Flags Explanation Pages?

[Stephen]

Good Morning;

Is there somewhere that explains what each of these options do in the about:flags section. Some of them aren't explained very well (or at all mostly) in that interface. Thanks.

[Yup did a search but other than a 3rd party site didn't look like anything relevant.

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[PhistucK]

What do you need to be explained?

I can try and help.

Some of the things there are not doing anything, so if you tried to enable one and saw no impact in what you thought it might affect, that might be because it is still on early development and has no impact yet ("Web Page Prerendering", for example, I believe).

☆PhistucK

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[PhistucK]

Well, this is not really for regular end users, that is why it is about:flags and not chrome:labs (it used to be), I guess.

These are features under development.

"Side Tabs", "Tabbed settings", "Disable outdated plugins" and "Print Preview" are pretty obvious, I would say.

"Remoting" is a remote desktop feature under development. It will be used by Chrome OS, apparently and regular Macintosh\Windows\Linux Chrome will provide Chrome OS with the ability to remote control the computer on which it is run.

"Cloud Print Proxy" is a remote printing feature under development, more details can be found here.

"XSS Auditor" is a feature that makes the browser be over protective about the URLs to which you browse. Sometimes a website that asks for your name on a form, is not protecting itself against code execution (You type "<script>alert()</script>" as your name on a form and when you submit it and the resulting page that is supposed to show your name, shows an alert window) that can lead to identity theft.

"Check for known conflicts with 3rd party modules." - sometimes different application conflict. For example (though such a good one), you use Microsoft Word and it does something that happens to make Chrome crash. So I guess this one will notify you about such things when you start Chrome.

"Experimental Extension APIs" and "Background WebApps" - the first one is allowing extensions to do more stuff that, that the Chrome team has not stabilized yet and are not ready for prime time, basically, more capabilities for extensions. Up until recently, context menus were experimental, for example. The second is another experimental extension feature, the difference is that when you enable it, it will make Chrome start when your operating system starts and not only when you start it yourself. This feature adds to installable webapps (or extensions, I guess) the capability of being available through the entire operating system session, along with an optional system tray icon, if I am not mistaking.

"GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D" adds more hardware acceleration to Chrome. Basically, it means pages that are doing advanced graphical will run faster and smoother.

"Native Client" is a plugin that will let you run native code within the browser. It means you could run intensive calculations within the browser, for example, or run intensive graphics within the browser, beyond the capabilities of a regular web page.

"Web Page Prerendering" means Chrome will start loading the pages to which links link, before you click on them. Before, it would just look for their server, but not actually load them (called "DNS pre-fetching"). As I understand it, this one is not really working right now.

"Snap Start" is a way to shorten the time it takes to load secure web pages. Usually, secure pages are loaded more slowly than regular web pages, so Chrome uses some technique to shorten that difference.

"Click-to-Play" will let you select "Click to play" in Options\Settings\Preferences-->Under the Hood-->Content settings-->Plug-ins-->Click to play, which already existed in Chrome 7, but (I guess) turned out to be incompatible with some websites, or simply incomplete. It will make Flash (or any other plugin) content not to run, instead, it will show you a box with an option to click on it to actually run the Flash content. This can benefit you when you have a slow computer, or when Flash (and others) is too intensive for your computer at the moment.

If I missed anything or if anything is not clear, tell me.

☆PhistucK

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 16:11, Stephen <stephen...@gmail.com> wrote:

Just about all of 'em Phistuck. I'd like to know what they do or are supposed to do. Realize it's for extension developers per se but as a end-user guinea pig some explanation should be provided next to the flags.

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[Finnur Thorarinsson]

> "Check for known conflicts with 3rd party modules." - sometimes different application conflict. For example (though such a good one), you use Microsoft Word and 

> it does something that happens to make Chrome crash. So I guess this one will notify you about such things when you start Chrome.

To clarify...

about:conflicts lists all the modules (DLLs on Windows) that are loaded into the Chrome browser process as well as some registered modules on the system that are likely to be loaded into Chrome (such as shell extensions). It has a blacklist that can point out modules that are known/likely to conflict, but the blacklist is not final yet.

Microsoft Word is maybe not the best example to use here because to my knowledge it isn't responsible for modules loaded into Chrome.

[PhistucK]

Oh, I meant "though not such a good one", not "though such a good one", hehe.

Microsoft Word can add shell extensions (or anything else for that matter), so, like EMET suddenly became a conflict (of some sort), so could Microsoft Word, in theory.

And to clarify, too, this flag does not enable about:conflicts - about:conflicts is enabled by default, this flag is supposed to enable the warning of such conflicts without going to that page, if I understand correctly.

☆PhistucK

[Finnur Thorarinsson]

> And to clarify, too, this flag does not enable about:conflicts - about:conflicts is enabled by default, this flag is supposed to enable the warning of such conflicts 

> without going to that page, if I understand correctly.

Correct (for 'confirmed' matches, but not for 'suspected' matches).

[Stephen]

Thanks for the detailed explanation!

On Fri, Nov 19, 2010 at 9:43 AM, PhistucK <phis...@gmail.com> wrote:

If I missed anything or if anything is not clear, tell me.

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