Land of the Rising Chrome

Google Chrome is available in 50 languages, but that's not the only thing international about it. The browser was developed by open-source contributors and Google engineers from around the globe, including our Tokyo office.

Engineers at Google Japan developed the Navigational Suggest feature that makes it faster to get where you want to go. For example, if you type "tokyo tower" into the Omnibox, the nifty search and address bar, you'll see a suggestion that will take you directly to the landmark's official website.



Our Japanese engineers also figured out how to speed up Google Chrome's rendering of double-byte languages like Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.

Since comics (or manga) are quite popular in Japan, we thought Japanese users would enjoy a comic book about the contributions of our local team. So we created a brand new issue of our comic book in Japanese. Even if you can't read Japanese, I think you'll enjoy it.




The illustrations are by a talented Japanese artist named Yutanpo Shirane, who picked up right where the first comic left off.

Posted by Kaori Negoro and John Fu, Google Japan

Get to where you're going, faster

Google Chrome's New Tab page is designed to help you get to where you're going, faster. In the following video, I'll show you an overview of how it works and the newly added ability to remove items from the page.



Posted by Glen Murphy, Google Chrome team

Join the Google Chrome icon project

A few weeks ago, a few of us on the Google Chrome team decided to experiment with creating the Google Chrome icon out of different objects. We started off simple, using things like spoons and balloons, and eventually progressed to more elaborate creations, using stop-animation and other video effects. We even created a cake!



We know from past experience that users are the ones who come up with the coolest stuff. So with that, we now turn the challenge to YOU to make a video showing the formation of the Google Chrome icon in a big, unusual or creative way.

Imagine a bird's eye view of a parking lot with carefully arranged cars, coordinated outfits in a stadium's bleachers, a 10,000 M&M mural, etc. We are excited to see what you come up with and we'll showcase the best submissions!

Here are the details:

• You have until July 22 to submit your video
• Users from all over the world are invited to participate
• The best entries will be featured on Google & YouTube

To start you thinking, here's a quick video of our team's experiments. It also includes two great ideas from FlippyCat and Anna the Red:



To learn more and submit your video, visit google.com/chromeicon09.

Posted by Jason Toff, Google Chrome team

Get to know the Omnibox

Looking at usage statistics, we've noticed that many users don't take full advantage of the search capabilities of the Omnibox, our combined search and address bar. So we decided to make the following short video to show you the basics of how it works. I hope you enjoy!



Posted by Ben Goodger, Google Chrome team

A Speedier Google Chrome for all users

It's been about 8 months since we launched Google Chrome. Aside from exclaiming how fast it is, users have been sending us lots of feedback and feature requests. We've increased our focus on speed and also added some of the most-requested features. Some of these improvements made it into the Beta version that we first released in March, and we've continued to improve the Beta since then. Today, we are moving the Beta version to the stable channel for all users to enjoy.

Here are some improvements that you'll notice right away:

Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.

Full Screen Mode: If you've ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.

Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you've previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that's easy to do from the Tools menu.

And here are some improvements that aren't immediately visible, but will make web browsing with Google Chrome more enjoyable:

Increased Stability: Google Chrome is more stable than ever--we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.

Increased Speed: Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. We've also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark. You can read more about V8 in our JavaScript scalability post on the Chromium blog.

To hear more about these improvements, check out the following video by Product Manager, Brian Rakowski:



If you're already using Google Chrome, you'll be automatically updated to this new version soon. If you're new or if you're itching to try this right away, you can get the latest version at google.com/chrome.

Finally, a note on version numbers: we're referring to this as Chrome 2, but that's mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don't give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible.

Darin Fisher, Google Chrome Team

Improvements to Google Update for Administrators

If you're an IT administrator, you may be interested to know that today, on the Open Source blog, we announced a way to manage the update cycle for Google Chrome via Google Update for Administrators. This means that administrators are now able to specify how often to check for updates, how applications should be updated, and whether to allow installation of certain applications.

Read more on the Open Source blog.

Posted by Jason Toff, Google Chrome team

11 short films about a browser

For those of us who live and work on the web, the browser is an unsung hero. It's become the most important piece of software on our computer, but rarely is it given proper recognition, let alone fêted.

We invited some creative friends to make short movies about our own browser, Google Chrome, and then watched as they came back with dozens of interesting ways to portray the browser. After finishing his video, artist and illustrator Christoph Niemann wrote to us about his approach:

"Instead of thinking of what I wanted to show, I tried to think about what I did NOT want to show. I realized that when I use a computer or browse the web these days, the one thing I do NOT think about is... a computer.

There was a time when I knew the meaning of every single item in my system folder and had to wisely allocate RAM to an application before burdening it with a complex task. Dealing with a computer has become much simpler these days (if everything works), but much more difficult and complex (especially if it doesn't behave) — almost like dealing with a living creature.

I wanted to find a simple metaphor that explains what a browser does, without showing a screen, a keyboard, the letters WWW, pixels, zeroes or ones.

Initially I thought of my mom (the browser) who brings me (the user) a plate of spaghetti bolognese (the Internet). But since spaghetti bolognese is not a rewarding thing to draw, let alone animate, I went for the next best metaphor, which can be seen in the animation."

Along with Christoph's video, there are great shorts by Motion Theory, Steve Mottershead, Go Robot, Open, Default Office, Hunter Gatherer, Lifelong Friendship Society, SuperFad, Jeff&Paul, and Pantograph. You can view the individual Chrome Shorts on our YouTube channel as well as a quick compilation below. 

We're really excited about the imagination and range of their ideas, and we hope you enjoy them.

Posted by Ji Lee, Creative Lab