And unless you’ve got an inexplicable aversion to cool new software, I recommend that you do spend some time with Chrome. I wouldn’t have guessed that it was possible to bring so much new thinking to a Web browser circa 2008–especially without adding much in the way of new features. But Chrome is fun, zippy, and practical. If it were a car (I hate automotive metaphors in tech journalism, but can’t help myself) it might be something like this.

When I met with one of the people in charge of Chrome a month ago, he told me that Chrome would ship when it displayed Web pages properly and was sufficiently reliable, not when Google had added every feature on its to-do list. Chrome in its 1.0 version reflect that: It’s got far fewer features than Firefox, Flock, IE, Opera, or Safari, and I’m sure some folks will come away disappointed simply because it’s ultimately pretty basic. The Google blog post on today’s news mentions two upcoming features: form autofill (I’m a little surprised the browser came out of beta without it) and RSS. And it reaffirms its intention to release versions for Mac and Linux versions without revealing a timetable.

Google says it has plans to add lots more stuff to Chrome; that’s good news, although the browser’s streamlined, no-muss-no-fuss personality is so pleasing that the company will have to work hard not to bloat it up over time. I do, however, have a little list of new features that I hope are on Google’s Chrome agenda.

More platforms. I use OS X more than Windows these days, and I like browsers I can use on both operating systems. Which, come to think of it, is all the major ones except Chrome [update: and IE, of course--duh!]. Given the high volume of Mac aficionados at the Googleplex, I’m hoping that the Mac edition is actually nearly done, and that Google will spring it on us as a happy surprise before we know it.

Extensions. Google’s working on them, but it sounds like they’re still in the figuring-it-all-out stage, and once the extension framework is ready it’ll still be a long time until Chrome has anywhere near as many wonderful add-ons as Firefox does.

Variants. Chrome, like Firefox, is an open-source browser. I hope that means that we’ll see customized versions, much as Flock builds on Mozilla’s Firefox platform.

More Google integration. There’s infinite opportunity for Google to meld its browser and its Web services into a seamless, powerful whole. Shouldn’t Google’s online bookmarks service be tied into Chrome’s bookmarks? Might Chrome tap into the Google Maps API to do clever things with geographical info? What if Chrome had an iGoogle sidebar or could run iGoogle gadgets in windows that popped out of the browser? I’m not sure if Google hasn’t gone here yet because A) it doesn’t want to; B) it needs more time to get it right; or C) it’s worried about anti-trust hobgoblins like those that haunted Microsoft in the 1990s when it integrated Windows and IE. And I’m not arguing for doing anything that would make Google services run poorly in other browsers. But I still think there’s huge opportunity to make Chrome the first browser that’s part software and part service.

More Webification, period. I want a browser that behaves exactly the same on every computer I use it on, with the same bookmarks, saved tabs, and settings. Opera Link does some of this, and Mozilla Weave is an ambitious attempt to do something along these lines with Firefox. But who’s better equipped than Google to nail this idea?

Smarter application shortcuts. I love the idea here: Chrome lets you tuck icons for Web-based applications onto your desktop or into the Start menu that launch them in their own windows, with no unnecessary browser toolbars. But this feature could go even further to make Web apps feel like desktop apps. For one thing, I can’t understand why Google’s own Google Docs spawns a second, standard browser window when you launch any of its apps after putting its home page into application-shortcut form.

True zoom. Chrome’s zoom feature just makes the type smaller or larger. It oughta change the size of images, too, as just about every other browser Firefox, IE, and Opera now does do.

If you’re using Chrome, let me know what you think–and what items are on your to-do list for the Chrome development team.

Google’s applications are a likely vehicle for distributing Chrome, with Apple having paved the way for more aggressive bundling by tethering distribution of Safari to iTunes. There is also plenty of potential for high-profile promotion of Chrome at Google’s wildly popular Web properties, and the company has several hardware partners that could pre-load the browser on PCs.

Chrome is the bedrock for Google’s whole Web application platform. Its pillars are speed and stability: Chrome’s zippy JavaScript engine is at the top of the class, and its use of separate processes for browser tabs and windows can make browsing more reliable.

The arrival of Chrome has also pressured other browser makers such as Firefox to accelerate the performance of their JavaScript engines–making Google’s applications perform better across the board.

