I’ve spent the last two weeks wandering around London, Paris, and Istanbul (not Constantinople.) As an experiment, I left my trusty MacBook Pro behind and brought only the $199 Chromebook on which I type this. And to my considerable surprise it has served admirably. So admirably, in fact, that I believe ChromeOS is only one or two iterations away from being the right choice for many-if not most… → Read More
Google’s decision to fork WebKit and launch its own Blink rendering engine came as a surprise when the company made the announcement just over a month ago. Yesterday, at the Google I/O developer conference, the Blink team provided an update about the state of the engine. As Alex Komoroske, a product manager on Chrome’s Open Web Platform told the audience, the team has already removed 8.8 million… → Read More
Sundar Pichai, Google’s senior vice president for Chrome and Android today announced that the company’s Chrome browser now has more than 750 million monthly active users. That’s up from 450 million users Google announced at last year’s I/O. This number, as far as we can see, includes both desktop and mobile users. Google launched Chrome in 2008 and since then, as Google… → Read More
At last year’s I/O, Google launched its Cloud Messaging push notification service for Android. This week, it extended this service to Chrome and Chrome OS, which, Google says, allows Chrome apps and extension developers to wake up their apps remotely and/or send alerts to users. → Read More
Google just reminded developers that they can use Chrome as the default browser for their apps and easily switch back and forth between app and browser. With x-callback, Google says, developers can open links in Chrome and once the page has loaded, Chrome will show a link back to the original app in the top left corner of the screen. This should make it much easier for developers to allow users to… → Read More
A few months ago, Google announced the Windows Start button-like app launcher for Chrome on Windows, and with it, a way to easily launch Chrome packaged apps, a new way to write apps that are based on Chrome and web technologies but behave like native apps. These packaged apps for Chrome are based on HTML5, CSS and JavaScript, but they behave like native apps and have access to Chrome APIs and… → Read More
Google always said that its Chromebooks were “for sharing,” but even though they always had a guest mode, they weren’t necessarily set up to be used as public Internet kiosks. Today, Google is changing that with the launch of the new and imaginatively named “Managed Public Sessions” feature. Google says this new feature, which lets you turn your Chrome OS device into… → Read More
At the end of last year, Google announced that it would start testing a number of changes to Chrome’s New Tab page. The changes that were currently percolating through the development channels were anything but popular. Instead of the usual eight links to your most-visited sites, the Chrome beta channel currently features a large Google Search box and just your four most-visited links. Now… → Read More
If you regularly need to open Microsoft Office documents in the browser, Google now offers you a new Chrome extension that renders Word, Excel and PowerPoint files directly in the browser. Currently, these documents open in a Drive-based viewer, but after you install the new Chrome Office Viewer (which is officially still in beta), these documents will open directly in the browser. Until now, this… → Read More
With the Era of Over-sharing and the Social Fire Hose upon us, the heft and value of privacy is changing — and, for better or worse, many argue that it’s diminishing. Perturbed by the access many companies (inconspicuously) have to our browsing history, former Googler Brian Kennish developed a Chrome Extension to address the browser privacy issue. Facebook Connect, as it was called then, disabled… → Read More
Chrome will soon warn users when they are about to download software that could try to change how the browser handles extensions. Specifically, this extension to the company’s Safe Browsing system looks for binaries that could allow potentially malicious extensions to be installed in the browser without the user’s knowledge. This new feature will roll out within the next few days. Last… → Read More
Google today added a new feature to Google Apps for Business that could make its Chrome browser significantly more palatable for businesses. The company’s new cloud-based management tool for Google Apps for Business and Education customers now gives IT administrators the ability to customize more than 100 Chrome policies and preferences for their users right from the standard Google Admin… → Read More
It’s sure been an interesting week for this of us who cover browsers. Last weekend, we heard that Internet Explorer 11 will probably support WebGL and SPDY. Then, on Tuesday I got an email from Mozilla, asking if I had time to get on the phone with Mozilla’s CTO Brendan Eich to talk about the organization’s next generation browser engine Servo and the Rust language it is written… → Read More
The latest Chrome beta just hit Google’s release channels and Chrome 27 for desktop, and mobile promises to speed up your web-browsing experience by making content appear on your screen 5 percent faster than before. Also new in this release are a new user interface for HTML5 date and time input forms, support for live audio input using the Web Audio API, some minor updates to the Chrome… → Read More
Google just announced that it is forking WebKit and launching this fork as Blink. As Google describes it, Blink is “an inclusive open source community” and ”a new rendering engine based on WebKit” that will, over time, “naturally evolve in different directions.” Blink, Google says, will be all about speed and simplicity. It will soon make its way from Chromium… → Read More
