Appy Holidays from the Chrome Web Store

The winter holidays are my favorite time of the year: I get to spend quality time with friends and family and eat lots of delicious food. However, between booking airplane tickets, sending greeting cards and looking for the perfect gifts, the pre-holiday season can be busy...and even a bit stressful. This year though, I feel much more in control thanks to the apps I discovered in the Chrome Web Store’s Holiday collection.

If you are looking for last minute holiday gifts, try Gilt for Chrome. Within the app, you can find the latest designer fashion items on sale and search for specific items and sizes like “men’s shoes size 11.”



I also recommend Amazon Windowshop. You can use the app to browse through millions of products in a slick way. For example my cousin really likes cupcakes: a search in the app shows me cupcake related products organized across categories like books, groceries and clothing, helping me find unique gifts.



For those of you still planning your trip home, check out Hipmunk. Hipmunk sorts all available flights to your destination by “agony” -- a mix of price, duration, and number of connections. You can see all the flights that meet your needs in a single view.



Finally, if you are late like I am in sending holiday cards, I suggest checking out Stupeflix Video Maker. In the app you can select a theme (my favorite one is “Celebrate”), insert pictures, text, and music, and create a free 60-second greeting that you can email or post on YouTube and Facebook. Or, you can simply create beautiful photo slideshows with DropMocks and comemories.

There are hundreds more apps to discover at the Chrome Web Store.

Happy Holidays!

Posted by Christos Apartoglou, Product Marketing Manager

60 million tabs towards good causes

In 2010, the Chrome community has joined us in moments of fun, invention, exploration, and now, giving. Last week, we invited Chrome’s users worldwide to “donate” their opened tabs in Chrome to drive a charitable gift of one million dollars. We on the Chrome team were deeply impressed with the support and participation and now we’re happy to share the results with you.

The Chrome community responded with staggering enthusiasm and, acting together, raised 60,599,541 tabs for charity.

Each Chrome user chose the causes their tabs would support, which determined how we allocated our one million dollar donation. Accordingly, we’re excited to make the following donations on behalf of the Chrome community:

• $245,278 toward planting trees in the Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s endangered tropical forests.
• $232,791 toward providing clean water, by building freshwater wells for communities in developing nations.
• $112,078 toward building shelter, to be constructed by volunteers for impoverished families in Latin America.
• $267,336 toward administering vaccinations against meningitis to combat outbreaks in Africa.
• $142,518 toward publishing books by local writers and illustrators, which will be created and donated to schools and libraries across Asia and Africa.

We’ll be making the donations at year-end, and our partner charities are already looking towards applying the funds from Chrome for a Cause in 2011. Read more about how your donation will be applied specifically by visiting our partners’ websites:

• The Nature Conservancy
• charity: water
• Un Techo para mi País
• Doctors Without Borders
• Room to Read

We're glad to connect Chrome users with these important causes all around the world -- so much so that we’re already thinking of more Chrome for a Cause projects for the future!

Feel free to keep your extension installed if you’d like to hear about future opportunities to work together with the Chrome community for a good cause. We’ll post all the details about how to participate on the Chrome blog, so make sure you check in when you hear about new opportunities.

Thanks for joining us in this endeavor. Happy Holidays!

Posted by Sarah Nahm, Product Marketing Manager

Guest post from the Demo Lab: Help us test the Cr-48

Here at the Demo Lab we have only one mission: to protect your data no matter what happens to your computer. To serve this mission we have been evaluating our Cr-48 prototype notebooks in challenging, some might say extreme, conditions. We’ve been in the lab testing notebooks exhaustively (I'm talking 24 hours a day here). But, to try out as many notebooks as possible, we’re opening up the lab to the public today.

Are you ready to help take the Cr-48 through its paces? If you are up to this challenge, take these mean machines through explosions, carbicide, and destruction by ravenous zombies at google.com/demolab. While you're at it, you can submit an application to the Chrome notebook Pilot program.

That's all from here. Good luck, remember to wear your safety goggles at all times, and see you in the lab.