Google will be leveraging Chrome to deliver the open source Native Client project, a plug-in that permits Web applications to directly access hardware resources. Let’s hope that Native Client is effectively sandboxed so it can’t be abused by hackers, so we don’t revisit the bad old days of the ubiquitous ActiveX exploit. The more Google can blur the lines between client applications and Web applications, the more competitive it will be against entrenched software. CPU intensive software will no longer have to run on the desktop. The concept of what type of application a Web application can be would be drastically changed.

Chrome is based upon the WebKit open source project, making it easier for developers to make their sites and services Chrome-friendly, because it is not something entirely new. Google is likewise providing a framework for the development of secure Firefox-like extensions for Chome. Developers could very well fall in love with Chrome, but with technologies and tools from Adobe, Microsoft, Sun, and others in the mix, not to mention HTML 5, they may have to pick their side of the battlefield. You can see why it’s in Google’s best interest to release a Chrome that’s ready for prime time sooner rather than later.

Chrome

Developer: Google

Current version of the beta: 0.4.154.31

How long has it been in public prerelease? Since 9/02/08

Reasons to download it: A pleasingly minimalist interface; fast performance for Web apps and ability to iconize them in your Start menu; Omnibar address bar; Icognito stealth (aka porn) browsing mode.

Reasons not to download it: Lots of basic browser stuff like bookmark management is really, really basic. Or missing altogether. Plus, you can’t get the Google Toolbar for it.

Overall, how promising is it? The current beta, paradoxically, is both incredibly rudimentary and very, very slick. I wouldn’t use it as my primary browser, but it wouldn’t stun me in the least if it becomes a big player in the long term.

When is final release expected? Google isn’t telling. Nor will it say when Mac and Linux versions will arrive.

Firefox 3.1

Developer: Mozilla

Current version of the beta: Beta 1

How long has it been in public prerelease? Since 07/28/08

Reasons to download it: New JavaScript engine for snappier performance; <Ctrl><Tab> tab switching with thumbnail previews; special characters to refine searches in the Awesome Bar. A stealth browsing mode is apparently in the works, but I don’t think it’s in the current beta.

Reasons not to download it: Your beloved Firefox 3.0 add-ons may well not work.

Overall, how promising is it? I like the tab switcher, and faster JavaScript should make the Web more pleasing even if you can’t tell it’s the JavaScript that’s doing it. But this isn’t a radically new Firefox, and the .1 version-name increment is appropriate.

When is final release expected? March 2009.

Internet Explorer 8.0

Developer: Microsoft

Current version of the beta: Beta 2

How long has it been in public prerelease? Since 03/05/08

Reasons to download it: Better support for Web standards; “Web Slice” subscriptions to snippets of information; “Accelerators” to send info between Web services; InPrivate stealth browsing mode; screens for malicious sites.

Reasons not to download it: Because you moved on from IE long ago. Or, you use an operating system that doesn’t have “Windows” in the name.

Overall, how promising is it? Anything that makes IE adhere better to Web standards is a good thing, since much of the Web is currenty jerry-rigged to work properly in IE 6 and IE 7. Web Slices and Accelerators look intriguing, but their success is contingent on Web developers embracing them, and Microsoft doesn’t have a great recent track record of getting the Web to climb on its bandwagons. Overall, though, this is a more timely and interesting IE upgrade than IE 7.

When is final release expected? Microsoft says it’s doing one more prerelease version in the first quarter, and will then release the final one.

Opera 10.0

Developer: Opera

Current version of the beta alpha: 10.0 Alpha 1

How long has it been in public prerelease ? Since…let me check here…today.

Reasons to download it: Better support for Web standards; faster; inline spell checker; auto updates; rich text editor for mail; mail client can delete old mail.

Reasons not to download it: It’s an alpha–it’s crashed spectacularly once in the couple of hours I’ve used it, and I’ve noticed other quirks. Lots of them.

Overall, how promising is it? I’d never argue that improving support for Web standards or souping up performance is insignificant, but overall, it looks like this is Opera 10.0 not because it’s a huge deal but because the last version was 9.6. In other words, it’s only .4 of a great big upgrade. If that.

When is final release expected? Opera doesn’t seem to be saying, which is understandable given it’s just getting the first alpha out the door.

Safari 4

Developer: Apple

Current version of the beta: It’s been widely reported that Apple has distributed a preview version to developers.

How long has it been in public prerelease? The great unwashed can’t get their hands on it yet, but you might try signing up for a free Apple Developer Connection account if you’re curious about what developers may have access to and can reasonably claim to be one. (Note: If you do, you’ll have to agree not to write about what you find there–I did when I signed up.)

