Over the past couple of days I’ve been using a browser plugin called ChunkIt. I wish I had this plugin when I was looking for a new apartment using Craigslist.

Basically what ChunkIt does is go into search results and pulls out content from inside the results so you can scan one page with item title and a good bit of important content before making a decision on which result to jump to. On Craigslist all you see is a long list of links - when searching for an apartment in NYC this list is worthless. The brokers know what lies to put into the title to get you to click. But if you could pull back bits of content based on your search and then decide, it could save a good deal of time.

ChunkIt works with all of the major search engines. The company calls it “x-ray vision” since you can see behind the links before making the jump.

You need a large monitor with a good resolution for ChunkIt to be effective. On my 19" monitor I found it to be ok but not great.

This week they launched a "store" option which allows you to chunk results from online shopping stores including Amazon, BestBuy and Target. I assume this is how they will generate revenue - by grabbing the affiliate revenue from any purchases made through the bar. 

ChunkIt launched last April. Initial reviews included Erick Schonfeld and Phil Bradley who didn’t see much value, Anthony Ha said it was worth trying, and Greg Sterling was neutral on the plugin.

Here’s the company’s video demo on the new store feature:

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If you’re scared to install the mobile version of Firefox, which is now available as an early developer alpha, and works (well) only on the Nokia N800 and N810, you can check out a very detailed video presentation of its features.

What’s there to see? Some of the interesting features included in this alpha are bookmarking and tagging, the inclusion of Firefox’ awesome bar (its awesomeness still being the subject of discussion), tabbed browsing, easy search, zooming, password management, popup blocking, and an easy way to clear private data. It looks good, although it’s a very early version; let’s hope that support for more devices (hint: G1) will come soon.

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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…if you have a Nokia N800 or N810, that is. That’s right, the mobile version of Firefox (which would have had a far greater impact had it come before the advent of mobile Safari) is now available as an early developer alpha (v.1.0a1), works (well) only on the aforementioned Nokias, and goes by the name of Fennec. If you’re the curious kind, there are versions for Linux, Max OS X and Windows, so you can test out those too; installation instructions and release notes are available over at the official site.

What’s there to see? Some of the interesting features included in this alpha are bookmarking and tagging, the inclusion of Firefox’ awesome bar (its awesomeness still being the subject of discussion), tabbed browsing, easy search, zooming, password management, popup blocking, and an easy way to clear private data. It doesn’t sound bad at all; still, it’s an early alpha version; I recommend you save yourself the trouble of installation and check out the presentation in the video below.

Fennec Alpha Walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

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Flock has announced that they have moved the 2.0 version of their social browser into full public release tonight. Flock initially launched the 2.0 browser in beta back in June. Since then they have added a variety of customized installations including German and fashion versions.

The major updates in the Flock 2.0 release include MySpace integration, Media RSS accessibility. The company also notes that the new version is based on Firefox 3 and has a host of improvements and users should find memory management much improved over the 1.0 release.

Flock CMO Dan Burkhart took me through the new version last week and shared some download stats. To-date there has been 6 million downloads and 3.6 million of the total are from the 1.0 release. I asked Dan who is their target user and he replied that the target user utilizes 2 or more social services and if you do use 2 or more, you will see a benefit by using Flock.

Dan and I also discussed the ad downturn that might be approaching and he noted that the current Flock monetization is double the plan numbers. He also pointed to their Series D raise from 2 months ago of $15 million.

The big push for the company now is the college market. Dan says that the college market could prove very beneficial for Flock as most students are using multiple social services.

I’ve been using the Flock version launching tonight for the last week and I see a performance improvement over the prior versions. Although on my Pentium 4 desktop, I still find it lags behind IE and FF in load times and certainly behind Chrome. Flock reminds me of a new couch. At first it’s hard and a bit uncomfortable but after you sit on it a few times, you find the sweet spot and life is grand. Flock requires a lot of setup but once it’s customized to your needs, it works well. The key for Flock is figuring out how to get users to their sweet spot as quick as possible.

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The “green” incarnation of travel, called ecotourism, mandates that travelers minimize cultural, economic, and environmental impacts as much as possible to promote sustainability. But while there are thousands of hotels worldwide that promote themselves as “green”, many of them are only partially fulfilling these requirements - they might not be wasting energy, but are paying locals at near-slave wages, or funneling money out of the local economy.