Posted by Lab Tech, Demo Lab

Safer plug-ins, faster search, and richer graphics

Last week, we previewed several upcoming features that will be available to users on Chrome and Chrome OS. Today we’re excited to introduce a few of these new security, speed, and open web platform features into Chrome’s beta channel.

As one of the engineers working on Chrome’s sandbox, I’m happy to announce that we’re bringing Chrome’s existing sandboxing technology for web pages to the Flash Player plug-in in Chrome for Windows. The sandbox adds an additional layer of protection to further guard against malicious pages that try to hijack your computer or steal private information from your hard drive. Based on this groundwork in the beta, we’ll be bringing the sandboxed Flash Player to Chrome for Mac and Linux in future releases as well. For an explanation of how sandboxing technology makes Chrome safer, check out this animated video:



With the latest beta, you can turn on Chrome Instant (à la Google Instant), which lets you view web pages and search results faster than ever. With Instant enabled, web pages that you frequently visit will begin loading as soon as you start typing a URL in the omnibox, faster than you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’ (or in this case, faster than you can hit Enter). In addition, if supported by your default search engine, search results appear instantly as you type queries in the omnibox, and in-line predictions will also appear to help guide your search. Give it a whirl by enabling it on the Basics tab of Chrome’s options and see how you like it!

Finally, this beta will include WebGL, a new web technology for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser. For more on WebGL in Chrome, check out the Chromium blog. If you’d like to learn more about 3D in the browser and what hardware-accelerated graphics, read on in our online guidebook to browsers and the web.

We hope you’ll enjoy this safer, faster, and more powerful version of the Chrome beta!


Posted by Carlos Pizano, Software Engineer

Browse for a good cause

Whether it’s bug fixes to the Chromium open source project, dazzling apps and extensions arriving daily in our Web Store, or boundary-pushing Chrome experiments -- the Chrome community never fails to inspire us with their awesomeness.

This holiday, we wanted to enable the Chrome community to work together for a good cause. Starting today, we invite you to support five worthy causes by counting and “donating” the tabs you open in Chrome.

Everyone’s total tabs will determine a charitable donation made on behalf of the Chrome community, up to one million dollars. Here's what your tabs can do:

• 10 tabs = 1 tree planted
• 10 tabs = 1 book published and donated
• 25 tabs = 1 vaccination treatment provided
• 100 tabs = 1 square foot of shelter built
• 200 tabs = 1 person's clean water for a year

To find out more about this effort and the organizations we're partnering with, visit google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/.

Want to participate?

• Get the Chrome for a Cause extension
• Browse the web with Chrome between December 15 - 19
• At the end of each day, you’ll be prompted to click on the extension to submit your tabs
• Choose which charity you’d like to support with that day’s tabs -- you can always support the same charity, or pick a different one each day

Next week, we’ll be sharing the details of the good deeds you’ve enacted. In the meantime, browse away!

Posted by Sarah Nahm, Product Marketing Manager

Added on December 15, 2010:

In order to prevent hackers, spammers and bots from manipulating the extension, and to maintain the integrity of the campaign, we ask that users login with their Google account before submitting their tabs. As part of this step, the account log-in process requires connecting to one of Google's APIs to connect with your account. The Google Contacts API is the lightest of all Google APIs and grants the least permissions. Though we use the Contacts API to verify your account we do not use any of your Contacts data in the Chrome for a Cause promotion.

Rest assured, Google's not going to spam your contact list or send you a single email about this.

Chrome is Ready for Business

When we announced that Chrome is now used by over 120 million users and showed off some of its latest features last week, we saw a tremendous amount of excitement from both users and businesses. Many businesses asked how they can get the benefits of increased security, speed and the modern browser capabilities that Chrome offers with the configurability and customizations they need.

The good news is that businesses don’t need to wait any longer to deploy Google Chrome. Today, we’re announcing that Chrome offers controls that enable IT administrators to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to their business requirements. We’ve created an MSI installer that enables businesses who use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users. We’ve also added support for managed group policy with a list of policies and a set of templates that allow administrators to easily customize browser settings to manage security and privacy.