Reasons to download it: Apple, too, is said to be sprucing up its JavaScript engine. It’s also reportedly introducing support for various new Web features and adding the ability to run Web apps outside the browser (which sounds similar to what Chrome is already doing).

Reasons not to download it: Because you’re not a developer.

Overall, how promising is it? Too soon to tell.

When is final release expected? Only Apple knows, and it’s not acknowledging that the thing even exists–a search on Apple.com doesn’t bring up any relevant results. Next year, presumably.

Technologizer community member Relyt asked: “What are your plans for Google Chrome in the future? How much is planned to be changed for the final release (example- interface)?”

Rakowski told me that the Chrome beta is mostly about testing the browser’s reliability and ability to accurately render Web pages of all sorts. Once Google is comfortable that Chrome is robust enough for general consumption, it’ll take it out of beta. Featurewise, though, that version may be more or less the same as the current one.

But Google wants to make sure that Chrome quickly gains the basic features that you kind of assume every browser will sport, such as a more comprehensive approach to bookmarks and auto-completion of text fields. Rakowski says that it’ll implement some of this stuff itself, but other features are being worked on by members of the Chrome open-source community.

Rakowski stressed that Google doesn’t think in terms of a “final” version of Chrome: It plans to roll out new features more or less continuously…much as it does with most of its Web-based services.

Kon Z asked: “What does Google have to say in response to Professor Hermann Maurer’s statements, especially about Chrome sending every visited URL to Google?”

I asked Rakowski about the hubbub over Chrome privacy, most of which centers around the fact that the browser’s default settings for its Omnibox address bar send every keystroke back to Google–so it can auto-suggest sites you may be looking for–and the fact that Google stores about 2 percent of queries to help power the auto-suggest feature. He said that the company takes privacy seriously, and that it thinks that auto-suggestions are a useful feature which most users will like–but that it also lets folks disable auto-suggest, in which case their keystrokes won’t be logged.

He said that some concerns about Chrome are based on misconceptions, but that the company has already made some Chrome tweaks based on legitimate issues that users have brought up.

As for Austrian professor Hermann Maurer’s allegations, Google apparently has a standard response that calls him a conspiracy theorist and says his concerns are “frankly, a little strange.” No beating around the bush there, huh?

Sudeep asked: “Will there ever be a real Google Toolbar for Chrome?”

An awful lot of folks are wondering the same thing that Sudeep is: Almost 200 of ‘em have commented on the post in which I lament Chrome’s toolbarlessness.

So will Google build one? Probably not, Rokoswki told me, at least in the form of a downloadable, installable, optional toolbar. It thinks it would be odd to build a toolbar for its own browser. But over time, the company would like to enable much of the toolbar’s functionality in the form of features built right into Chrome. (Rokowski said it sees Chrome’s Omnibar as providing an improved version of the toolbar’s search functionality already.)

Oh, and since Chrome is open source, it’s also plausible that some random third party will see fit to build its own Google Toolbar. (Which, come to think of it, happened with Firefox once upon a time: The unofficial-but-excellent Googlebar satisfied those with a jones for the Google Toolbar before Google got around to building a Firefox version.)

I also asked a question submitted by…well, myself: “Will Chrome be customizable through extensions, like Firefox?”

Rakowski said that Google very much wants to open up Chrome to Firefox-like customization…but that it wants to do so in a way that doesn’t bog down the browser or make it less reliable. So the company is still in the process of figuring out how to do it. (One small bit of customizability–if that’s a word–is already out there, thanks to an open source developer: Support for Firefox’s Greasemonkey page-rejiggering engine.)

Thanks for the smart questions. I promise I’ll keep the ones I didn’t get to relay to Google this time around in mind, and will ask them as the opportunity arises…

There are many simple steps that Chrome could take to further protect its users. To be fair, many of the complaints I have could also be directed at Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari, so I’ve decided to break things down into a feature-by-feature comparison.

Password Management
Every single browser offers you the capability to save form information for quick logins to websites, including passwords. They each take varying measures of security to ensure the protection of this sensitive information, with degrees of benefit and safety to each one. Firefox stores passwords in its local information data, and offers an option to encrypt them with a master password, shielding them from other users of the computer. Safari on OS X similarly stores this information in the system-wide password management system Keychain, tying your passwords to your operating system account’s login password.  While Internet Explorer does not give you the option of encrypting your web passwords with a master password, it does store the data in a registry key protected by very limited permissions.

