Wednesday 17 March 2010

At the end of the rainbow, a new pot of Chrome!

Earlier this month, we launched a new beta of Google Chrome that brought automatic translation and fine-grained privacy controls to the browser. Today, those features have been promoted to the stable channel so all Chrome users can try them out.

Google Chrome’s translation feature uses the supercool Google Translate technology -- today, it works across 52 languages and can automatically detect and translate entire websites in less than a second. In Chrome, the language detection takes place in the browser, not on Google servers. If the page isn’t in a language you know, Chrome offers to translate it for you by sending it through Google Translate. If you’re curious about the technical nitty-gritty involved in integrating translation in Chrome, check out our post on the Google Translate Blog.

Today’s stable release also comes with some new privacy features and a tweak to our Google Update technology. Now, there’s a set of “Content Settings” options that let you manage how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can block all cookies except for the ones from sites you trust. We’ve also implemented a new approach to our Google Update technology, which allows us to remove the unique ID from Google Update while still preserving our ability to determine the number of active users and keep everyone up-to-date with the latest security updates and speed improvements. Chrome has many other existing and new features to help you manage your information. You can learn more about all of these features at google.com/chrome/privacy, watch our video series on browser privacy, or check out the video below about how to manage Cookies ‘n Chrome.



We’re excited that these new features are now available to all Chrome users. For those of you who currently use Chrome, you should be updated automatically within the next few days. You can also download the browser directly at google.com/chrome. And if you need a place to try out your new found translation abilities, try searching for the best way to tell your friends “Beannacht Lá Fhéile Pádraig”!

Thursday 11 March 2010

Tip: Always restoring tabs

When reading the last tip about restoring closed tabs, you might have wondered if you can just get the browser to always start up where you left off. This would save you the trouble of re-opening your windows and tabs manually.

It turns out you can do this easily. Open the Tools menu and select "Options" (or, if you're using a Mac, open "Preferences") and go to the "Basics" tab. The first section on the first page of options is called "On startup:", and in there you'll see an option to "Reopen the pages that were open last". Once you select this, Google Chrome will start up showing the same pages that were open when you shut down.


There is one caveat here. Normally, only the most recent window you were using is restored when you restart. If you have more than one window you want to restore, make sure you use the "Exit" choice in the Tools menu (on Mac: "Chrome" > "Quit Google Chrome") to shut down all your windows at once, instead of closing them one at a time. (Of course, as covered in the last tip, you can always restore the other window(s) manually if you forget to exit!)


Finally, if the browser ever crashes, the next time you start up you'll have the option at the top of your window to restore your previous windows and tabs, even if you haven't changed what appears on startup.



Monday 1 March 2010

A polyglot Google Chrome beta, with new privacy features

Whether you're catching up on your favorite Arabic gameshow, getting up to speed on the latest Korean mobile gadgetry, or researching the local perspective for a dream trip to Machu Picchu, we're all constantly reminded that the internet is an amazingly multilingual place. The Google Chrome team is excited to introduce a new beta feature to help our users navigate the multilingual web: instant machine translation of webpages, without the need for any browser extensions or plug-ins.

How does it work? When the language of the webpage you're viewing is different from your preferred language setting, Chrome will display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate.

Here's a demo of the translation feature by Jay Civelli, one of the engineers who developed it:


For more on how automatic translation in Chrome works, read on in our Help Center article. We hope that the development of online translation tools like this one will help make all the world's information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way – imagine reading a diversity of foreign language news sources in your mother tongue, or easily conducting online commerce across borders and languages.

With today's beta release, we're also excited to introduce new features that will give you even greater choice and control over your privacy as you browse the web. We realize that many users have questions about privacy in browsers, so we've produced a short video to help users better understand privacy in the browser:


In addition to Chrome's existing incognito mode – a handy way to browse the web without leaving traces of website visits on your computer or downloads in your browser history – you can now manage your privacy settings in the new "Privacy" section of Chrome's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites.

You can read more about these features, or watch videos explaining how your privacy is handled in Chrome's various features including search and suggestions, browser cookies, Safe Browsing technology, and automatic security updates.

Try out all these new features for yourself in today's beta release. For those of you already on the beta channel, you'll soon be updated automatically. And for those of you on the stable channel, we'll be making Chrome's new translation and privacy features available to you in the coming weeks. Till our next update, auf Wiedersehen!