New Features for Chrome On Mac OSX Lion – What’s Cooking?
We all know by now that Google is planning to make Chrome more Lion friendly. There are a bunch of features being planned for this new version of Mac OS where Apple did a little “Shake Things Up” activity.
I am trying to find out what they are planning for Lion. This is not a final list and things are still being developed. So, what you see her may or may not change. But I am sure you will get  a taste of what’s planned.
Turn On Session Restore by Default
OSX Lion will have session restore turn on by default, meaning, every time you open the browser, you start where you left last time. Â ”Since applications will be more agressive about restoring state, we should mimic this behavior” says a bug opened for this feature.
Another comment here says, “Now that the Lion’s out of the bag, these are safe to open up to the world.” I am pretty sure this is now available on daily builds of Chromium, for now.
Full Screen API
Lion believes that with smart phones and tablets, people have become more interested in doing things in “full screen”. Â Chrome will make use of its existing full screen API to make best out of it.
“Currently we think our API for this is fine. Â If someone wants to make this work they can, but for now off to MX.” says a comment from Chromium.’
Things are not as smooth as it should be, for now. They are still working on this feature and have great plans about it. Read this comment “Long-term, we’re going to implement a proper fullscreen interface for Lion. In this interface, we’ll also experiment with having a collapsable toolbar. Until then, fullscreen will operate as it does on Leopard/Snow Leopard.”
Rubberband-Scrolling (overscroll)
Apple website explains this as “Scroll to the top or bottom of a list or a web page and it springs back.” The team is trying to get this working on Chrome as well. The bug for this says “Scroll to the top / bottom edge of a page using the trackpad -Â There should be the rubberband-effect like on iOS.”
We will see this feature as well, pretty soon.
Support “scrolling” to go backwards/forwards
To explain this feature, I will simply copy the notes on this bug, says it all.
 ’On Lion, there’s a new gesture controlled by System Preferences –> Trackpad –> More Gestures –> Swipe between pages. If the value is set to enable two-finger gestures (either “Scroll left or right with two fingers” or “Swipe with two or three fingers”), then a two-finger gesture will perform a cool slide animation.
In Safari, when you gesture backwards with two fingers, the current page slides to the left, tracking with the user’s fingers, until after some point (1/3rd-1/2 of the page has slid) the gesture is committed. The same is true for going forward.
We should do this for Chromium, but it’s a lot of work.”
Couple of these features are already implemented in the daily build. Some are being discussed or planned. But I am sure you could get a taste of what’s cooking!
To track what’s happening with Mac OSX and Lion, you can visit this page on the Chromium Code and sort them with time to see the latest. But again, you can subscribe to my blog’s feed to get the best, always!
One Response to “New Features for Chrome On Mac OSX Lion – What’s Cooking?”
I am using Mac OS Lion. How do I set google.com as my homepage?