How to Delete Certain Time Frames or Entire History from Google Chrome

First, you need to get into the Google Chrome preferences screen, by clicking the options wrench and then clicking Preferences:

If you want to clear all files within a certain time frame of your history, clear cache files, cookies, and more, click the Under the Hood section on the left, and then the Clear Browsing Data… button on the right:

You’ll be presented with a screen that provides many different options to delete browsing history and other private data:

• Obliterate the following items from: This dropdown menu allows you to select the span of time for which you want to delete history and other private data. You can delete items from the past hour, past day, past week, past 4 weeks, or delete all private data regardless of when they were created. Only the items for the selected checkboxes will be deleted for the time frame you select.
• Clear browsing history: Checking this box will delete your browsing history. However, any old webpages, images, and supporting files will still remain in the cache. If you want to really cover your tracks, be sure to empty the cache as well.
• Clear download history: This will clear your download history, which can be viewed by pressing Ctrl+J. Please note, this does not delete any downloaded files.
• Empty the cache: Check this box to clear cache files. Your cache contains files downloaded to display webpages, such as images, JavaScript files, stylesheets, and the HTML code for the pages themselves.
• Delete cookies and other site and plug-in data: Check this to delete your cookies and plug-in data. Cookies are special files you download from websites that store information about your session with the website. If you clear your cookies, you will have to log into any websites you were previously logged into prior to deleting them.
• Clear saved passwords: Pretty self explanatory
• Clear saved Autofill form data: Autofill is a feature in Google Chrome that remembers values that you enter into forms you fill out on webpages. If you want to erase these from the browser, click this checkbox.

How to Delete Individual Webpages in Google Chrome History

If you want to delete specific visits from your history, you can review your entire browser history by pressing Ctrl+H. Alternatively, you can click the options wrench and then click History:

When you are in the history page, if you hover an individual webpage you’ve visited, you’ll notice it is highlighted in light blue and a checkbox appears to the left of the name of the web page. To delete history for individual web pages you’ve visited, click the checkbox and then click the Remove selected items button:

How to Delete Several Pages from Google Chrome History

It is also relatively easy to delete multiple pages from your history at once. Say you want to delete Newegg from your history. Just type newegg in the search bar at the top of the history page, then click Search History. You’ll see all instances of newegg in your history.

To delete the history for all of the displayed pages (or certain groups at once), hover over the first row until you see it highlighted. Then hold the Shift key down on your keyboard, move down to the last page you want to select, and then click the checkbox on it. All of the checkboxes between them will also be selected. Then just click the Remove selected items button.

Now you know how to delete history on Google Chrome three different ways. Enjoy!

Although you could use Firefox to download videos from YouTube, in Google Chrome it is a snap, and it does not require any additional plugins. First, you’ll want to enable the JavaScript console, Chrome’s built-in debugger.

You can just do this by pressing Control+Shift+J or by clicking the options wrench, and going to Tools > JavaScript Console.

Next, go visit the webpage with the YouTube video you want to download and play the video. As the video starts playing, it will start downloading the video file. The Chrome Javascript file makes it very easy to identify the YouTube video file you will download.

Just click the Network tab, and then click the Size column header twice. This will cause the list to sort by size descending (you will see a down arrow next to where it says Size. You’ll notice that the largest file is listed at the top, and it is called videoplayback.

In this screenshot, you see there are two files called videoplayback. The second one was an advertisement I did not care to watch and skipped, which is why you see it in red with a status of (cancelled). To download the video, right-click on the file you want to save, and then click Open Link in New Tab. This will actually save the file to your downloads directory.

You may want to rename the file to something a bit more memorable than videoplayback, and even add the .flv extension to the end of the filename. You can play back the saved file with a great, free video player called VLC, which is available on Windows, Mac, and Linux. Consequently… This process of downloading flash videos will work with other sites as well as YouTube. Just look for the largest file on the page, save it, and play it back with VLC.

