Sporting a new stable release

Thanks to a full year of great feedback from our users, we're kicking off our second year of Google Chrome with a brand new stable release. This stable release incorporates many of the improvements and features that we tested out in our most recent beta release, including a 150% increase in Javascript performance since our very first beta, a freshly redesigned New Tab page, an improved Omnibox, Themes capability, as well as HTML5 features. You can get the full, play-by-play details on the Official Google Blog.

If you haven't tried Google Chrome recently, we invite you to give it a whirl. Many of the improvements in this release were inspired by the responses from users, so we're all ears if you have any feedback. If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon, but if you're itching to try this right away, download the latest version at google.com/chrome.

Posted by Anthony Laforge, Program Manager

Tip: Even more control over opening links

In the previous tip, we covered middle-clicking and ctrl-clicking to open links in new tabs. There are even more shortcuts you can use to take total control over where links open. Feel free to try these:

Shift-click: Opens a link in a new window (just like right-clicking and selecting "Open link in new window")


Shift-middle-click (or shift-ctrl-click): Opens a link in a new tab, and switches to that tab immediately


Alt-click: Saves the contents of a link to your computer


With these shortcuts, you can quickly handle links no matter how you wish to use them. Enjoy!

Posted by Peter Kasting, Software Engineer

Google Chrome Turns 1!

A lot has happened for Google Chrome since the day we prematurely shipped our comic book, announced Google Chrome just a day before we initially intended, and pushed our browser out of the nest and into Beta. To take stock of this past year, we thought we'd celebrate with a birthday cake, birthday balloons, and a few interesting factoids. Since September 2, 2008, there have been:

• 51 developer releases, 21 beta releases or updates, and 15 stable releases or updates
  
• Over 20,600 bugs filed (4367 of them were duplicates, 3505 have been fixed, which leaves a whole lot left to go!)
  
• 11 external committers and bug editors, 46 external code contributors
  
• 50 Chrome Experiments
  
• 26 posts on the Google Chrome blog
  
• 12 Chrome Shorts, a collection of short films about Google Chrome
  
• A sequel to the comic in Japanese
  

More importantly, we've improved by over 150% on Javascript performance since our initial beta:

We've also added some of the most commonly requested features -- including form autofill, side-by-side view, the ability to remove items from the New Tab page, and full screen mode (just hit F11!) -- and even a bit of magic to make the entire web three-dimensional (okay, that was just a joke).

There's still plenty for us to do. Extensions for Google Chrome are well underway. We're also hard at work on Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, which are making rapid progress on the developer channel. Our Mac and Linux versions are missing a few key features (such as printing), so we're keeping them in the developer channel a little while longer to make sure that they provide a satisfying native experience on these platforms and meet our standards for stability and performance. If you like living on the cutting edge and don't mind the work in progress, you can download Google Chrome for Mac and Linux today through the developer channel.

Before we blow out the candles on Google Chrome's first birthday, we'd like to send a huge thank you to all our users who browse the web with Google Chrome, provide great feedback, and shared your all-round awesomeness with us. The second year of Google Chrome's life is shaping up to be a pretty exciting one, and we look forward to an action-packed year for the browser and the web. Stay tuned.

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

50 Chrome Experiments and counting!

When we launched Chrome Experiments in March, we wanted to create a showcase for innovative uses of web browsers and JavaScript. It was also our hope that artists and programmers from around the world would be inspired to submit their own experiments. Today, we're excited to announce that Chrome Experiments -- which started out as nineteen experiments at launch -- now points to fifty very impressive JavaScript experiments.

We'd like to send a huge thank you to the community for submitting such great work over the last five months. And we're thrilled to see many new submissions by developers from around the world, from Lithuania to Brazil to Australia. As the new generation of JavaScript engines make the web faster, we hope that you're enjoying the creative possibilities as much as we are. Some of our favorite new experiments include Depth of Field, Wavy Scrollbars, JavaScript Canvas Raytracer, and Bomomo.

The 50th Chrome Experiment, Sebastian Deutsch's 100 Tweets, shows a hint of the future by using the HTML5 canvas and audio tags. The audio tag, which is supported in Google Chrome Beta, allows audio playback without a plug-in.

We're very excited about HTML5 becoming standard in modern browsers. If you're thinking about submitting an experiment to Chrome Experiments, we'd love to see some innovative uses of this new standard. We're especially psyched about the video and audio tags.

If you haven't checked out Chrome Experiments recently, we hope that you take some time and explore all the latest experiments. Please keep the experiments coming, and, hopefully, we'll see you again at 100.

Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab

Tip: Opening links in new tabs

Tabs can be great for working with multiple pages at the same time. But if you open them by right-clicking links and selecting "Open link in new tab," you might not have realized that there's an easier way. Just use your middle mouse button (it might look like a wheel) to click a link, and it will open in a new tab in the background.


"But wait," you say, "my mouse doesn't have a middle button!" No problem -- another way to get the same effect is to hold down the Ctrl key while clicking (with the left mouse button) on a link.


(If clicking the middle button on a link doesn't open it, your mouse may be set to use the middle button for something else. You can configure your mouse settings by going to the Windows Control Panel.)

Posted by Peter Kasting, Software Engineer

Recreating the Google Chrome icon: videos from around the world

When I was originally designing the Google Chrome icon, I went through many iterations to figure out how to best represent our brand new web browser. The design needed to stand out on the desktop, look stable yet dynamic, and use color to show some Google branding. Through the design process, another quality that became important to the team was to make the icon feel like a real, tangible object so that clicking on it would be like pressing a real button.

This June, we invited users to take the icon and actually build it in a new, creative way. Many people around the world accepted the challenge and submitted fun and surprising videos of their process. We got to see the icon made out of some interesting materials — like cups, dominos, food and even clothing — as well as many unique digital creations.

I was really impressed by the great care people took in recreating the icon, and I particularly enjoyed this video by Renaud, a fan of Google Chrome in Annecy, France:

A big thank you to everyone who sent us videos. Check out all the submissions here.

Posted by Micheal Lopez, Web Design Lead

A New Beta: Why slow down when you can speed up?

There's a brand new beta for you to try out today. As always, we continue to focus on speed, and this beta release shows over 30% improvement on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over our current stable channel release. We've also improved two of the most loved and most used features of Google Chrome: the New Tab page and the Omnibox. Plus, we decided to add a little bit of style by allowing you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns, and images.

Customize the new New Tab page
The New Tab page has been one of the most popular features in Google Chrome. It's also the one that we hear the most about. Embarrassed that checking out lolcats is showing up as your most popular browser pastime? Now you can bump up something dignified and refined into that top Most Visited slot with a simple click and drag of your mouse. You can pin website thumbnails to a particular spot so they don't disappear even if your browsing habits change. Last but not least, you can hide parts of the page if you don't want to see them using the layout buttons on the top right of the New Tab page.


Rearrange website thumbnails on the New Tab page by clicking and dragging thumbnails


Pin websites thumbnails to a particular spot


Try the latest and greatest Omnibox
The Omnibox is indisputably an important part of Google Chrome -- it helps you get to the sites you're looking for with just a few keystrokes. With this release, we've optimized the presentation of the drop-down menu and added little icons to help you distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your browsing history.




Tweak the chrome of Google Chrome
We built Google Chrome to be speedy, stable and more secure. Now we're adding a little bit of style by allowing you to add a theme to your browser. So, if you've been dying for a browser that reminds you of the Friendly Confines, or if you just want the comfort of your favorite blanket when you're browsing the web, now you can have it. Of course, if baseball or quilting isn't your thing, you can change the theme of your browser by visiting the Themes Gallery. There is still some testing to do -- we're only launching some very basic themes and there are still some kinks to work out, but we will add more themes in the future as we roll this out to the stable version.


A sneak peek at the woody "Desktop" theme



...and your favorite website thumbnails basking on a grassy field


Experience HTML5 capabilities
We're always trying to further push the things you can do in the browser. For example, we've started building HTML5 capabilities into this beta release, including video tag functionality and web workers.


Speed, Speed, and more Speed
Beyond the improvements in JavaScript execution in this latest beta, there are a host of other improvements that should help Google Chrome make the most of your network connection. For example, when you open a new web page while other web pages are still loading, Google Chrome is now smarter about prioritizing the requests for the new page -- for instance, fetching text, images, and video for your new page -- ahead of the requests from the older pages. Loading pages on this beta release should also be faster than ever with DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and using V8 for proxy auto-config.


To try out these new features, you need to get on the beta channel. This means that your version of Google Chrome will regularly get updated with new speed enhancements, features, and bug fixes before most users see them. The beta channel provides a sneak preview of things to come with occasional rough edges, but it's a great way for us to quickly churn out new features and get your feedback.

If you're interested in giving all these fresh new features a whirl, download the beta version of Google Chrome.

Posted by Glen Murphy, Software Engineer