Whole Travel, a new site that launches tonight, is looking to keep these hotels honest while promoting the concept of sustainable travel. The site assigns each hotel with a score based on its environmental, cultural, and economic impacts, as well as its “customer interaction”, or how well it teaches visitors about the issues that affect their destination.Source:TechCrunch

eBay launched a new browser extension tool today that lets you highlight different products in Firefox or Internet Explorer and compare the pricing of those products on eBay. The tool also includes Skype functionality, which will let you click on a number in your browser and call it directly via Skype.

Dubbed Browser Highlighter, eBay’s latest tool will run only on Windows machines for now, but will eventually be rolled out for Macs and Apple’s Safari browser in the coming weeks.

After installing Browser Highlighter, a small icon is placed to the right of the address bar in Firefox or Internet Explorer. When you click the icon, you have the option of turning the “Compare on eBay” function, as well as the “Skype Phone Number Recognition” tool on or off. When either one or both are turned on, the information you search for in the browser becomes an interactive space to compare the price of products on eBay or make phone calls with Skype.

I didn’t expect this. I fired up Google’s Web browser, Chrome, expecting very little except a stripped down early beta with a plethora of bugs. After playing with it for a while, it’s too early to say that I’m blown away, but I must admit that I’ve stumbled onto some impressive feats which show that the team that built Chrome was intelligent, mature and forward-thinking. Here they are, in no particular order.

1. Blazing fast

Chrome actually uses WebKit for rendering Web pages, the same rendering engine as Safari, which is known to be very fast. Put that in a simple, well optimized, stripped down shell and you get the fastest Web browser around. It loads fast, it displays pages fast, and we’re talking noticeable differences here, which really makes it a joy to use. Don’t just take my word for it, check out some early benchmarks.

2. Chews code like there’s no tomorrow

This one goes hand in hand with being fast, but it’s a little different. Today, it’s not all that important for a browser to render a lot of HTML quickly; browsers are now platforms in which you run applications: two, three, perhaps even a dozen at a time. Therefore, a good browser can handle dynamic content without stuttering and crashing, and from what I’ve seen, Chrome passes the test with flying colors.

True, I haven’t had enough time to test this thoroughly, but the folks over at scriptNode have put together some benchmarks and it seems that Chrome not only handles good code well, it also excels at handling errors.

3. Incognito mode

Click the control icon in the upper right corner of the browser and you’ll get the option to open a new tab, a new window, or a new incognito window. Incognito window will fire up without appearing in browser or search history, and it won’t leave cookies or any other traces of your activity, except files you’ve downloaded or bookmarks. Yes, Safari has it, too, but it’s a nice jab at Firefox which skipped some similar privacy features in version 3.0.

4. Easy to switch

When you’re entering a saturated market with a new product, you can’t change everything. You must carefully balance the features you want to blatantly copy with the ones you want to innovate in. I was pleased to see that Google Chrome was built with this in mind; for example, it’s easy to switch from Firefox, but it does bring enough novelties to make you stick around. Importing your bookmarks from Firefox is easy and works well; and other details, like keyboard shortcuts, are the same. Therefore, Chrome’s learning curve is virtually non-existent; start it up and you’ll be browsing as usual in no time.

5. Intelligent start page

Although not completely original (Opera has got a similar approach to quick bookmarking), Chrome’s start page is a pleasant surprise. Besides the ubiquitous search bar, it gives you a list of most commonly visited Web pages to fire up quickly. Granted, I’ve always hated suggestions of that ilk (for example, I’ve never, ever used the commonly used programs feature in Windows), but here it just works, because the pages you frequently visit really are the ones you want to open first.

6. Has its own task manager

Chrome treats tabbed windows as separate processes. Nice, we’ve already seen that in IE8, right? But Chrome also has a nifty way to see what’s going on: a task manager. Similar to the task manager in Windows, it lets you see which processes are active (inside Chrome), and how much memory, CPU, and network resources they use. Beautiful. You can access it by right clicking Chrome’s title bar.

