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