of the browsers that support the new plugin across all of the operating systems.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Google just launched a new stable version of Google Chrome, the company’s increasingly popular browser, which introduces a number of new features and more advanced privacy controls. Chrome will now automatically detect the language of any site you surf to and offer you to translate the text for you. In addition, Google also added granular privacy controls to Chrome that allow you to turn off cookies and JavaScript on a site-by-site basis. For now, these new features are only available in the Windows version of Chrome.

Read 52 Languages

Starting today, anybody who uses the stable release of Chrome on Windows will see a little bar appear at the top of the window whenever the browser loads a page that features a language that is not the default language of your browser install. Google Chrome uses the technology behind Google Translate to automatically detect and translate 52 languages. Chrome also gives you the ability to selectively turn this feature off for those languages you don’t need it for.

One interesting aspect of this technology is that the language detection happens in the browser, while the translation itself happens on Google’s servers. As with all automatic translation algorithms, Google Translate is prone to errors, but it more than good enough to easily get the basic gist of a new article or blog post.

Better Privacy Controls

In addition to the new translation feature, the new stable release of Chrome also includes a number of new privacy controls. Through the new “Content Settings” option, Chrome users on Windows can manage how they want Google to handle pop-ups, plug-ins, cookies, images and JavaScript code. These new settings, for example, allow you to easily block cookies from some sites. It remains to be seen, however, if mainstream users will be able to understand these relatively complicated controls.

What About the Mac and Linux?

With multiple release channels and different schedules for every platform, keeping track of Chrome isn’t easy. While these new features aren’t available for Mac and Linux users yet, it’s likely only a matter of time before we will see them on non-Windows platforms. For the time being, Mac users on the dev channel should make sure that they have updated to the latest version of Chrome, which finally brings a usable bookmarks manager to the OSX version of Google Chrome.

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