New Chromium: 32.0.1700.77

 Chromium is the Open Source variant of the Chrome Browser. Both are part of the Chromium project which also has the Chrome OS as a product. Chromium and Chrome share the same codebase, and the closed-source Chrome browser is enhanced with some proprietary features like Adobe’s Pepper Flash plugin.

A new stable release (32.0.1700.77) for the Chrome/Chromium browser has been revealed a few days ago.

It took a little to get the official sources – there was an issue with the Google build bot which creates the source tarballs. I did a successful test build with a tarball I created myself (see below for the recipe if you’re interested) and reported the issue of the missing sources in the packagers Google group. Eventually official sources became available and I rebuilt both packages (i.e. 32-bit and 64-bit) using this tarball.

Get my Chromium packages in one of the usual locations:

• http://slackware.com/~alien/slackbuilds/chromium/ (primary server)
• http://taper.alienbase.nl/mirrors/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium/ (my own US mirror)
• http://alien.slackbook.org/slackbuilds/chromium/ (US)
• http://slackware.org.uk/people/alien/slackbuilds/chromium/ (UK)

You can subscribe to the repository’s RSS feed if you want to be the first to know when new packages are uploaded.

There are some nice new features in this new “32” release. The browser tabs will show a small speaker icon if that page is playing audio, and a “play” triangle if video is playing on the page. Another enhancement (not yet experienced here… perhaps I never will 🙂 ) is that the browser will warn about potentially harmful pages and downloads in a more directly visible way. And if you have kids, now there’s this new feature called “supervised users” where you can define  sub-accounts to your main Chromium account and limit access to sites for those (as well as being able to monitor their browesing history through a new Google control panel).

Apart from all the fancy new stuff, this release is just as much about squashing (security) bugs. You can check out the release page for that, here are the most interesting fixes, quoted directly from the announcement:

If you are new to Chromium and in particular my Slackware-packaged version of it, you should definitely check out my previous post on Chromium where I explain the build requirements and use of API keys that allow you to use the official Google storage for data synchronization and such. That post also mentions more about some extensions to Chromium (PDF viewer and Flash player) which you can extract from the official binary Chrome package.

A few sites to play-test your Chromium browser:

• http://www.zygotebody.com/ – the Body Browser, using WebGL for fast realtime rendering
• http://www.quirksmode.org/html5/tests/video.html – HTML5 video tests (several encodings like H.264, WebM and Ogg/Theora)
• http://www.naclbox.com/ – NaCLBox is an implementation of DOSBox in Chromium’s Native Client, guaranteeing near-native speed of the applications running in the sandbox. NaCLBox offers a lot of good old DOS games which you can play directly in your browser window. Note that my package contains the Native Client (NaCL) whereas the version you can compile using the SlackBuilds.org script will not add NaCl.

Have fun! Eric

PS: this is a script which I wrote as documentation of the manual steps I took to create my own unofficial release source tarball when I got fed up waiting for the official one:

#!/bin/sh
#
# Checking out the sources of an official chromium release,
# by Eric Hameleers
#
# In a working directory, you will create three directories:
# - depot_tools: this contains all the tools needed for creating the tarball
# - checkout: here almost 7 GB of sourcecode will be checked out
# - output: here the chromium-${RELEASE}.tar.xz source tarball will be created.
#
# Some variables:

WORKING_DIR=”${HOME}/chromium_src”

CHROMIUM_REL=”32.0.1700.77″
DT_REPO=”https://chromium.googlesource.com/chromium/tools/depot_tools.git”
RELEASES_URL=”https://src.chromium.org/chrome/releases”

# The actual work (takes a while);
# Checkout 1 GB of source and pack it up:
mkdir -p ${WORKING_DIR}
cd ${WORKING_DIR}

# Clone the depot_tools:
git clone ${DT_REPO}

# Check out the sources:
mkdir ckeckout
cd checkout
PATH=”../depot_tools/:$PATH” gclient config ${RELEASES_URL}/${CHROMIUM_REL}
# At this moment, your config will have been written to a file ‘.gclient’
PATH=”../depot_tools/:$PATH” gclient sync 2>&1 | tee ../sync.log
# The sync will download everything, based on what it found in this file:
# ${CHROMIUM_REL}/DEPS
PATH=”../depot_tools/:$PATH” gclient sync 2>&1 | tee ../sync.2.log

# Pack up the source tarball:
mkdir ../output
python src/tools/export_tarball/export_tarball.py –remove-nonessential-files ../output/chromium-${CHROMIUM_REL}

echo “”
echo “Resulting source tarball is: ${WORKING_DIR}/output/chromium-${CHROMIUM_REL}.tar.xz”
echo “”