Google released their Chrome Browser today. I’ll refrain from giving it a full review as many others have already manged to do so.
I want to comment on the ease of adding search engines and some minor tweaks you can do to make the search functionality more powerful, specifically in regards to Grooveshark Lite and TinySong.
To add a search engine to Chrome, just visit the site. If they have properly implemented their search extensions by embedding information about them in the page (and we have), then all you have to do is visit the site and Google will add it to its list of search engines. Each search engine has a “keyword” that you type before your search term to indicate which search engine you wish to use. The default keyword is the domain of the search engine, but you can change it by clicking on the wrench icon, and then Options | Basics | Default Search | Manage
I changed mine so that I can search lite by typing in “listen artistname” so if I want to listen to Soltero I type “listen Soltero.”
Likewise I modified the keyword for TinySong to be ts. So if I want to search for Camera Obscura, I type “ts Camera Obscura”
Another thing about Google Chrome that is really cool as it relates to Grooveshark Lite is the built in support for making any website an application. I installed Grooveshark Lite on my start menu, and now it runs as an independent application with the lite Favicon showing up in the taskbar. Very cool.
David Gerard
September 2, 2008 at 4:39 pm
“We are so, so happy with Google Chrome,” mumbled Mozilla CEO John Lilly through gritted teeth. “That most of our income is from Google has no bearing on me making this statement.” – http://notnews.today.com/?p=57
Pacfan
September 9, 2008 at 8:01 am
The spacebar doesn’t work when searching for songs in http://listen.grooveshark.com/ using the Google Chrome browser.
Is this a known bug, or just some problem with my settings?
Jay
September 9, 2008 at 11:41 am
That is a known issue that we discovered shortly after I made this post.
Basically, we have some javascript on the page that is supposed to eat spaces and tabs when flash doesn’t have focus, which is a fix for another browser bug.
Somehow Chrome is giving keyboard focus to both the page/javascript and the swf at the same time (or, actually, running it all through javascript first), which causes the javascript to always eat spaces and tabs.
The fix is to just detect the Chrome user agent string and disable the javascript when it is detected. Unfortunately that fix hasn’t made it up yet because we are working on the other big changes as well, but it should be fixed within a few days.
Pacfan
September 10, 2008 at 9:10 am
Glad to know that there’s a fix already. =)
It’s quite annoying to type the string somewhere else then have it pasted on the search bar (of course I could just use a different browser, but that’s beside the point).
Jay
September 10, 2008 at 11:35 am
Haha, tell me about it. I prefer to run lite in Chrome as well, but the space bar issue limits me to searching for artists with only one word in the name, because I’m too lazy to type elsewhere, copy, paste.
Anyway, we might be able to get the fix out today, most of our new code is stable and we can easily roll back the portions that aren’t ready yet. I’ll post here as soon as we push it live.
Jay
September 12, 2008 at 1:18 am
Lite and Chrome should be playing nicely now. Check it out and let me know if you find any other issues. Thanks!