Google’s Aura hardware accelerated window manager
remains a mystery to the outside world, but there is now a video that
gives a first impression of a feature in Aura: Translucent windows.
François Beaufort, a Chrome developer, posted the
note about Aura on Google+ with a link to a YouTube video. There isn’t
much to see other than, well, a translucent window frame, which can be
activated in the Chromium Aura build via a flag, as well as constrained
window dragging. Beaufort notes that “it is definitely work in progress”
and there is certainly the indication that Aura will not be ready for a
public release anytime soon.
Aura is described by Google as a hardware-accelerated user interface
that will enable much richer visuals than Chrome delivers today. The
main goal for Google is to depart from Gtk and a Microsoft-dependent
user interface as well as Windows-specific elements that are causing
headaches in the cross-platform code of Chrome. Aura is designed to work
much more seamlessly across all platforms, including Mac and Linux.
Those users who are keeping up with the publicly available developer
builds of Chromium recently got several new features in the browser.
Most importantly, the chrome://net-internals page got a timeline feature
that now paints a graph of incoming and outgoing data traffic, there is
a new (and expected) flag for Pointer Lock, which hands over control of
the mouse pointer to a web application and there is a nifty tab
overview in chrome://sessions, which displays all open tabs - which is
especially informative, if the live tab syncing feature is enabled and a
user can see which tabs are opened on all synced devices.
Wolfgang Gruener in Products on November 21
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