Ubuntu – What does the “a” on customize and control Chromium icon mean

chromium

After upgrading to 14.04 I see a blue lowercase "a" over the "Customize and control Chromium" icon that I've never seen before. What does it mean?

enter image description here

Best Answer

It means you are running chrome/chromium with the new "aura" stack. From the link:

Aura is the (not so) new UI stack that we use in Chrome OS. It does not use native widgets for controls and it fully uses the GPU when available. Compared with the traditional UI stack as seen in Chrome 28 or 29, the only native element is the top level window. Everything else is drawn by Chrome, composited by the the Chrome Compositor and uses Angle/GPU to present to the screen. Focus/Activation and in general input ins managed differently as well.

If you type chrome://version/ it will tell you the build is done with aura:

Chromium    34.0.1847.116 (Developer Build 260972) Ubuntu 14.04 aura
Related Question