By deploying Google Chrome, organizations can take advantage of improved security and web application performance without needing to upgrade other expensive software licenses or buy new hardware. Deploying Google Chrome also gives users access to productivity-enhancing HTML5 web applications. Since Google Chrome is the same as the browser on Chrome OS, admins considering Chrome OS for their organizations can start testing their mission-critical web applications by deploying the Google Chrome browser.

Support for these new administrative features is available to Google Apps for Business admins by phone and email as part of their Apps deployment. For those who are not Google Apps for Business customers, we’ve also posted documentation to assist administrators deploying Chrome inside their organization.

Over the past few months, we’ve worked to test Chrome with admins in a diverse set of large organizations interested in moving to a more secure, modern browser. Organizations such as Vanguard, Boise State University, and Procter & Gamble (and Google!) have already successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users. They’ve provided us with excellent feedback, and we’re continuing to work on the next set of features that they’ve requested.

What we’ve built is just the start of what we’d like to offer businesses with Google Chrome. We’re excited by the features built so far, and we’re working hard on polishing the next set of policies that will make Google Chrome even more customizable and useful to users in the future. Please give the new features a try and let us know what you think!

Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager and Daniel Clifford, Software Engineer

How to upgrade your browser (and 50 other things you might want to teach your parents)

The other day I told my parents about a recent Chrome experiment, but the site wouldn't load for them: turns out they were still using a browser released over nine years ago and weren’t sure how to update it. I ended up installing Chrome for them, as it stays up-to-date automatically (read: it's less work for me!).

For those of you who also have family members suffering from outdated browser issues, I’ve created a video tutorial that you can share with them so that they can walk through a few quick steps to ensure that they have the latest browser:



This video is one in a series of basic how-to videos that a handful of us at Google have put together at TeachParentsTech.org, a place where “kids” of any age can send tutorials to their moms, dads, uncles, and whomever they like. Send someone a tech support care package of your own!

Posted by Sean Liu, Associate Product Manager on the Google Apps team

X = G / (C*H*R*O*M - 3)

Yesterday, we posted a demo video with a secret challenge where the first clever person to crack the code would receive a Cr-48. Just 20 hours later, the puzzle was solved correctly by the team at Jamendo. Congratulations!

Here’s how you can find the puzzle and the solution.

First, around 2:24 in the video, you see the following equations on the board:

The constants solve out as follows:

G = 900.91

C = 8335727

H = 269462689

R = 222647

O = 694079

M = 552

The final equation is written as:

X = G / (C*H*R*O*M - 3)

Plugging in the previous answers gets you to:

900.91 / 191605050401140404051920181525

At that point, the puzzle changes from math to code where the numbers represent letters. It hints to that by the final equation spelling CHROM3, but we expected people to get stuck here and have to play around for a bit. The first mental leap is that you have to visually identify 900.91 as goo.gl (just like spelling words on a calculator: 9=g,0=o,0=o,9=g,1=l). The division sign is a slash ( / ), so this pretty clearly points to the Google URL shortener. From there, you need to figure out the shortened URL.

The number 191605050401140404051920181525 may confuse people for a bit, but the large number of zeros and the repeated "04" and "05" sequences in it visually allude to pairs within the string. Once you see that, it can be broken up into:

19 16 05 05 04 01 14 04 04 05 19 20 18 15 25

If you've gotten this far, you've probably noticed that all of those numbers are between 1 and 26. From here, it's just a straight mapping to letters of the alphabet (A=1, B=2, C=3, etc). Decoding the full string gives you:

s p e e d a n d d e s t r o y

Putting everything together, the end result is:

goo.gl/speedanddestroy

That URL points to a page where you can fill out a form to request a shiny new Chrome notebook (the form is closed now, of course).

Posted by Chris Lyon, Hardware Engineer, Chrome OS Team

Keep calm and carry on: Chrome notebook

At our Chrome event on Tuesday, we showed how Chrome notebooks can make computing simpler.

