| | | Chrome’s Windows 8 Chrome OS-lookalike gets a stable release
Latest build also makes it easier to track down noisy tabs.
by Peter Bright - Jan 14 2014, 8:40pm CST
The latest stable version of Chrome—it's up to an astonishing version 32 now—brings with it perhaps one of the most useful features ever to make its way into a browser. I'm sure we've all suffered the infuriating situation where one of our browser's many tabs is making a noise. We then have to hunt through all the tabs in turn to find out which one is the culprit. That can be easy enough if it's a YouTube window, say, but not all noisy tabs are so easily detected, with ads being notorious audio offenders.
Chrome now has a trio of icons to help out. If a tab is making a noise, Chrome will put a little speaker in the tab itself. This gives instant, at-a-glance detection of noisy tabs. The other two icons are less important, but still useful. If one tab is accessing your webcam, it'll be adorned with a little red recording icon. A tab that's being cast to your TV with a Chromecast will show a little TV icon.
The noisy tab icon.
These icons have been a part of Chrome's developer builds for many months, and the speaker icon is really invaluable. It's a simple feature, but an absolutely welcome one.
Another feature making its way to the stable build is Chrome's Chrome OS-like Metro mode browser. When set as the default browser on Windows 8 and started up in Metro mode (using the icon on the Start screen or a link in a Metro app, rather than the icon one on the taskbar or a link on the desktop) the browser looks like Google's browser-based operating system. This mode starts a Chrome "desktop." Along the bottom of the screen is a taskbar of sorts, used for launching Web apps of your choosing. Populating the main area of the screen are one or more browser windows. |
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