Chrome’s take on this matter is to encrypt your passwords on the hard drive, but it doesn’t offer you the option to protect them from prying eyes. For example, if I walked by a computer with Chrome installed on it, I would need to only click Show password in the Options dialog to see that poor user’s login passwords. In fairness, Firefox is also guilty here to an extent, since it doesn’t prompt you for a master password by default. The shame here is that password protection is really a simple feature that could make a world of difference for anyone who leaves their computer on when they leave the room.

Separation of Address and Search
Like password saving, every browser finally has a dedicated search box for searching in Google, Yahoo, and other engines. A recent innovation in this area–enabled by default only in Firefox–further enhances the search box by offering suggestions for popular queries as you type. Chrome’s approach with integrated search is to make the entire address bar, where you normally enter plain URLs, into a giant search box called the OmniBox. As in IE 8 and Firefox 3, typing into the bar will search your history and bookmarks by URL, as well as page title, but it will also act as an auto-suggestive search box.

While this is certainly an interesting design idea that works well, one not-so-obvious flaw in this feature is that for the auto-suggest to work correctly, every single character that you type in the OmniBox is transmitted to Google, whether or not you intend it to be a search. This means that even if you are just trying to go to a site by plainly typing its URL, you will be sending that information to Google. The privacy-conscious should keep this in mind.

Third-Party Cookies
The ability of cookies to store inormation has added incredible convenience to our Internet lives,  but flaws in cookie-handling have been a thorn in the side of security researchers since Netscape created the technology years ago.  One major problem with cookies from the privacy and security perspective is the notion of third-party cookies. Basically, any site that is displaying content on a page–even if it’s not the same site you’re actually visiting–has the ability to read and write cookies in your browser. For example, if I go to any site with ads, the ad providers could leave cookies behind, in addition to the primary site’s cookies.

This is really not a big deal, except in the case of massive online ad providers such as DoubleClick, who provides ads for countless sites (and happens to be owned by Google). Such providers can read cookies in your browser at any of the sites that you visit with their ads on them, letting them track your browsing habits. Not a very comfortable situation.

Thankfully, as it stands today, all three major browsers have the native ability to protect you from third-party cookies, but only one, Safari, has this protection enabled by default. Google Chrome also lets you limit of third-party cookies, although that feature is turned off by default, as it is in Firefox and IE.

And Chrome’s implementation is not as secure as it should be. Renowned security expert Steve Gibson did a full analysis of its security on a recent episode of the Security Now! podcast and discovered a cookie-handling flaw in the browser known as “cross-context leakage.” Basically, this means that Chrome prohibits writing of third-party cookies, but not the reading of them. If upon clicking a link to a site, I was quickly routed and re-routed through an advertiser’s URL (as depicted below), that advertiser would still be able to track my behavio in a limited fashion.

Gibson attributes this flaw to Chrome’s reliance on the WebKit rendering engine, but I still hold Google at fault for an unnecessary hole in Chrome’s security policies.

Selective JavaScript Controls

In every browser, JavaScript code execution remains the biggest possible source of security problems. As fancy Web 2.0 services find their way into almost every area of our online lives, JavaScript becomes increasingly important. Yet as malware authors use cross-site scripting (XSS), code execution vulnerabilities, and other techniques to do their dirty work, strict JavaScript controls become more and more necessary. Security-conscious Firefox users out there will immediately recall the NoScript add-on as the best implementation of such controls, providing protections from third-party scripts and plug-ins, XSS, and more. Even Internet Explorer and Safari have at least the capability to turn off JavaScript, with the power to do it selectively in IE’s case. Chrome, however, lacks the ability to turn off JavaScript at all.

I know that most people don’t think about JavaScript most of the time, and that Chrome has been praised for its impressive JavaScript handling since day one. But I can’t see myself using Chrome as an everyday browser until it has the ability to turn JavaScript off. The rapidly growing number of JavaScript attacks includes ones hosted by innocent sites that have suffered an SQL injection, which lets hackers execute malicious code in your browser without the knowledge of the afflicted site.

You might also argue that Chrome is really a platform for Web applications, and not just a broswer, so JavaScript is absolutely essential. I agree , but I don’t accept that as an excuse for the browser’s complete lack of controls. I’d even be satisfied by an add-on like NoScript for Chrome that users would have to download separately.

Now For the Good News
After all my harping about Chrome’s small but significant security flaws, I should leave you with some things that do excite me about its security model. Like Firefox and Internet Explorer, Chrome downloads a list of potentially malicious sites regularly, then checks the URLs you visit to ensure you only encounter safe sites. Furthermore, the Google team has implemented some simply awesome sandboxing techniques, preventing the browser from even touching critical parts of your system, leaving them immune from attacks initiated within Chrome. You can see explanations of this system here and here. In truth, I like these protections so much that I would love to see these technologies not only implemented in Chrome but in every other browser out there.