The Chromium OS source code is available for download (Chromium OS is the open-source version of Google Chrome OS), and you can compile and build it. It took some time, but I did manage to do this on my 64-bit Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) machine. I also managed to put together a VirtualBox virtual appliance that is all ready to go. I built a torrent for it, so feel free to download it here:

Download the Chromium OS VirtualBox Appliance Torrent

Please continue to seed, as I’m sure there will be many people out there wanting to try it out.

To use it, just start up VirtualBox, click File and then Import. Navigate to the chromiumos.ovf file and select it. The virtual appliance will be imported into VirtualBox and you should be good to go.

I also included a txt file that more or less has the commands I used to build it. You may be able to run it as a script, although I haven’t confirmed that it will work. I guess you could say I more or less took “script-like notes” as I was building Chromium OS.

If you hit Ctrl+Alt+T when you first log in, you’ll get a shell prompt. You can run “sudo su” (no quotes) to log in as root, and I’ve set the password to “password” (no quotes). If you use this machine for anything serious (although I doubt you would), be sure to change the password.

You should be running VirtualBox 3.0.12, and when you import the virtual appliance everything should be configured properly. If you get an error that says “network not connected and offline login fail” when you try to log in, be sure that the virtual network adapter is set to Intel Pro/1000 MT Desktop (82540EM).

If the network adapter is already properly configured but you are still seeing the error, try logging in with the user “chronos” with the password “password” (no quotes). This should log you in and bring up the chrome browser window. If you don’t see a Google Accounts login screen, try hitting the refresh button. That should bring up the Google Accounts login screen.

It is absolutely astounding how fast it boots. It really is nearly instant-on and takes a mere few seconds to bring up the login screen.

Once you log in with your Gmail account, it launches and you’ll see the Chromium interface open up to your Gmail. There is also a Google Calendar tab and a New Tab tab. The little chrome sphere appears in the upper left corner, but when you click on it you don’t get a menu as you see in some of the Chrome OS videos. Instead, you get a Google.com account login page.

As you can see, it looks very much like the Chrome OS screenshots that had surfaced last month. Of course, being that this is running on a virtual machine without any decent video drivers on the operating system, the resolution is quite low (800×600). Your dear old granddad may be the only one that actually finds it visually appealing at this resolution.

Right now the most impressive thing is how fast this operating system loads. Of course, it should load fast because there really is hardly anything there. In any case, it is rather neat to see an early release in action. The fact that it actually works on a virtual machine is quite promising. Eventually as drivers for more hardware are incorporated into it, it should be possible to run it your own real hardware.

I also found a VMWare virtual disk image on a Google Wave about the Chrome OS. You can download it here:

Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image

As of now, the link to the VMWare disk image is valid and the download works.

Update: I just went into the Chrome OS Wave I found with the link to the VMWare disk image, and apparently the poor guy that posted that file to Amazon Web Services ran up a $380 bill so he took the file down. Here’s the torrent of the same file posted up on Pirate Bay:

Download the Chromium OS VMWare Virtual Disk Image Torrent

However, I haven’t tried using it, so I can’t confirm that it will run on VMWare without issue. Enjoy your Google Chrome OS virtual machines!

If you ask me, the Google Chrome OS will really be nothing more than a Linux distribution. It will use the Linux kernel along with a “new windowing system” Google has developed. I suspect it is really just a new window manager that sits on top of the X.org server or XFree86 (X.org would be my guess).

The Chrome browser will play a large part of the windowing system (the OS is actually called the Google Chrome OS). It seems that Google wants to further close the gap between the desktop and the web, and the applications for the operating system will be based on web technologies. I’m fairly certain that Google Gears will also play a significant role in the OS, in order to make applications available offline as well as online.

So what does this mean for Microsoft? Well, Microsoft has already announced what seems to me to be a similar product, that Ballmer refered to as Windows Cloud. Google’s announcement may help to push Microsoft to release Windows Cloud a bit sooner than expected, depending on how well the Google Chrome OS is received.