If you were one of the three million people who watched Google’s Gmail Blue prank yesterday and found yourself wondering just how horrible it’d be if it weren’t, you know, a joke — you’re in luck! → Read More
Google’s Eric Schmidt has said Mountain View will keep its two OSes, Android and Chrome, separate after all, according to a Reuters report. Schmidt, who is in India attending an IT event called Big Tent Activate Summit, said the two operating systems will remain separate products but apparently also said there could be more “commonality” between them. → Read More
Verrrrry interesting. Last week, amid the Google Reader fallout, we noticed that Google had removed its RSS Subscription Chrome browser extension from the Chrome Web Store. While the move was not as high-profile as the Google Reader shutdown, it spoke more broadly of Google’s intentions towards the RSS format itself – that is, maybe the search giant was ready to distance itself from the… → Read More
Google has learned all that it needs to learn about the reception of its Chromebook laptops in the U.S. and UK and has announced availability of Acer, HP and Samsung flavors of its device in Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland and the Netherlands. As we’ve spent time with Google’s Chromebook and OS, it has become apparent that the goal of the operating system is to focus on… → Read More
Google’s operating system Chrome OS survived all attempts to hack it at this year’s Pwnium 3 competition, which took place at the CanSecWest security conference in Vancouver, BC this week. Google, which was offering up $3.14159 million in prize money (get it, Pi money?), said that there was no winning entry, but it was in the process of evaluating some exploits for partial credit. → Read More
Google just announced that it has released a new feature for the Chrome Beta for Android that could speed up web browsing and save bandwidth for mobile Chrome users. With this proxy feature turned on, all your web requests will be routed through Google’s servers, where the company then uses its PageSpeed libraries to compress and optimize the content. The actual connection to the browser… → Read More
Ever since Google launched its Chrome browser on multiple mobile devices, more people have been getting used to syncing their desktop browsing experiences for on-the-go usage. Being able to have one browsing experience wherever you go is handy, but when a browser doesn’t move as fast as, say, Safari on the iPhone, it’s hard to dedicate yourself to making the switch. Google knows that… → Read More
According to a new report from ad network Chitika, Chrome OS usage continues to increase, but it still trails the PlayStation and the various flavors of Linux that the company sees on its network. Since last June, Chrome OS’s share of traffic on Chitika’s network increased by 700 percent. Even so, Chromebooks still just account for 0.07 percent of desktop- and laptop-based traffic to… → Read More
At the CSUN International Technology and Persons with Disabilities Conference this week, Google announced that it has added a number of accessibility to Chrome, Chrome OS, Gmail and Google Drive that should make using Google suites of web apps a bit easier to use for blind and low-vision users. In addition, Google also launched a new sign language interpreter app and keyboard shortcuts for… → Read More
Google’s Super Sync Sports Chrome Experiment is what happens when you put modern web technology, smartphones and a love of 80s sports games into one rather wacky package where cupcakes race moose heads for virtual gold. The new game, which Google announced this morning, runs in your desktop browser, but you use your smartphone or tablet as the game controller to make your avatars run, cycle… → Read More
With the release of the latest Chrome Beta today (version 26), Google is rolling out a new spell checker inside its browser and on Google Docs. The new version features support for three additional languages (Korean, Tamil and Albanian) and a number of other improvements. The most important new feature, however, is that users who sync their Chrome settings between devices can now also sync their… → Read More
When talking about Apple’s rise from near-bankruptcy to become the most valuable company in the world, people often credit the amazing string of products from the iMac to the iPod to the iPhone to the iPad. And rightfully so. But just as important was another piece of the puzzle that ensured said products would find mainstream appeal and acted as an accelerant for Apple’s success: the Apple… → Read More
WebRTC, the plugin-free real-time video, audio and text chat protocol most browser vendors now support, is now activated by default in the latest bleeding edge Firefox Nightly release. While Mozilla has long backed WebRTC, it was only available as an option in the Nightly releases so far. Now that it is enabled by default, chances are that it will slowly make its way into the stable release… → Read More
The news that Opera is shutting down the development of its own browser rendering engine and moving to the open source WebKit engine cause quite a stir earlier this week. With WebKit powering the built-in browsers of Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS, it’s already the de-facto standard engine for the mobile and it has the potential to do the same on the desktop. Worldwide, Chrome now holds a … → Read More
One nifty feature of HTML5 is that apps can store data locally on your computer and have it available even when you are offline. Google today introduced a new API for Chrome, the Sync FileSystem API, that offers an app-private sandboxed file storage system, similar to what’s already in the HTML5 specs. The interesting new feature here is that this data is also automatically synchronized across… → Read More
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