RC4 is a stream cipher designed in 1987 that has been widely supported across browsers and online services for the purposes of encryption. Multiple vulnerabilities have been discovered in RC4 over the years, making it possible to crack within days or even hours.
It’s good news that all the major browsers are going to drop it and move forward to a better cipher.
Input Device Capabilities: Chrome 47 has a new feature that makes it easier to understand the how users interact with your site: InputDeviceCapabilities! DOM input events are an abstraction above low-level input events, loosely tied to physical device input (e.g., 
click events can be fired by a mouse, touchscreen, or keyboard). However, there is a problem: there is no simple method to obtain the details of the physical device responsible for an event. In addition, certain types of input can generate further “fake” DOM input events for compatibility reasons. One such fake DOM event happens when a user taps a touch screen (such as on a mobile phone); it not only fires touch events but, for compatibility reasons, mouse events as well. The new InputDeviceCapabilities API provides details about the underlying sources of input events this come to helps with problems when supporting both mouse and touch input. Read More: developers.google.com/web/updates/2015/10/inputdevicecapabilitiesbackground_color that removes any delay and paints the screen with a solid color until the browser is ready to paint something from the web page. This was a good addition, yet it still didn’t look fully like an app. Now in Chrome 47 on Android, Beta these days as of October 2015, we are introducing the concept of a “splash screen”. Have a look:
Since the start of the year, the Chrome adoption is moving in one direction. Very impressive considering the mobile trends.
A lot of new interesting APIs that are pushing the web platform forward introduced with Chrome 43 (now in Stable). Let see the ones that are going to impact a lot of users.
Chrome has a great new Autofill feature that as a developer you’ll want to add to your websites for Chrome to use. Other browsers are sure to follow too. The first time you fill out a form, Chrome automatically saves the contact information that you enter, like your name, address, phone number, or email address, as an Autofill entry. You can store multiple addresses as separate entries. Moreover, Chrome can save your credit card information, with your explicit permission. When you enter credit card information on a form, Google Chrome asks you at the top of the page whether you’d like to save the information. Click “Save info” if you’d like the credit card to be saved as an Autofill entry.
Later, when you start filling out a form, the Autofill entries that match what you’re typing will appear in a menu. Select an entry to automatically complete the form with information from the entry. Chrome also saves the text you’ve typed in specific form fields. The next time you fill out the same field, text that you’ve typed in the past appears in a menu. Just select the text you want to use from the menu to insert it directly into the field.
In Chrome, you get a full support for the autocomplete attributes . All we need to do is to make sure we are leveraging them. You will improve your checkout process and make your users 6.73 times happier. Since autocomplete is part of the standard (WHATWG HTML) you know that other browsers will support it as well.
The autocomplete attributes can be accompanied with a section name, such as:
shipping given-namebilling street-addressThis is recommended because it will make your form easier to understand and fill. The browser will auto complete different sections separately, and not as a continuous form.
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Quick update from the world of Chrome. The new version in stable (chrome://version = 42 just like the answer to the universe) brings some interesting and powerful features that give web developers more options to create amazing experiences.
Chrome 42 (stable)
We are getting to a world where web developer could create web apps that act just like ‘native apps’ without any bridges (e.g. Cordova). The main enablers APIs are already in this version. Check out what you can do today with Service Worker and the options it’s giving you to cache, work offline and push notifications in the background. Here is an example I wrote that uses service worker to cache & offline. I think we are going to see some very interesting implications. There are many options for the “physical mobile web” and these powerful APIs. Continue reading
2014 was a busy year.
In few moments of reflection, it feels more like 3-4 years. Anyway, let’s try to see where was the interesting stuff on this blog.
There are some very interesting technologies that are now available in Chrome. In this post I will try to cover some of them.
We know that Google started the Chrome project on the three ideas of speed, simplicity, and security. It’s still focusing on these important aspects while keep moving forward (fast) on implementation of many other HTML5 features. You can find Chrome on mobile, desktop, Chromebook and Chromecast. Let’s see what are the new, improved features we got these days as developers in Chrome platform:
We’re investing a lot of time to make sure mobile web experiences improve and that they are easier to develop!
A (good) web developer use several tools in order to be productive and built amazing projects. I guess, you can find advocates for Vim or Emacs but after you pass the phase of writing the code, it’s time to check why it’s not doing what you wish to see. You can find on Opera Dragonfly and in FireFox land there is Firebug. But, as you might guess already, my favorite tool is Chrome DevTools on Canary.
The Chrome Developer Tools are a set web authoring and debugging tools built into Google Chrome. The DevTools provide web developers deep access into the internals of the browser and their web application.
(!) If you are a front-end developer you should use Google Chrome Canary. It is easy to install it side by side your regular Chrome and it will give you the latest and greatest features with frequent improvements. This post is not a replacement to the one ‘source of true‘ but more of an update on the new features we have today (OCT 2013) in Canary. Checkout the pictures below with the green arrows that show you some of the interesting feature you can use. Continue reading
Ido Green 