Hi, it's HandyAndy Tech Tips here.
Now I don't need to tell you that Google Chrome is a great web browser.
According to StatCounter, it's actually the most widely used
browser in most countries around the world, as you can see by this map where the green
colour means high usage of Chrome.
Now the reason why Google's browser is so good is that, along with Firefox, it broke
the monopoly held by Microsoft's Internet Explorer and really encouraged browser makers
to adopt more web standards.
But in an effort to make their browser more streamlined, Google has actually removed some
features from Chrome.
In this video, we'll be looking at four of them.
1.
OK Google.
With Chrome 46, which was released in October 2015, this voice activated search function
was removed.
It basically allowed you to search without ever touching
your keyboard or mouse; you'd just say OK Google into your microphone, and then everything
you said after that would become a part of your search query.
But if you really liked this feature, then don't worry too much - you
can still click the microphone icon in the search bar on Google.com and do a speech to
text search.
Sure, you now need to use your mouse, instead of just doing everything
with your voice, but this shouldn't be too hard.
Also, keep in mind that this feature has only been removed from the desktop
versions of Chrome, and is still available on the Android and Chromebook versions.
2.
the Notification Center.
This feature was also killed off in October of this year.
It allowed web pages to put notifications on your desktop, and aggregated them in one
central place.
If you use a Mac, then you would be familiar with the little bell icon in your menu bar
- that was the Notification Centre.
But unfortunately, it seems like nobody really used it, so Google have removed
it from their desktop versions of Chrome.
However, it will still be available on Chromebooks.
3.
CSS vendor prefixes.
Now we start getting into the more technical items on the list, and this is one which really
affected me as I like to develop webpages.
So, if you've never heard of it before, CSS is a language which
allows you to style web pages, so you can change the font style of headings, add page
backgrounds, basically do anything that involves the visual presentation of your site.
But sometimes, the inbuilt features in CSS aren't good enough to create the design you
want, so browser vendors started adding new features
to the language.
So that these new declarations didn't break the standard or cause compatibility issues
for other browsers, they were prefixed, so Chrome had -webkit, Firefox had -moz,
and so on.
But when Chrome's rendering engine changed from Webkit to Blink back in 2013, it was
announced that no new vendor prefixes would be created for Blink.
Now this means a couple of things.
Firstly, this move effectively ends the implementation of custom CSS features into Chrome.
It means that, if the developers of Blink want to add a new feature
to the CSS language, then they need to get it standardised with the W3C, so web
developers will have to wait a very long time before they can use it.
But there is an advantage - this also means the end to CSS prefix hell, where developers
had to put so many prefixes in for all the different browsers
that it nearly drove them crazy.
4.
NPAPI.
Plugins have been supported in web browsers for a lot longer than you might think.
The popular NPAPI architecture allowed plugins to be
run inside the web browser for the first time.
It was created for Netscape Navigator way back in 1995 - that's 20 years ago now - and,
amazingly, it was still widely used up until just a few years ago.
But in 2013, Google announced that Chrome would be dropping support for the feature,
because it was filled with security vulnerabilities and, because of its age and complexity,
was a major source of crashing.
Now it's 2015, and, even though NPAPI is gone from Google Chrome, you can still run plugins
in the browser, using a new architecture called Pepper.
So I hope you enjoyed the top 4 missing features in Google Chrome.
If you did, then please subscribe to my channel for more videos like this, and do feel free
to give this video a like.
I'm HandyAndy Tech Tips and thanks so much for watching!