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64-Bit Google Chrome for Linux, and More Chrome News

In the course of only a year (September will mark its first birthday), Google's Chrome browser has carved out a good niche for itself. It's widely liked as a fast, very stable browser, and NetApplications' market share data for July showed it at almost three percent share, up from only one percent a few months ago. This week, there were several significant Chrome-related developments, including Google's announcement of a 64-bit version for Linux, and bookmark syncing tools. Here are the details.

64-Bit Chrome. Chrome engineer Dean Mcnamee has confirmed that Google has started working on a 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux. According to his post: "The v8 team did some amazing work this quarter building a working 64-bit port. After a handful of changes on the Chromium side, I've had Chromium Linux building on 64-bit for the last few weeks." (V8 is Chrome's JavaScript engine, and Chromium is the open source core of Chrome.)

It's clear from some of the responses to Mcnamee's post that the 64-bit build is still early in development. "Video will not work out of the box since the ffmpeg binaries we have are 32-bit," reads one post, and "currently, the performance of the 64-bit version is pretty close to the performance of the 32-bit version when Chrome 2 stable was released," says another. Still, Linux users will likely get a workable, fast version of 64-bit Chrome in short order.

Xmarks for Chrome. Xmarks used to be Foxmarks, and has long been beloved by Firefox users who use it as an extension to synchronize Firefox bookmarks and passwords for various devices. It essentially lets you instantly flip a portable version of all your bookmarks, passwords and preferences between instances of Firefox that you have on different computers and gadgets. This week, the Xmarks team announced that it has been hard at work on creating a version of Xmarks for Chrome--which would one of the earliest extensions for Chrome, and quite useful.

The Xmarks extension for Chrome is in closed alpha testing for now. At the link above, you can sign up to be an alpha tester, but there may be a delay before you're accepted for testing the alpha. There are also a few features found in existing versions of Xmarks that need to be built.

Google's Bookmark Sync. Speaking of syncing bookmarks, in this post from earlier this week, Google announced that it has brought bookmark syncing to the dev channel version of Chrome (the dev channel versions inherit new features before the officially released ones). If you're using the dev channel version, you'll find simple instructions for enabling bookmark syncing in the link just provided.

For many more Chrome resources that can extend your capabilities with the browser, and some interesting alternative versions that can boost your privacy, see this post.
 

• google
• linux
• browsers
• Chrome
• Xmarks

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