Reloaded Software

Loosely Chrome-related, more about getting Windows 7 up and running

The Vista 2.0 Windows 7 beta successfully installed, I was immediately shot down on the two non-work critical apps that I use: Chrome and Skype.

While I am still working on getting Skype working, I have found the following to make Chrome work:

Find the shortcut for Chrome and add the following after the quoted binary path

–in-process-plugins

While this modifies the start menu (or taskbar) shortcut for direct launch, I still have some issues when launching the browser via a document or Url handler.

A registry change to HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\ChromeHTML\shell\open\command where the command line is made the same as for the shortcut seems to take care of all other use and Chrome therefore acts correctly as the system default browser.

The number of comments posted after the last update that fell in to the negative column was unexpected. While I hope that these still represent the minority of those who have tried this program, I am suspicious. My testing is limited to two generic systems, and I could have easily missed something. So, I went ahead and turned on some really basic logging so that I could get some idea (better than none) of what might be happening for those who say that this application has failed for them.

Logging is enabled only during the export step. If you have a problem, send me your log file (named BookmarkExportLog.txt) via email – it may help. If you are having a problem outside of the export steps, you really need to send me a screenshot of the dialog which describes the error.

I also made a few changes so that your bookmarks will export correctly even when they contain non-English characters (in response to the comments about Russian language support, as well as others). I did some testing with Chinese, Russian, and some other languages and all went well.

The bookmarks file generated is easily imported in to Firefox, but it will not import in to Explorer. I was concerned about this for all of 10 seconds, as Explorer wont even export bookmarks that it creates itself if they happen to contain these foreign characters. I am about done on this subject, but I would assume that if you have a (for example) Russian native version of Windows, then the file will import and of course you can export – but I am not adventurous enough tonight to try it myself. Someone, feel free to let me know how things turn out.

Current state of things:

Updates were made today to permit this application to export bookmarks from any version of Chrome, and likely the Chromium build as well. Have at it.

Essentially, this means no more errors mentioning the ‘starred’ table. I for one will be glad to never hear of that again.

The original story:

Having nothing better to do the other week, I installed the new Google Chrome browser. It seemed to be working pretty well, and without getting to much in to it right here; for me the choice in a browser doesn’t get me all that excited, so I went ahead and made Chrome my default web browser for my main system.

I haven’t really had any complaints - I avoid plugins and themes anyway but I did think at some point that I should mirror my newly added bookmarks back to Firefox or IE, only to find that the export functionality is not yet implemented.

So, here, for my own use and yours too if you have the need, is a very simple program to export bookmarks from Chrome to a standard document (the age-old bookmark.html file) usable by Firefox or IE (or I would imagine just about anything else).

While I was there, I also added the tremendously useless button to remove all download history as well - another item that seems to not be available yet in Chrome itself.

No warranties or guarantees on this program doing just what you want it to do, but I needed it, I use it now, and I forced myself to actually test it on several systems (OK… two systems. Vista 64 and XP 32). Feel free to use it yourself, just unzip and run. I’m open to adding more if you have got an interesting idea, but otherwise I would expect that this program will become unnecessary with a forthcoming Chrome update.

Until then….

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