Back to the future: two years of Google Chrome

Watching the 1985 classic Back to the Future last night, I was struck by how much things can change with time. The main character Marty McFly travels 30 years back in time, only to find that his house hadn’t been built yet, skateboards hadn’t been invented and nobody had ever heard rock ‘n roll.

Looking back today on Chrome’s second anniversary, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.

Happy 2nd birthday, Google Chrome!
(Illustration: Mike Lemanski, click image to expand)

Since Chrome’s first beta launch for Windows, we’ve brought our Mac and Linux versions up to speed, and continued to make the browser faster, simpler, and safer across all three platforms. We’ve also introduced a boatload of features, including a more customizable New Tab page, browser themes, side-by-side view, password manager, better privacy controls, built-in Adobe Flash Player, Autofill, automatic translation, HTML5 capabilities and synchronization of various settings such as bookmarks, themes, extensions and browser preferences—just to name a few. Finally, there are now more than 6,000 extensions in our gallery to enhance your browsing experience.

Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.

The old Chrome: our very first beta!

Chrome now: Our brand new release today

Today, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.

Sliding back into Doc Brown’s DeLorean and setting the dial ahead by a few months, we have more in store for Chrome. As always, we’re hard at work on making Chrome even faster, and working on ways to improve graphics performance in the browser through hardware acceleration. With the Chrome Web Store, we hope to make it much easier to find and use great applications on the web. We also ratcheted up the pace of our releases so that we can get new features and improvements to everyone more quickly.

If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.

Life on the web, in the browser.
(Illustration: Jack Hudson, click image to expand)

Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

Arcade Fire, HTML5 and Chrome

Today we’re excited to launch a musical experience made specifically for the browser, called “The Wilderness Downtown.” The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with the band Arcade Fire and Google.

“The Wilderness Downtown” is set to Arcade Fire’s new song “We Used to Wait”, and showcases many of the latest developments on the web. It features a mash-up of Google Maps and Google Street View with HTML5 canvas, HTML5 audio and video, an interactive drawing tool, and choreographed windows that dance around the screen. These modern web technologies have helped us craft an experience that is personalized and unique for each viewer, as you virtually run through the streets where you grew up.




Browsers and the modern web have indeed come a long way since Chrome was introduced, and we hope this project provides a glimpse at some of what the future holds. The project was built with Chrome in mind, so it’s best experienced in Chrome’s beta or stable builds. To launch the project and learn more about how we made it, please visit our Chrome Experiments site at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

Posted by Thomas Gayno, Google Creative Lab

More ways to find the right Chrome Extension for you

A few months ago, we launched several categories of featured Chrome extensions to help you find the right one. Today, in addition to updating these pages with new extensions, we are also launching more categories to enhance your web experiences in News and weather, Photos, Productivity, Search tools and Social.



If you have a busy life online and offline, extensions in the Productivity category can help you be more efficient and productive on the web. With Start! or Incredible Start Page, you can customize your New Tab page to quickly access your favorite sites. Extensions like StayFocusd and Time Tracker can help you keep track of your time spent on various web sites.

Chrome extensions can also help you view, edit and share photos and images easily. You can take screenshots of web pages using Awesome Screenshot and Webpage Screenshot. You can also transform your favorite photo sites into slideshows with iSlide or scroll through images on an infinite 3D wall with Cooliris.

For those who use social networking services like Twitter, Facebook and Google Buzz, there are extensions to help you stay connected with your family and friends. With Shareaholic for Google Chrome or AddThis, you can share web pages to your social networks, email and blogs. For Twitter users, TweetMeme to retweet any article you find on the web. There are also full-featured Twitter extensions like Chromed Bird or Chrowety that allows you to follow and send tweets, retweets and direct messages from your Google Chrome browser.

I hope you enjoy these new categories of extensions. We are working to make the categories in the gallery more dynamic so you can easily find the Chrome extensions you want.

Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Instantly zap links, maps and phone numbers to your Android phone with Chrome to Phone!

Ever wanted a way to quickly and easily send links and other information from your desktop or laptop to your phone to view on the go? The new Chrome to Phone extension adds a button to your Google Chrome browser that instantly sends the current web page, map, YouTube video, or selected phone number or text to your Android device running Froyo (or Android 2.2).

Suppose you're reading an interesting article on your favorite news website and need to leave for an urgent appointment. Simply click the extension icon in your browser to send the link to your phone and the device's browser will automatically open the link, ready for you to view on the go.

Chrome to Phone also works seamlessly with Google Maps. Say you’ve looked up an address or driving directions on your desktop. Clicking the extension icon in your browser will push the information to the Google Maps app on your phone. YouTube videos work the same way with the extension. You can also select a phone number on a web page and send it to the dialer on your phone. Selected text can also be automatically copied from your browser and sent to your Android clipboard for later viewing.