Ultimately, I do think that Chrome has some amazing new technology in it, and that it will push forward the capabilities of standard browsers. I’m hoping the rumors of Google integrating a Firefox-like add-on framework for Chrome are true, so that these and any other foreseeable security problems can be swept away by talented independent developers. But in light of all that’s great about Chrome, I’m even more disappointed about its security flaws. Here’s hoping Google fixes them soon–this browser is, after all, still a beta.

Note: Thanks to Steve Gibson, mentioned above, whose work in investigating the security of Google Chrome was the inspiration for this post.

Well, not exactly, but it’s still pretty entertaining. Chrome may be a Google product, but it’s Google’s version of an open-source project that the company initiated. The open-source version is called Chromium. And CodeWeavers, which produces software based on Wine, the open-source system for running Windows apps without Windows, decided to try its hand at using WINE to create Mac and Linux versions of Chromium. Both are now available for download. I snagged the Mac version, which takes a few minutes to initiate itself once you’ve downloaded and installed the program. And here it is, looking like the Chrome I’ve been using in Windows. (Actually, looking a bit too much like the Windows version: Those are Windows minimize/maximize/close buttons, not Mac ones.)

In answer to the question “Should I run CrossOver Chromium as my main browser?”, CodeWeavers’ FAQ provides a succinct and honest answer: “Absolutely not! This is just a proof of concept, for fun, and to showcase what Wine can do.”  You only need to spend a few minutes with CrossOver Chromium to see that CodeWeavers isn’t being inappropriately modest–fonts and formatting are kind of messed up, and if there’s a way to get Flash working, I haven’t figured it out. As the CodeWeavers blog points out, CrossOver Chromium can’t auto-update itself with security fixes, as Chrome can. And another sign of its Windows origins is the fact that it offers to import bookmarks and other settings from Internet Explorer–even though IE for the Mac is defunct, and Safari is the browser that a new Mac browser would appropriately ask about importing from.

It’s also unclear from CodeWeavers’ blog and FAQ whether it intends to refine CrossOver Chromium or leave it as is. Presumably that’s hard to say: If Google releases Chrome for Mac soon, CrossOver Chromium becomes redundant. But if it’s months and months before Chrome for Mac shows up, CodeWeavers’ browser might have an audience. If the company polishes it up…a lot.

For now, CrossOver Chromium is really a software toy that you’ll likely use for just a few minutes, then put away. But it is fun. And it does whet my appetite for a Mac version of Chrome–one, I hope, that’s even more fully evolved than the Windows one is at this early point in its existence.

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I think it’s pretty much a given that Google will eventually either release a Toolbar for Chrome or essentially build in all of its functionality. But it’ll only happen on Google’s timetable, and I suspect it isn’t priority #1. And while Toolbar is cool, it’s not exactly advanced technology–what it does, mostly, is to provide fast access to various Google services.

Is it possible to put together a stopgap? After reading some of the comments to my original post, in which folks discussed putting bookmarks in Chrome’s Bookmarks Bar to mimic certain aspects of the Toolbar, I decided to try to fake the whole damn thing. Call it Project Fakebar, if you will.

I used two methods to rebuild the Toolbar’s functionality: plain old bookmarks and bookmarklets. The latter are neat bits of JavaScript that let a bookmark do more than just link to pages, and there are a bunch of Google-related ones available around the Web. I used several existing ones that do things similar to Toolbar functions.

If you want to follow along with this experiment at home, a few notes:

1) Start by clicking on Chrome’s wrench icon and selecting “Always show bookmarks bar.” We’re going to fake it into doubling as a pseudo-toolbar, so it needs to stay open.

2) In the instructions below, I link to Web pages that include bookmarklet links–just drag the bookmarklet links onto the Bookmarks Bar to place ‘em there. You can also drag them around to reorder them if you like.

3) I also link to pages that I’ll turn into bookmarks; just click on my link, then click the star to the left of Chrome’s address bar (aka Omnibox)  and make sure that Bookmarks Bar is selected as the folder, then click Close.

4) I edited the names of most of the bookmarks to match Google Toolbar’s names; you can do this by right-clicking on the bookmarks once they’re in the Bookmarks Bar.

5) You may not be silly enough to add all the bookmarks I discuss below–but you can, of course, add only the ones you care about, for a Google Partial Fakebar. Or you can use other bookmarks and bookmarklets to fashion a Google Custom Fakebar.