Thanks to the cloud, your Chrome notebook might be how you do everything, but losing it means you lose nothing. No matter what crazy things happen to your laptop, your work stays safe online. Check out our demonstration video below.



Posted by Glen Murphy, UX Designer

An update on Chrome, the Web Store and Chrome OS

On the Chrome team, we’re constantly amazed by the speed of innovation on the web. We designed Chrome to make the web shine, and we hope our upcoming efforts will help support this vibrant ecosystem even more. By making the web faster, helping people discover great apps, and making computers more fun to use, the next year of computing should be even more exciting than the last one.

Chrome

This year, the number of people using Chrome has tripled from 40 to 120 million. Speed is what people love most about Chrome, and we’re always working to make the browser even faster. Therefore we’re bringing Google Instant to the Omnibox, showing search results and loading web pages as you type. We’ve also overhauled V8, Chrome’s JavaScript engine. It now runs complex JavaScript programs up to twice as fast as before. These two features are available in our early access channels and will be rolling out to all users soon.

Chrome Web Store

Today the Chrome Web Store is open for business. Developers have already started uploading apps, and we expect the number to grow over time. Right now the store is only available in the U.S., but will expand to many countries and currencies early next year. The store will be featured prominently in Chrome, helping people discover great apps and developers reach millions of users around the world.

Chrome OS

Last year, we announced our effort to design an operating system that is built and optimized for the web. Many people already spend all their time in a web browser, and by building an operating system that is essentially a browser, we can make computers faster, much simpler and fundamentally more secure.

We’re not done yet, but Chrome OS is at the stage where we need feedback from real users. Some of the features of Chrome OS require new hardware, but we didn’t want to sell pre-beta computers. Instead we’re launching a pilot program where we will give test notebooks to qualified users, developers, schools and businesses. We're starting with the U.S. and will expand to other countries once we get the necessary certifications. To participate in the pilot program, visit the Chrome notebook website.

The test notebooks exist only to test the software—they are black, have no branding, no logos, no stickers, nothing. They do have 12.1 inch screens, full-sized keyboards and touch pads, integrated 3G from Verizon, eight hours of battery life and eight days of standby time. Chrome notebooks are designed to reach the web instantly, are easy to share among friends and family, and simply by logging in, all of your apps, bookmarks and other browser settings are there. Setting up a new machine takes less than a minute. And even at this early stage, we feel there is no consumer or business operating system that is more secure.

In the first half of next year Chrome notebooks will be available for sale from Acer and Samsung. More manufacturers will follow. Also, Chrome OS is designed to work across a wide range of screen sizes and form factors, enabling our partners to deliver computing devices beyond notebooks.

We’re excited to get Chrome notebooks into the hands of users. The data from our test pilots is key to building something wonderful. We look forward to working together to make computers better.

Posted by Linus Upson, VP Engineering and Sundar Pichai, VP Product Management

A curious guide to browsers and the web

On the Chrome team, we’re always looking for new ways to communicate complex concepts about technology. More than two years ago, we launched Chrome with a comic book by Scott McCloud. Since then, a few of our colleagues at Google created a simple explanatory website called WhatBrowser.org when they realized that many of our friends and family weren’t sure what web browsers are.

Today, we’re very excited to release a special project called “20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web.” In the spirit of Chrome’s tradition with books and HTML5 experiences, we teamed up with illustrator Christoph Niemann to publish an online guidebook to browsers and the web, written by the Chrome team. If you have questions like “What are plug-ins?,” “What is HTML5?,” or even “Why is it ok for a truck to crush my laptop?,” “20 Things” is a handy guide for anyone who’s curious about the basics of browsers and the web.



So grab a cup of hot chocolate and enjoy this illustrated guidebook in Chrome or any up-to-date HTML5-compliant browser. Once you’ve loaded it in the browser, you can even disconnect your laptop and read comfortably in your favorite armchair since this guidebook works offline, thanks to HTML5. You can also jump directly back to the page at which you’d previously left off, search for topics that you’d like to read up on, or even view it in “lights off” mode (remember reading under the covers with a flashlight?). If you’re on Chrome’s beta channel, you can give the Chrome PDF viewer a test drive in the “Print book” section of the guidebook.

