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Archive for the ‘Chrome Developer’ Category

It was inevitable that Google would eventually release its own web browser, but the steadily-growing success of Google Chrome took even the staunchest advocates by surprise. With more than 12% of internet users now using Chrome, it has obviously become the browser of choice for many power users. As a result, a number of extremely useful plug-ins have been created for Chrome, including many which are highly relevant to SEO professionals. What follows is a sampling of the most useful.

Chrome SEO

Without a doubt the most comprehensive SEO tool available for Google Chrome, Chrome SEO offers a number of features that help speed up the process of SEO. Chrome SEO has some innovative features, such as highlighting all no-follow links on a page, allowing webmasters to quickly and easily see whether sites they link to are linking back.

Chrome SEO also has easy access to cached versions of a webpage; full domain information including Whois, IP, DNS, etc.; number of pages indexed on a site; traffic and rankings on major engines; a robust keyword research tool; social bookmarking data; and backlinks from a page. Chrome SEO makes use of Ask, Bing, Alexa, Digg, Dmoz, Google, StumbleUpon, Technorati, Yahoo, and more, making it one of the most comprehensive suites for any browser.

Best of all, as with many Google Chrome Extensions, Chrome SEO is constantly being updated. New features are added every few weeks, and the developer is highly receptive to feedback from the SEO community, making it likely this extension will remain relevant for some time to come.

Meta SEO Inspector

A highly-functional, very usable tool for displaying meta information, the Meta SEO Inspector is seamless and can greatly speed up analyzing pages for SEO. The extension shows things such as the head title, meta tags, XFN tags, microformats, no-follow links, scripts, and other crucial information. Although being able to see this information all in one place is very useful, the Meta SEO Inspector’s best feature is its warning system: if tags are too short or too long, or if tags are improperly formatted, it throws up a red flag. This helps webmasters ensure their meta data is all optimized for Google, increasing search engine relevance with a minimum of time investment.

Link Grabber

Although not explicitly an SEO tool, Link Grabber is one of the fastest, most usable Google Chrome extensions that webmasters will likely find themselves using for SEO. The extension simply takes every single link on a page, opens a new tab, and generates a page with a list of all of the links on it. It’s an incredibly fast way to see how many links a page has, and to see where they lead.

SEO Quake

This is an extension for Google Chrome that any SEO-driven webmaster who was also a Firefox user will be well acquainted with. SEO Quake is one of the most popular SEO extensions for Firefox, and its Chrome version replicates all of its many features. A top bar includes a wealth of SEO data, including no-follow links, Google PageRank, inbound links, Alexa rank, page age, link density, and more.

One exciting development to come out of Google’s recent announcement of their Chrome OS has been the support for Trusted Computing through the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) chip built into the specification from the ground up, but first, a slight aside. There are two operating systems, Chrome OS and Chromium OS, both of which support TPM, and both are basically identical, mirroring the similar Google’s Chrome and Chromium web browsers. The Chrome version is Google’s own branded version, the Chromium is the Open Source public release, but both in theory use the same code base. From here on I will use the more familiar Chrome term, although the applicable version of the browser and operating system is Chromium.

What does Chrome OS and TPM give us?
Trusted Computing, and the TPM, has a really poor image amongst Open Source fans, many of whom love Google, so support for a TPM in their new operating system induces a bit of cognitive dissonance. Do not worry, however, Google Do No Evil, and this philosophy is reflected in their approach. First, support for a TPM is only an option, although since Chromium is Open Source, any vendor can make the TPM mandatory. Next, if a TPM were to be present, the role described follows the Trusted Computing Group’s suggested method of implementing a Trusted Boot, a method that produces nothing more than just a trusted boot log through the use of trusted registers on the TPM.

This means that client applications, and remote servers, can attest to the state of the device and be able to tell if it booted into a known trusted state. Although from one point of view one might throw up one’s hands in horror at third parties checking out the configuration of the TPM and thus one’s operating system, the benefit is for banking applications, for instance, where the bank can query your TPM for the Chrome OS state, and if it decides it is an unknown, thus potentially insecure due to the possibility of spy software on the device, refuse you access to your banking details.