7. Dragging tabs out and back in again

It’s a little thing, but it warms my heart. You can drag a tab out of Chrome into a separate window, and you can drag a separate window back into tab bar, where it’ll be happily received by Chrome. Stuff like this turns geeks into converts, and Google’s dev team knows that.

Feel free to let us know which are your favorite (or least favorite) features of Chrome in the comments!

[Image credit: Google]

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Here are the slides presented today at Google regarding the Google Chrome browser. The first set of six slides below discusses the product itself. The press conference is now discussing the elements of the Google Chrome Browser.

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FYI - There is a press event setup for 2pm Eastern today - we will live blog this along with CNET’s Webware. You can watch the press event here.

At my company, Kloudshare, a big part of what we are developing involves pushing boundaries of what browsers are expected to do. Generally speaking this is the case industry wide as the web browser is becoming more and more a real application delivery system.

Google understands this issue and has apparently been focused on some of the more glaring weaknesses of the current crop of browsers. As such, they have decided to launch a new browser called Chrome, to try to bring browsers into the 21st century.

This has the blogosphere all excited. Everyone is writing about the features of the new browser, and its strategic significance. The product sounds great, but I can only get but so excited.

Why?

Because as a developer, Chrome seems to me to be little more than pissing in the wind.

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer controls around 75% of the browser market, and that’s not the bad news. The bad news is that Internet Explorer version 6 has 25% of the market.

IE 6 launched in August of 2001.When IE 6 Launched the attacks of 9/11 hadn’t happened yet. We were in the middle of the 1.0 tech bubble. In fact, if I had had kids when IE 6 was introduced they would be in second grade this year.

And yet 25% of the market is still using it. I’m not sure, but I believe it still comes on XP installation disks. In any case the fact that Microsoft has nothing in place to induce a higher upgrade rate is damn near criminal.

And so I must contrast all of the breathless excitement over chrome with the fact that the browser with #2 market share is so bad in 2008 terms it is just barely capable of delivering modern experiences. And even to do that, *lots* of engineering goes into supporting this trailing edge of the browser market.

I’d love to see a study of how much time is wasted developing special case crap for IE 6. I suspect if you added it all up we could solve world hunger or something.

All I know is that for me, as a writer, Chrome is a fun story — as a developer, not so much. As a developer, Chrome is very much a story for the next decade and has nothing to do with my 2008 or even 2009 challenges. In fact it will be a cause for celebration if I care at all even in 2010.

The bottom line is Microsoft has been fighting the browser wars with spitballs and plastic knives and they are still beating Firefox handily. So Chrome, from a business perspective, for the forseeable future, is totally irrelevant.

This article was authored by Hank Williams who is a New York-based entrepreneur who explores the tech marketplace from 10,000 feet at Why Does Everything Suck?.

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So the tech blogosphere is all a buzz about Google’s now outed Web browser that goes by the name of Chrome. The thing that I find absolutely hilarious about the whole thing is the fact that they used a comic book to announce it. C’mon, a comic book? How can you take seriously a product when it comes by way of a comic book announcement.

Anyways, such is the case with Chrome, as this morning saw Philip Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped where he let us know how he discovered the latest major initiative from the search giant:

“Today there was a comic book in my mail, sent by Google and drawn by no less than Scott McCloud, creator of the classic Understanding Comics. Within the 38 pages, which I’ve scanned and put up [edit: link to comic coming back soon, the server is a bit stressed right now], in very readable format Google gives the technical details into a project of theirs: an open source browser called Google Chrome.”

Of course, this sounds like the long-rumored “GBrowser” project which Google has denied for ages. According to the comic, this will be an open source project based on the existing Webkit engine, just like Apple’s Safari browser. Much like Philip thinks the browser is a good idea, Mathew Ingram noted:

“Although there will likely be some concerns raised about Google — the prism through which many people see the Internet — developing its own browser (will it build features that render its pages and search results better than others?), I think competition is overall a good thing. I can hardly wait to see some of the other features that Mozilla and Google and Microsoft come out with as the browser becomes a kind of OS for the webtop or “cloud” desktop.”

While there is no firm release date for Chrome, it definitely shows that Google is continuing its march forward to dominate in all things relating to your desktop and the Web. Whether this is a good thing remains to be seen.

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