I doubt that there will really be widespread adoption of the Google OS when it is released. It probably will not be capable of running Windows applications right out of the box, unless Google includes Wine along with it. It is difficult for people to completely abandon a platform they have been using for over 10 years, without having backward compatability to it. Backward compatability has been both a blessing and a curse for Microsoft, as they have released new versions of Windows.

Windows vs. OS X is a good case in point, when it comes to adopting a new operating system. OS X is a great product, but still has a long way to go before it takes considerable market share from Windows. Plus, OS X has the advantage of products that DO provide backward compatability with Windows, yet it probably has not achieved the market penetration Apple desires.

There is one major thing in Google’s favor that Apple does not have. The Google OS will be free. I think one obstacle for Apple to further increase their market share is that the OS is bound to very expensive (and pretty) hardware. Google will have no such obstacle since their OS will be free and open source.

I for one am looking forward to the release of Google Chrome OS. I enjoy tinkering with Linux and other free operating systems. I will be most interested to see if I actually would be able to use it as a replacement to my desktop OS.

Update: Be sure to check out my new article on how to download video from YouTube with Google Chrome.

There are lots of programs and browser plugins that help you to download flash videos from websites. The problem is that they all seem to only allow you to do it from select sites. I found a relatively simple way to do it with Firefox and Firebug.

Firebug is a great Firefox plugin for website development and debugging. I don’t know how I would ever get along without it. Don’t bother looking for the “flash video download” feature in Firebug, because it does not exist. You’ll have to do a little bit of manual work to do it, but using Firebug to download flash video from any website is relatively easy.

If you don’t have Firefox, download it. Then download Firebug. Next, open up Firefox and browse to the page with the flash video you want to download. Click on the little Firebug icon in the browser status bar at the bottom of the Firefox window.

Click on the Net tab in Firebug and then select Enabled.

If the video fully loaded into the page when you last opened it, it is likely the entire movie is in your browser’s cache.  That means that when we monitor the net connection, we won’t see it load the video.  You will need to go and clear you’re browser’s cache.  If you’re using Firefox 3.5 on Windows, click Tools > Clear Recent History.  Click the Details button and make sure the Cache checkbox is selected.  Then press Clear Now.

Now you’re ready to find the location of the flash file.  Click the refresh button in Firefox and allow the page to reload.  The Firebug Net panel will display all of the HTTP requests being made along with statistics for each request as the page loads.  There are a few things you can look for to identify the video file:

• .FLV file extension on the file being loaded
• Very large file size
• Very long gray bar on the load time

Here is an example of what the Net panel looks like for a video page on The Onion:

Once you’ve identified which one of the requests is for the video file, right-click on it and then left click on Open in New Tab.

There’s another nifty trick you can you can use if the video has not fully loaded in the player. First, click the clear button in the Firebug panel to remove all the requests. Then click on the player video navigation bar (if there is one) to fast forward to somewhere else within the video.

This will generate a new request for the video file, which in turn adds just a single line for the video file in the Firebug panel. This makes it very easy to find the video file. You’ll then want to click back at the start of the video file, to make sure you get the link to download the entire file. Select the last file request, otherwise, you will end up downloading it from the point to which you fast forwarded.

When the new tab opens, Firefox will ask you what to do with it. Just save the file somewhere where you will remember you put it.  That’s all there is to downloading flash video with Firefox and Firebug!

Of course this begs the question, “What do I do with the movie now that I’ve downloaded it?” Well, if you want to watch it, you’ll need a player that can read it. I suggest you download the VLC player. VLC is a great open-source multi-platform video player (available for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux).

I really like it because it includes all the codecs you will probably ever need for playing videos, so there’s no having to constantly add codecs to it all the time. You can even use it to convert videos for your iPod, although I tried this some time ago with limited success (it may work better with the latest version).