What does Chrome OS and TPM NOT give us?
A TPM does NOT prevent you hacking your device; Google from the get-go recognised that people will want to install not just their own operating system on the device, but also the firmware, so they have provided methods that allow the device to start up under these circumstances too. As the TPM is always a passive chip, there is no way that it can detect an unexpected operating system or firmware and prevent booting, despite what TPM detractors claim.

Indeed, if you have an enlightened bank and can convince them you know what you are doing, they might even offer a way to allow you to register a known-good system state based on your own personal software configuration, thus as described in the previous section, the bank could attest to your own personal TPM plus system configuration, thus accepting your own private device set-up, but detecting anomalies to that personalised configuration.

But why would I want a TPM watching over me?
In most homes there are probably two distinct classes of internet-connectable devices. The first is computers, the second home electronics like televisions or games machines. For private-use computers, TPMs are a bit of a hard sell, but for home electronics, you just want to switch on and have them work; the average user is not interested in anything other than the bog-standard out-of-the-box PlayStation. A device based on Google’s new OS falls more into the second category; you (with you being the average user, not you the leet haxx0r) just want it to work.

However, the internet is a big bad world, and full-time surfing can expose one to all kinds of potentially dangerous content that can infect one’s equipment. By adding a TPM into the mix, you as the user have an extra guarantee that the device is still in a secure and trusted mode. For example, after boot-up the Chrome OS-based device could query the TPM state and use that information to decrypt a message to display at login time, so if you saw a garbled message you could know the device is not in the expected state, then take measures to fix the problem.

Similarly, services you access can also query the state of the TPM within the operating system, and if the state is not recognised, take action to prevent illegal or invalid access.

Finally, since every TPM may have a unique identity, if your device is stolen, there may be systems in place to blacklist particular devices. A blacklisted device may be refused access to certain services, and (note the following is not a function of the TPM, but may be added by developers to an operating system featuring a TPM) then commanded to delete personally-identifiable data on disk or even within the TPM, or even more drastically, have a kill switch flicked, although that is not a very error-tolerant option!

Thus, with the TPM one can build a secure, trustworthy, user-friendly device that just works, like televisions and video recorders just work, thus if you are looking to get a Chrome OS-based tablet, picture frame, notebook computer, or whatever form-factor that appears, be sure to ask the vendor if there is a TPM within the device.

The evolution of smartphone technology has spurred on a change in the way websites and the virtual world work, from the core elements in building these websites to the final appearance and usability to the end user. The development of html5 hasn’t been an immediate one, and there is still a long road ahead before the resulting website experience is a smooth one, but this new technology holds many potential and real benefits which can be fully realized with even the simplest websites hosted personal and commercial web hosting.

Recently in the news, popular indie rock band Arcade Fire released “We Used To Wait”, with a new approach to creating a web-based music video. The project included a customizable series of enhanced videos that collate themselves on the screen at different timed intervals during the accompanying song, and a chance for viewers to watch Google Street View images of the place they grew up as a child.

All of the footage is displayed using the latest html5 technology in the Google Chrome web browser, and gives viewers a glance at just a few of the vast possibilities with HTML5 technology. Up until the launch of the first waves of HTML5 and Google Chrome, website developers have relied on Flash, and other slow-loading tools to embed media in their websites. The result is often disappointing, with a lack of cross-browser support, navigational issues for site visitors and problems in playback.

Flash is also limited in its supporting handsets, notably in the iPhone and iPad collection, where users get no support for Flash at all. A site hosted on any good hosting site could avoid these problems by having simple html5 code written into the script that allows the user to display video and other media without using troubled Flash plugins. Updating a website to utilize the benefits of HTML5 and Google Chrome is as simple as the user demands it to be. Embedding a video using html5 is as simple as copy and pasting a section of code into a portion of the existing information in the code files of the website, and other tasks that require a little more time and effort are well-supported across the web with an abundance of free tutorials and help forums. Getting to know these tutorials could see the website in question improving in accessibility, media playback and even offline storage – a function that allows a web user to draft emails or use Google Docs while offline and sync back up seamlessly when the computer returns back online.