To read this online guide, go to www.20thingsilearned.com, (or you can use this shortened URL: goo.gl/20things.) And to learn more about how we made it, you can read about the technical details on the Google Code Blog.







Posted by Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager

New Chrome Extensions by Google

We've been thrilled to see many useful Chrome extensions created by developers around the world. Similarly, Googlers have been very enthusiastic about creating extensions that allow users to add features to their favorite Google products. We have a handful of new extensions in the gallery that we're keen to share with you, including new official extensions for Google Calendar, Google Docs and YouTube.

For those of you with busy schedules, the new Google Calendar extension lets you easily check your Google Calendar for upcoming events and add new events from the websites you visit. For example, if you see an icon with a green plus sign on sites like Facebook or Evite, you can add the event to your Google Calendar. It will also show a map if it detects a location associated with the event.



The Web Clipboard extension allows you to copy and paste text and images easily with the Google Docs clipboard. This means that all the web content that you copy and paste is stored in the online clipboard so you can access it quickly and easily across multiple browser windows.



To stay on top of your favorite videos, YouTube Feed notifies you whenever new videos are available in your YouTube homepage feed. You can directly access videos that your friends uploaded, rated and liked right in your browser.



And there’s more! Other Google extensions like Blog This, Google Calendar Checker and News Reader have been updated with new features like enabling special characters in blog posts, support for multiple calendars and custom news feeds.

These are just a few extensions that enhance your experience with Google products. With more than 8,000 extensions to choose from in the gallery, you can find the right extensions to complement your favorite Google products.

Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager

PDF goodness in Chrome

With every Google Chrome release, we hope to bring new features and improvements that will make your life on the web speedier, simpler, and more secure. Today, we’re excited to introduce the integrated PDF viewer to the beta channel.

PDF is a popular file format that’s used for delivering documents on the web (such as the IRS W-4 tax form). To open a PDF document, you’d typically need to install additional software or a browser plug-in in order to view it in a web browser. With the integrated Chrome PDF viewer now available in Chrome’s beta, you can open a PDF document in Chrome without installing additional software. The PDF document will load as quickly and seamlessly as a normal web page in the browser.

Just like we do with web pages viewed in Chrome, we’ve built in an additional layer of security called the “sandbox” around the Chrome PDF viewer to help protect you from malware and security attacks that are targeted at PDF files. For now, the Chrome PDF viewer is available only in the beta channel, but we look forward to adding more polish and features, as well as making it widely available in the stable channel soon.

Posted by John Abd-El-Malek, Software Engineer

Understanding the omnibox for better security

National Cyber Security Awareness Month is a good time to learn more about how you can use your browser’s security indicators to stay safe online. One of the most important security indicators in Google Chrome is the “omnibox,” the spot where you enter web addresses:



The first thing to notice about the omnibox is that Google Chrome highlights the domain name of the website that you’re viewing with a slightly darker color. The domain name indicates which website is being displayed by the browser in the current tab. For example, the domain name in the image above is “www.google.com”.

Before interacting with a website, check that the omnibox has highlighted the domain name you expect. If the domain name doesn’t match what you expect, the website might be spoofing the “look and feel” of another site as part of a phishing attack. Google Chrome has built-in protection against phishing, but checking the domain name yourself is a good security habit — especially when entering sensitive information, such as your password or credit card number.

When entering sensitive information, the second thing to notice about the omnibox is the lock icon, which is displayed to the left of the web site address and, in the case above, is colored green. The lock icon indicates that Google Chrome has established an encrypted connection that works like a tunnel between your computer and the domain name displayed in the omnibox. An encrypted connection helps prevent malicious parties from eavesdropping or tampering with the data sent between your computer and the website. Most websites will use an encrypted tunnel when asking for your password or credit card number to help prevent people using the same wireless network as you, for example at a coffee shop, from being able to eavesdrop on your sensitive information.