The Chrome to Phone extension is available in English for now, but we hope to expand to other languages soon. Check out the help center if you have further questions.

To get Chrome to Phone, install the extension in your Google Chrome browser and the Android application on your phone, and you’re ready to go.

Posted by Dave Burke, Engineering Manager

Syncing, simplifying, and speeding up with Chrome’s new beta

In today’s new Google Chrome beta release, we’re introducing a host of new beta features which will further improve Chrome’s ease of use and speed.

One of my favorite features, Autofill, helps you fill in web forms automatically with information that you specify, such as your name, address, phone number, and the credit card number you use for shopping online. Autofill builds up and saves this information for you over time, so that you can fill in long web forms with just a few clicks without typing in the same information over again. For your security, any personal information stored in Chrome is safely stored and kept private until a user chooses to share the information with a website. Additionally, your credit card information is never saved without first asking you explicitly.

For a demo of Autofill, check out this video:


We also continue to bring more synchronization capabilities to Chrome. In addition to syncing bookmarks, preferences, and themes, you can now choose to sync your Chrome extensions as well as your Autofill data (excluding credit card numbers) through your Google Account. With Chrome’s sync features, you can personalize your Chrome experience and access your painstakingly curated set of bookmarks, preferences, themes, extensions, and Autofill data from any computer you choose, as long as you’re signed in to your Google Account on Chrome for that computer. To start syncing, go to the the “Sync” section of the “Personal Stuff” tab in Chrome’s options.

You may notice that we’ve given the user interface of the browser a facelift in this beta. As previewed on the developer channel in June, we have streamlined the upper toolbar, made the Omnibox more approachable, and condensed all of our options into a single menu. We hope that these visual changes will make Chrome feel even simpler.

Last, but certainly not least, our new beta release continues to be faster than before. Compared to our previous beta release, our newest beta hits a 15% speed improvement on the V8 benchmark, and a 15% improvement on the SunSpider benchmark, both of which measure JavaScript performance. Additionally, we’ve improved by 64% on Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests.



As always, Google Chrome will automatically update itself with the latest changes if you are subscribed to the beta channel. Stable channel users, hang tight -- these features and improvements will be available in the stable channel soon once we’ve given it a good test run on beta!


Posted by James Hawkins, Software Engineer

Become the ultimate sports fan with Chrome Extensions

Football season is coming soon. There are also many other sports events like baseball, tennis, golf and soccer that are in full swing. For die-hard sports fans out there, I found some handy Chrome extensions to help you track all the games, matches and player stats.

The Are You Watching This?! Sports extension alerts you when games get interesting via colored icons, so you know when to turn in. It lists the scores, news and TV listings for many professional and college sports in the US.

For those who need an edge in your fantasy sports leagues, there are a few Chrome extensions that can help you improve your fantasy team fast. Pickemfirst Fantasy Sports works with Yahoo!, ESPN, CBS and many other fantasy sports websites. This extension brings you news, stats and blogger opinions about all the players mentioned on the web page currently displayed in your browser.

Tweetbeat Firsthand brings in recent tweets from people and organizations mentioned in the page you're looking at. With this extension, you can see what players, coaches, sports bloggers and commentators think about upcoming matchups.

If following sports online is not enough for you. StubHub's Event Ticket Finder helps you find last-minute tickets to your favorite sports events right in your browser.

These are just a few extensions to help you stay on top of your game, and you can find many more in the Chrome extensions gallery.

Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager

100 Chrome Experiments and counting!

Last year we launched Chrome Experiments, a website showcasing innovative web experiments built with open standards like JavaScript and HTML5. Today we’re pleased to announce that the site now points to 100 experiments -- each one made, hosted, and submitted by programmers from around the world.


Since the site launched just 18 months ago, browsers have been improving at a rapid pace, and the latest experiments have taken advantage of that. A big step forward has been the widespread adoption and support of HTML5, which is becoming standard in all modern browsers. New functionality like the video and canvas tags have made for some inspiring work. It’s hard to pick our favorites, but a few innovative submissions include Destructive Video, SketchPad, and Harmony.

If you haven’t checked out Chrome Experiments recently, do take some time to explore the work of these talented artists/programmers in Google Chrome or any modern browser. Of course, if you’re a programmer yourself, we’d love to see your work -- just click the Submit button at the top of the site.

Thanks to everyone who has helped spread awareness of what browsers can do. We can’t wait to see what the future holds, and we’ll see you again at 200.

Posted by Aaron Koblin and Valdean Klump, Google Creative Lab