Tag Archives: Chrome

Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Chromebooks Get First Optimized Browser Alternative

In the world of internet browsers, most people only think of the Big Three: Chrome, Safari, and Microsoft Edge. Occasionally, Firefox gets an honorable mention, but there are a whole raft of smaller browsers out there if you’re looking for an alternative to the majors.

Recently, the little Opera browser made a significant change, becoming the first smaller browser to optimize its performance for Chromebooks. If you’re a Chromebook user and looking for some other browser besides Chrome to surf the web with, Opera is an excellent alternative choice!

Chromebooks really took off during the pandemic, with more than 30 million units shipped in 2020. It’s a trend that seems to have caught on, because if projections are correct, then Google is on track to sell another 40 million units this year, which means they’re carving out an increasingly significant segment of the market.

To be clear, if you want to give Opera a try on your Chromebook, it’s not a perfect Chrome replacement as it cannot be set to the Chromebook’s default browser.

Opera does, however, offer a few unique features, including:

  • Five different color schemes to choose from, including both Light and Dark modes.
  • Night Mode, which reduces the contrast based on time of day to help preserve and protect your eyes, minimizing strain.
  • A Crypto Wallet – If you own one or more cryptocurrencies, you’ll love the convenience of having a built in cryptocurrency wallet, and the ability to manage your accounts via a convenient “Quick Launch” button.
  • An ad blocker, built in, which is a very nice touch
  • An integrated VPN for added browsing security
  • Messenger Mode – which gives you quick and easy access to WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, Telegram, Instagram and Twitter, all in a convenient “Messengers” tab on the left side of the browser.
  • And Flow – which allows you to essentially chat with yourself, taking notes, saving links and storing images on the fly

In summary, it’s a very good alternative, and well worth checking out!

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Chrome Soon Releasing Feature To Always Use Secure Connections

Recently, Google announced another change to its Chrome browser designed with user security in mind.

The company will soon be rolling out an “HTTPS-Only” mode that will help make surfing a safer and more secure experience. The new feature is currently available for preview in the Canary build, Chrome 93, for Windows, Linux, Mac, Chrome OS, and Android systems.

Although the company has not officially announced a go live date for the new feature, the buzz is that it will likely be August 31st, which Chrome 93 is expected to reach “stable” status.

If you want to play around with the new feature, your first step is to enable the HTTPS-Only Mode Setting by opening Chrome and typing the following into the address bar:

Chrome://flags/#https-only-mode-setting.

Doing this adds the “always use secure connections” option to the security settings page of the browser, and that’s your next stop. Head to the settings page and click the option that now appears. Once enabled, the browser will automatically upgrade all website navigations to HTTPS, or, if it encounters a site that doesn’t support it, give you a warning box before actually navigating to the page in question.

While Google is certainly not the first or the only browser company to introduce an HTTPS mode, this latest change certainly takes the idea farther than anyone else has to this point. It’s a good change that will help protect users from man in the middle attacks, and make online shoppers safer as they don’t have to worry about or wonder if their data is as safe as it could be. Using the HTTPS-Only mode, the answer to that question is yes.

Kudos to Google for the coming change, and for continuing to do their part to make the web a safer place for all of us.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Google Adding Additional Security Feature To Chrome On iOS

Recently, Google made a small but significant change to Chrome for iOS.

If you use the browser in that environment, it now allows you to lock your incognito tabs behind a FaceID protection wall, giving you an added layer of security. This new feature makes it much more difficult for people to snoop around on your device and see what you’ve been up to on the web.

If you’ve never used incognito mode before, you should. It’s a superb feature that allows you to visit sensitive sites without having them appear in your browser history, and of interest, it also prevents cookies generated by those sites from being saved. Of course, this protection only extends so far. If you surf your way to a sensitive site and then walk away, leaving your device unlocked, there’s nothing to prevent someone from simply picking your device up and seeing what you’re doing, but as long as you take sensible precautions, incognito mode, especially with the new FaceID protection, provides some pretty solid protection.