Some websites have an “extended validation” certificate that lets the browser determine the name of the organization that runs the web site. Notice the green box between the lock icon and the web address in the omnibox:



The extended validation indicator makes it easier for you to determine which organization is responsible for the displayed web page. For example, the extended validation indicator for https://www.benefitaccess.com/ says “Citigroup Inc [US],” indicating that Citigroup is responsible for that web page – a fact which might have been difficult to determine without the indicator. You should be careful to share sensitive information with a website only if you trust the organization responsible for the site.

If you would like to learn more about the browser’s security indicators, you might enjoy reading our Help Center article on Chrome’s indicators. Until next time, safe surfing!


Posted by Adam Barth, Software Engineer

Bringing another Chrome release to you, right on time

Not long ago, we mentioned that we’d be releasing a new stable version of Google Chrome approximately every six weeks to get bug fixes, improvements, and new features in the hands of our users quickly in the spirit of speedy innovation. With that in mind, we’re happy to bring you a new stable version of Google Chrome today.

In this stable release, we’ve focused primarily on hundreds of bug fixes. We’ve also included a few other things that may be of interest to developers, such as full AppleScript support on Mac OS X for UI automation and implementation of the HTML5 parsing algorithm, the File API, and directory upload (via <input type="file" webkitdirectory>). Also, if you choose to block sites from setting any data in your browser’s content settings for cookies, you can now use a new dialog for managing blocked cookies in bulk.

Enjoy!

Posted by Jeff Chang, Product Manager

New Featured Extensions

With so many new extensions uploaded in the gallery every day, we know it can be tricky to decide which ones to try out. We post a selection of the ones we enjoy in the "Featured" section of the gallery, and from now on we plan to update you regularly on new additions to our recommended extensions.

Here are a few new extensions in the Featured section:


Layers allows you to overlay content like sticky notes, images, videos, tweets and even maps over any web site. You can drag and drop your content anywhere on the page. You can also share and discuss whatever you add to the site with your friends across social networks.


The Postrank extension for Google Reader helps you stay up-to-date on the news and posts that matter. The extension aggregates engagement activity such as tweets, comments and votes from over two dozen social networks and ranks stories based on how much engagement each story has received.



With the Ozone extension, you can get suggestions from fifteen different sources like Google, Amazon, your bookmarks, Gmail, YouTube and more. As you type in the Ozone search box, you can see the suggestions change in real time.



Highlight to Search is a new official Google extension that allows you to search keywords by highlighting instead of typing them into a search box. When you highlight words within a web page, you'll see a magnifying glass icon appear below the highlighted keywords. Clicking on the icon or the keywords allows you to search easily from the search box that immediately appears.

These are just a few of the new featured Chrome extensions, and you can find many more in the gallery.


Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager

Use Chrome like a pro (Now for Mac!)

(Cross posted on Official Google Mac Blog.)

Two months ago, Chrome team members shared a list of their favorite extensions on the Official Google Blog. This time around, we asked Mac aficionados on the Chrome team to share with us the extensions they like the most. Below is a list of their favorite extensions.

• Google Voice - Make calls, send SMS, preview inbox and get notified of new messages right in your browser (US only)


• Send from Gmail - Makes Gmail your default email application and provides a button to compose a Gmail message to quickly share a link via email.


• iReader - View news stories and other articles in a very easy to read, clutter-free, scrollable display.


• Google Dictionary - View definitions easily as you browse the web, similar to using ⌘-Option-D in other Mac applications.


• delicious bookmarks - Integrate your bookmarks with Google Chrome with the official Chrome extension for Delicious, the world's leading social bookmarking service.


• Instachrome - Collect articles from around the Internet to read them on the web with Instapaper.

These are just a few extensions to help our Mac users enhance their web browsing experience and address the most requested features. There are more than 7,000 extensions to choose from in our Google Chrome Extensions gallery, so you’ll be sure to find the right extensions for you.

Posted by Mike Pinkerton, Staff Software Engineer

Google Chrome Extensions at School: Get more done!