Well, to match their breakneck speed out of beta, they’ve now released a 2.0 version in the Google Chrome dev channel. There are a few new features, the most notable being the ability to do full-page zoom.

Prior to the 2.0 release, if you zoom on a page (Ctrl+ and Ctrl-, or using your scroll wheel on your mouse while pressing the control button) only the text zooms and the images remain the same. The 2.0 release now properly zooms text and images together. Here are a few other blog posts around the web describing some of the other new features in Google Chrome 2.0:

• Chrome gets Mac deadline, extensions foundation
• Google Chrome 2.0 Pre-Beta
• Google Chrome Update With Form Auto-Completion And More
• Google Releases First Pre-Beta of Chrome 2.0
• Release Notes 2.0.156.1

• Click the link below to install it
• When you want to search Twitter, type a search term into your Google Toolbar
• Click the Twitter button on the Google Toolbar
• You are taken to the Twitter search result page for your search term

Install the Twitter Search Button

Install the Google Reader search button

• Add Google Gadgets
• Fill in forms with the AutoFill feature
• Synchronize toolbar settings across different computers (I’m assuming this feature works even work across IE and Firefox browsers as well)
• Google Notebook integration
• Suggestions instead of 404 pages

So what are you waiting for?  Go and download Google Toolbar 5 for Firefox!

If you would like to use Google Chrome at work, but are unable because you have a SOCKS proxy, you’re not alone.  It is a known issue that Chrome does not work with socks.  Initially I couldn’t even install Chrome because of my firewall at work.  I did install it on my laptop when I got home the day it came out.  However, when I came back to work the next day I was disappointed to learn that it didn’t work behind a SOCKS proxy.

Yesterday it dawned on me that I could use Privoxy instead of SOCKS!  I already had a machine running Privoxy, so it was just a matter of configuring IE/Chrome to use it.  If don’t yet have Privoxy, here is the Google Chrome SOCKS proxy workaround you’ve been looking for:

1. Download Privoxy
2. Modify the configuration file to have Privoxy forward requests to the SOCKS proxy
3. Configure Internet Explorer to use Privoxy (default would be localhost:8118 for http and secure)
4. That’s it!  You should now be able to use Google Chrome through your socks proxy.

• WordPress.com (http://www.wordpress.com)
• LiveJournal (http://www.livejournal.com)
• Xanga (http://www.xanga.com/)
• Windows Live Spaces (http://spaces.msn.com)
• Performancing (http://www.performancing.com)
• Jeeran (http://www.jeeran.com)
• Tumblr (http://www.tumblr.com/)
• MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/)
• b2Evolution (http://b2evolution.net)
• Splinder (http://www.splinder.com/)
• Movable Type (http://www.movabletype.org/)
• Drupal (http://www.drupal.org)
• Textpattern (http://www.textpattern.com/)
• Roller (http://www.rollerweblogger.org)
• Blogger (http://www.blogger.com)
• MetaWeblog API (Any blogging software that implements this API)

It has a bunch of other great features I haven’t even mentioned, but the best thing about it is definitely the convenience and efficiency it provides for creating new posts and pages.

]]> http://geeklad.com/scribefire-firefox-plugin/feed 1 http://geeklad.com/aboutinternets http://geeklad.com/aboutinternets#comments Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:42:44 +0000 GeekLad http://geeklad.com/?p=19

about:internets Google Chrome screenshot

Here’s a fun thing to do with Google Chrome.  If you type about:internets in the Omnibar, you get this.  I tried it while connected to my PC via Remote Desktop and it didn’t work.  The title of the page said “The Tubes Are Clogged!” instead of “Don’t Clog the Tubes!” I suspect that the tubes are rendered with OpenGL or Direct3D, neither of which are possible to do on Remote Desktop since it is not a hardware accelerated display.  Still a nice easter egg nonetheless.

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