My first public Chrome extension – “Multiple Monitor Full Screen”

Yesterday I published “Multiple Monitor Full Screen“, my first public extension to Google Chrome.  I just wrapped up shooting a simple walkthrough video of the extension:

Try it out and let me know what you think of it. Within the first day of the extension being published, there were 7 downloads and over 100 views of the inaugural demo video.

The extension uses JavaScript to resize the Flash player of the video to be the dimensions of the browser window. It uses HTML5 LocalStorage to keep track of the previous dimensions of the player so the user can revert back cleanly.

Right now the extension only works on non-embedded videos hosted by YouTube and Vimeo. I looked in to adding support for Hulu but they appear to be doing some funny things to restrict this. In the near future I would like to add support for embedded YouTube/Vimeo videos.

How to fail at website

The internet has been in heavy use for a long time now. Browser wars have come and gone. There is now two dominant browsers in North America and has been for the past 4 or so years, yet there are still companies specifically targeting their websites towards a specific browser.

Point in case: Microsoft Outlook Web Access.

In order to get the really nice version, you have to use Internet Explorer. This means that I have to stop using Chrome, and fire up another browser just to check my email if I want to send an HTML formatted mail message.

So today after sending an email through IE, I decided to see if the only thing blocking Chrome was the browser sniffing done by Microsoft.

And the verdict is: ……………… Nope, the browser sniffing isn’t the only thing stopping Chrome from replacing Internet Explorer.

The Outlook interface is completely, I mean completely, unusable in Chrome. Messages can’t be read, folders can’t be switched. The full, unsliced CSS sprites are displayed everywhere.

If you’re curious to test this out, all you have to do is run Chrome with the –user-agent command line argument like so:

chrome.exe --user-agent="Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 8.0; Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; Trident/4.0; SLCC2; .NET CLR 2.0.50727; .NET CLR 3.5.30729; .NET CLR 3.0.30729)"

Guess I’m stuck with either using the “Web Access Light” on Chrome or the full-feature switch to IE.

*I will continue to hope that Microsoft will start to care more about end-user experience*

Why Google Chrome is the next giant leap in browsers

And why all competitors have had to change their game plan because of it

Google Chrome was released as a beta in September 2008. Since then, the development and quick releases have outpaced any other browser on the market. As with most Google products there is a very high level of quality, yet it seems that with this product Google has put immense resources behind it compared to other products. Below are some of the reasons why I believe that Google Chrome is the next giant leap in browsers.