Over the last two weeks on the Official Google for Students blog, we have been highlighting extensions that help students stay connected with friends or research and write papers. For the last post in the Google Chrome Extensions at School series, we will showcase extensions that can help you stay on task and make the most out of your time.

Posted by Koh Kim and Meredith Papp, Product Marketing

Google Chrome Extensions at School: Research and write papers

Last week in the Official Google for Students blog, we highlighted extensions that help students stay connected with friends and family. Check out today's Google Chrome Extensions at School for extensions that can help you research and write papers for any class.

Posted by Koh Kim and Meredith Papp, Product Marketing

Tip: Just the text, please!

Has this ever happened to you? You're writing an email online and you try to copy some text from a webpage. But when you paste it in, you get all the original fonts, colors, and spacing. "Wait!" you say, "I just wanted the text!"

This happened to us so many times while building Google Chrome that we added a special shortcut to do just that. Alongside the common Ctrl-V keyboard shortcut for "paste", Google Chrome supports a similar shortcut, Ctrl-Shift-V, for "paste as plain text". (And it’s Command-Shift-Option-V on a Mac.)



You can use this shortcut in any rich text editor (like Gmail's compose window, or when writing in Google Docs) to strip out all the presentation from the original source and just paste in a block of text.


Posted by Peter Kasting, Software Engineer

Google Chrome Extensions at School: Staying Connected

It’s back-to-school season in many parts of the world, so we thought we’d kick off a series of blog posts about cool Chrome extensions that can make life easier for students. These include extensions that helps students keep in touch with friends and family, research and write papers, and be more productive during the school year. Check out the Official Google for Student blog to read about today’s extensions that help students stay connected with friends at school and those back home.

Posted by Koh Kim and Meredith Papp, Product Marketing Team

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

Making the web more accessible, one step at a time

From text that is too small to read, to user interfaces that do not offer keyboard navigation options, users with special needs face a lot of challenges when trying to access websites they are interested in. We believe that extensions can complement the work we are doing to make Google Chrome more accessible and can help users with disabilities turn the web from an often unwelcoming place to an environment they can truly enjoy.

Today we are launching a new category of featured extensions under the name “Accessibility”. On this page you’ll find ChromeVis a brand new extension from Google that allows users with low vision to magnify and change the color of selected text. You will also find extensions like Chrome Daltonize that can help color blind users to see more details in web pages or gleeBox that provides alternatives to actions traditionally performed via the mouse such as clicking, scrolling and selecting text fields.



All users can benefit from these extensions - not just users with disabilities. To encourage more developers to incorporate best practices in accessibility when designing extensions, we’ve open sourced the code behind Chrome Vis and created relevant documentation. You can get more information in the Chromium blog.

One can develop a lot of great extensions to benefit users with special needs. We plan to release a few more in the next months so stay tuned for more updates.

Posted by Jonas Klink, Accessibility Product Manager

Adobe Flash Player support now enabled in Google Chrome’s stable channel

In our most recent stable release of Google Chrome, we talked about beta-testing Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome. We're now happy to enable this integration by default in the stable channel of Chrome. To read more about this integration, check out the Chromium blog.

In testing Flash Player integration into Chrome, the Chrome team admittedly spent many, many fun hours with a few of our favorite Flash-based indie games. So as a side project, we teamed up with a few creative folks to build Chrome FastBall, a Flash-based game built on top of the YouTube platform.



Try pitting your wits against the clock at youtube.com/chromefastball. If you’re using Chrome, your browser should be automatically updated with Flash Player integration as of this week. And if you haven’t yet tried Chrome, download this newest stable release of the browser at google.com/chrome and take it for a test drive!

Update 9:20 AM PST: Due to the overwhelming response to the game, some things aren't quite working as we hoped due to server-side overloading. Please forgive the maintenance work as we get the game back up again. Thanks!

Update 2 6:00 PM PST: All technical issues have been resolved now, so you can enjoy the game. Thanks for your patience!

Posted by Jeff Chang, Product Manager

Gooooaaal!