Here’s what I did, starting from the left-hand side of the Toolbar:

Google Search
Truth to tell, the search field in the Google Toolbar would be kind of superfluous in Chrome, since you can do searches right from the browser’s Omnibox. And I know of no way to truly replicate the Toolbar’s search experience. But the Google Toolbar wouldn’t be the Google Toolbar without search. So let’s use the Google search bookmarklet available here. You can highlight any text on a Web page, then click it to Google that text; if you haven’t highlighted anything, it’ll ask you for text.

Search for News Articles
This icon is basically a link to Google News; we can replicate it easily enough with a simple Google News bookmark.

New buttons available for your Toolbar!
This icon leads to some additional Toolbar features. We can be true to its spirit, if not its specifics, by creating a bookmark that leads to this nifty Google Operating System blog post that includes additional Google-related bookmarklets. Once it’s in the Fakebar, you can click the link to get to a page of additional bookmarklets to drag onto the Fakebar.

Gmail
Click this icon and you go to Gmail; click the little arrow to the right, and your inbox pops up, letting you check your mail without leaving the page you’re on. I don’t know of any way to replicate that latter feature, but a simple bookmark for Gmail handles the first part.

Bookmark This Page
Click this star, and you bookmark the current page using Google’s Web-based bookmarks, which should have some sort of integrated support in Chrome but don’t. This bookmarklet lets you do the same thing.

Bookmarks
This link proves access to a drop-down list of your Web-based bookmarks. The drop-down part we can’t replicate, but a simple bookmark can take us to the bookmarks’ online version.

PageRank
This link gives you Google’s PageRank for the site you’re on–a gauge of how important the Google search engine thinks it is. So can this bookmarklet. The arrow to the right of the PageRank link provides access to more features: one that lets you see Google’s cache of the page (replicable with bookmarklet #5 here), one that lets you see similar pages (bookmarklet #6), and one that shows pages that link to the page you’re on (bookmarklet #7). If we really want to be obsessive, we can fake the drop down by creating a folder on Chrome’s Bookmark Bar, putting all the bookmarklets into it, and changing their names to match the Toolbar’s terminology, like so:

Spellcheck
This lets you spell-check Web forms. Chrome has built-in spellchecking, so we can get away with not trying to replicate this–which is fortunate, since the SpellingCow bookmarklet doesn’t seem to work in Chrome.

Autolink
This turns information on Web pages into links–hotlinking an address to a Google Maps map, for instance. I know of no way to replicate this in Chrome. Betcha that Google builds autolinking into the browser at some point, though.

Send to
This link/drop-down lets you send links to Web info via Gmail, Blogger, or SMS. The Gmail This bookmarklet handles Gmail, and BlogThis takes care of Blogger. Both Google and Yahoo used to offer SMS services, but they seem to have discontinued them; if know of a way to replicate ‘em, let me know. As with PageRank, we can put a folder on the Bookmark Bar and rename the links to simulate the dropdown:

Highlighting
The little highlighter icons highlights the keywords from your most recent search. So does bookmarklet #10 here.

So there you go. I added all these bookmarklets and bookmarks to the Bookmark Bar, edited their names to match the Toolbar (I used a * for the Bookmark This Page’s star), and ended up with this:

It’s not as pretty as the Google Toolbar and doesn’t replicate all of its features, nor make the ones it does provide as convenient. But hey, it’s a start.

Of course, you might not want to dedicate most of your Bookmark Bar’s real estate to the Fakebar. It’s easy enough to create a folder on the Bookmark Bar called Fakebar–right-click and choose “Add Folder…”–and then drag all the bookmarklets and bookmarks into it. That creates a much more space-efficient Fakebar that isn’t really a bar. Which, come to think of it, is in keeping with Chrome’s minimalist spirit:

I’d hoped to post all the bookmarks and bookmarklets needed to create the Fakebar on this site, so you could grab them and bring them into Chrome without much work. But Chrome has no way to open a file of bookmarks, and when I tried loading the Fakebar into IE or Firefox and using Chrome’s browser settings importing feature to get ‘em into Chrome, it didn’t work properly. So if you want a Fakebar, you’ll need to follow my instructions about, which involve about ten minutes’ worth of work.

I had fun putting together the Fakebar; if nothing else, it reminded of just how handy bookmarklets are. If you can build a better Fakebar than mine–or figure out how to automate the process–lemme know how you managed to do it!

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