March 20, 2011

Google Chrome's Experimental New Tab Page for Touch Screens

A recent Chromium build added a new option to the about:flags page: an experimental new tab page. The updated new tab page is a work in progress and it's optimized for touch screens. Right now, it only includes the web apps you've previously installed, which can be organized in multiple home screens.

"The idea with this touch NTP is to focus (for now) on apps, and make it easy
to arrange them into pages. You can swipe/drag to switch pages, and press
and hold to lift an app and rearrange it," explains Google.


I found an interesting comment in one of Google's JavaScript files: "Note that, while the product portion of the touch NTP is designed to work just in the latest version of Chrome, this hack attempts to add some support for working in older browsers to enable testing and demonstration on existing tablet platforms. In particular, this code has been tested to work on Mobile Safari in iOS 4.2. The goal is that the need to support any other browser should not leak out of this file - and so we will hack global JS objects as necessary here to present the illusion of running on the latest version of Chrome."

{ via ConceivablyTech. Thanks, François Beaufort. }

11 comments:

  1. It looks like the LaunchPad in Mac OS X Lion...

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  2. Its good, but i would like a bit Icon Effect on this!

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  3. Great feature. Very, very useful!

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  4. Looks cool. Hopefully they will bring back pages to the tab page through.

    Could this be the first part of the merge between Android and Chrome. After all I have forgotten the amount of times Google themselves have said chrome is for Keyboard devices and not tablets and yet they go and developed a touch interface for chrome . This interface seem contrary to that statement. But we also know in the long term Google plans to merge the two OSes I do wonder if this is the beginning of that long term goal.

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  5. Eric Schmidt said that Android is for touch screens and Chrome is for devices with Keybaords but now Larry is in charge !

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  6. When is a chrome browser coming out for Android?

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  7. "bwims said...
    When is a chrome browser coming out for Android?"

    Honeycomb looks a lot like it Chrome, at least heavily base on chrome. I guesting much of the code is the same save for the Hardware rendering elements.

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  8. Well I'll be happy to see chrome browser for my android device. when it will come?

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  9. Well I'll be happy to see chrome browser for my android device. When it will come?

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