Sore throats from yelling after every goal. Red eyes from waking up too early or staying up too late to watch a game. Sick leaves multiplying during important matches. It’s official: Football fever has spread around the globe, as the 2010 FIFA World Cup™ is already underway.

For those of you who are football fans, kick your game-watching up a notch with the FIFA.com Chrome extension that will help you stay up-to-date with the latest news and scores from South Africa. Most importantly, the extension notifies you when a match is about to begin and displays goal alerts within the browser in real-time for the matches you care about.

From the extension, you can also access match schedules and easily share match scores and personal commentary about specific plays and calls on Facebook, Twitter and Google Buzz. To complement the FIFA.com Chrome extension, you can personalise your browser with one of 32 custom themes that shows your team colours.



You can find the FIFA.com Chrome extension and themes in the World Cup section of the Chrome Extensions gallery. While you’re there, you can also try out more than 5,000 extensions -- you may not find one that helps your team perform better on the field, but you’ll likely discover a few that can make your daily browsing more enjoyable. May the best team win!

Posted by Max Madile and Paola Veglio, Product Marketing Managers, Google London

A new Chrome stable release: Welcome, Mac and Linux!

In our most recent beta release, we fired up all engines to bring to life our fastest version of Chrome to date.

Today, we’re bringing all this beta goodness to the stable channel so that it’s available to all Chrome users. We’re particularly excited to bring Chrome for Mac and Linux out of beta, and introduce Chrome’s first stable release for Mac and Linux users. You can read more about the Mac and Linux stable releases on the Google Mac and Chromium blogs respectively.

Today’s stable release also comes with a host of new features. You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences -- including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager.

Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5:



In recent weeks, we’ve been beta-testing Adobe Flash Player integration into Chrome. While Flash Player integration in the browser is not included by default in today’s stable release, we’re excited to enable this feature with the full release of Flash Player (version 10.1) soon.

If you’re already using Chrome for Windows, Mac or Linux, you’ll be auto-updated to this latest release soon. You can also try out these new features on our speedy browser now, by downloading Chrome from google.com/chrome.


Posted by Brian Rakowski, Product Manager

Six ways to find the right Chrome Extension for you

With so many Chrome extensions to choose from, exploring the extensions gallery has been like a treasure hunt for me. Over the last few months, I've spent hours checking out new extensions and discovering cool ways to keep up with the latest news or find better deals online. I'd like to share with you some useful extensions that I came across in six easy-to-use pages for web development, blogging, shopping, sports, fun and Google applications.

I always love finding a bargain online. For all of you who also like to shop smart, these extensions can make online online shopping faster and easier. You can track an item's price history with the Camelizer extension or complement your bargain hunting with extensions from Amazon, Woot! and eBay.

We also have extensions dedicated to fans of sports from around the world. You can track live scores and commentary on cricket, rugby and Formula 1 with extensions from ESPN. If you want an edge in your fantasy sports leagues, the Pickemfirst extension brings you news, game statistics and commentary of pro sports players currently displayed in your browser.

Besides sports and shopping, these blogging extensions can help you write better blog posts and share web content more efficiently. You can quickly post to your blogs at TypePad or Blogger. You can also get contextual suggestions of related articles, images, links and tags with Zemanta. After the Deadline offers an extension that automatically checks your spelling and grammar (while optionally checking for cliches and double negatives!)

In addition, we made it easier to find the extensions for Google applications you frequently use. These include extensions to preview Google Docs or to check your Google Calendar directly from your Google Chrome browser.

For those of you who want to complement Google Chrome's developer tools to create a customized development environment in Chrome, there are web development extensions such as viewing PHP documentation, creating random dummy text or testing your page at various resolutions.

Finally, if you want to play a prank on your co-workers or take a 5-minute break with a game, there are quite a few fun extensions to brighten up your day.

I hope you enjoy these pages. There are more than 4,000 extensions waiting to be discovered in the gallery. Happy hunting!

Posted by Koh Kim, Associate Product Marketing Manager