If you’re interested in giving the new feature a go, simply open Chrome on your iOS device and enter “Chrome//flags” in the address bar, then press Go on the virtual keyboard. This will open the Chrome Experiments page. Once there, search for “Device Authentication for Incognito” and enable it. That done, close and reopen your browser, then go to Settings and Privacy to actually enable the feature and you’re all set.

If, after playing around with it, you decide you don’t want or need it, simply go back to the Settings and Privacy section and disable it.

It’s a very good addition, and if you value your privacy, then once you’ve tried it on for size, you’ll probably wonder how you ever got along without it. Kudos to Google for the addition. Try it. You’ll love it.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Google Chrome Speed Will Increase With Update

If you’re one of the legions of users who rely on Google’s Chrome browser when you surf the web, we’ve got great news. As of the release of Chrome 91, it’s about to get a whole lot faster.

The engineers behind Chrome’s continued improvement have found a clever ‘cheat’ that makes the browser a whopping 23 percent faster.

At the root of the speed increase is the company’s V8 JavaScript engine, called Sparkplug.

Thomas Nattestad, a Chrome product manager, had this to say about the recent update:

“An important component of delivering a fast browser is fast JavaScript execution. In Chrome, that job is done by the V8 engine which executes over 78 years worth of JavaScript code on a daily basis. In M91 Chrome is now up to 23 percent faster with the launch of a new Sparkplug compiler and short built in calls, saving over 17 years of our users’ CPU time each day.”

As to the ‘cheat,’ Nattlesad adds the following:

“First of all, it cheats; the functions it compiles have already been compiled to bytecode, and the bytecode compiler has already done most of the hard work… Sparkplug compiles from bytecode rather than from JavaScript source, and so doesn’t have to worry about any of that.

Sparkplug strikes a balance between Ignition and Turbofan in that it does generate native machine code but does not depend on information gathered while executing the JavaScript code. This lets it start executing quickly while still generating relatively fast code.”

Technical details aside, the end result is that users will enjoy a notably faster browsing experience. It’s also great news for web developers because it means that they can create larger and more robust applications without worrying too much that it will slow a user’s browsing experience to a crawl.

Kudos to Google for continuing to push the envelope. Chrome is the most popular browser on the planet for a reason, and this is it.

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Posted on Author Atlantic Computer Services Categories Blog

Hackers Delivering And Hiding Malware While Undetected

Last year, Google made some important changes to their Chrome browser in a bid to increase user security.

Among these changes was to default to “HTTPS” in the browser in an attempt to reduce the number of “man in the middle” and similar types of attacks.

Their strategy worked.

Other companies adopted Google’s approach and HTTPS became the new standard on the web, and user security was increased. That’s a very good thing.

Unfortunately, we are now learning, courtesy of data collected by Sophos, that hackers are increasingly taking advantage of TLS (Transport Layer Security) to hide their own activities. Last year, Sophos reported that some 24 percent of malware was using TLS to communicate. This year, that value is up to 46 percent.

Where malware is concerned, there are, broadly speaking, three types of communication: downloading additional malware, exfiltration of data, and command and control. By using TLS when engaging in all three of these, hackers make it significantly more difficult for IT security professionals to detect, and ultimately to stop their malicious activity.

While user security has unquestionably increased over the last year, so too, has the security of hackers, and it’s complicating the lives of IT folks around the world.

Unfortunately, there’s not much that can be done about it. Anything that helps the general public by definition, can also be used by hackers around the world to help themselves, so it shouldn’t come as a great surprise that they’re increasingly embracing TLS. The first rule of hacking is, after all, ‘be at least two steps ahead.’ They are, and that’s unlikely to change in the foreseeable future.

For now, the best you can do is be mindful of the fact that hackers are increasingly taking advantage of TLS. Forewarned is forearmed. Good luck out there.

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