A new way to multitask

On December 9, 1968, Douglas Engelbart rocked the computing world with The Mother of All Demos. One of the many advancements Engelbart discussed was the creation of a simple, intuitive pointing device that would allow you to manipulate a cursor on a screen with the movement of your hand. The world met the mouse.

Before the mouse, the primary way to interact with a computer was to type a command, wait for a response, and type a second command. The ability to coordinate between the movement of a marker on the screen and a flick of the wrist was truly revolutionary, and has transformed the way we interface with our machines today.

However, for decades, the full power of the mouse has been limited. While we’ve been mousing away with one hand, our other hand has often been idle. As information has moved faster and faster, our mousing capacity has stayed the same.

On the Chrome team, we’ve been working to address this problem. Today, we’d like to announce a new way to get twice as much web from your browser. We call it Multitask Mode.



Multitask Mode lets you have access to multiple mice at the same time, so you can make a chess move while you watch a dance move, or draw a horse while you draw on a friend for relationship advice.

Chrome can handle as many mice, touchpads, styli, joysticks, trackballs, and other pointing devices as you can plug into your computer, so you and your friends can browse dozens of sites at the same time.

Try it out and let us know what you think!

Posted by Glen Murphy, Designer and Stylus Stylist


Update: April Fools :)

Faster and fancier graphics

Today’s web brings beautiful, rich experiences right into your browser. With Chrome’s most recent Stable channel release, we’ve sped up graphics and drawing performance for users on capable hardware, and enabled fancier 3D content for other users on older computers. Give Chrome a spin to see just how good the modern web can look. And if the nuts and bolts of graphics make your heart flutter, check out more technical details over on the Chromium blog.

Posted by Vangelis Kokkevis, Chrome Graphics Olympian

Pwnium: great exploits, fast patches

Last week we debuted Pwnium, a contest based on our Chromium Security Rewards program. Both of these initiatives reward well intentioned researchers who help make the web a safer place by reporting security vulnerabilities. Our total payout to researchers for these programs is now well over half a million dollars.

We weren’t sure what kinds of reports we would get from Pwnium, but by the end of the week we were thrilled to have awarded $120,000 for two excellent submissions. Thanks to Chrome’s rapid auto-update functionality, we were able to update Chrome twice, in both cases protecting users less than 24 hours after the respective bugs were reported. While these vulnerabilities were reported directly and privately to us, this kind of speed is especially important if bugs were ever being actively abused to harm users.

Since the full exploits were disclosed, we were able to study them and add a range of additional defensive measures based on what we saw. These measures will make Chrome more secure from any similar hacks in the future. We’ll publish write-ups to honor these two highly creative works in the coming weeks.

Also last week, a separate exploit for Chrome was demonstrated at the Pwn2Own competition. We’ve since learned that the bug exploited a vulnerability in the Flash Player plug-in -- affecting all browsers. The contest organizers have reported the vulnerability details directly and privately to Adobe, and Adobe will be providing a fix as part of its forthcoming Flash Player update. When that happens, Chrome users will enjoy the advantage of an auto-update and quick protection. Looking forward, Adobe and Google are collaborating on a version of Flash Player which will run inside the primary Chrome sandbox. Chrome OS devices already ship with this next-generation sandbox for Flash Player.

Engaging the wider security community is one of our core security principles, and Pwnium is a great example of the benefits of this type of collaboration. Our special thanks to the contestants for their exceptional contributions to security on the web.

Posted by Chris Evans and Travis McCoy, Chrome Security Team

Chrome dons a suit and heads to Washington

For the same reasons you might choose Chrome for your home or work computer -- speed, simplicity, security -- businesses and organizations are choosing to give Chrome to their employees. Just over a year ago we announced that Chrome would get a special set of tools for IT admins at organizations, giving them controls to easily set up, push out and manage the browser in a professional environment. Now guess what? The US Department of State made Chrome available to all employees, and just two weeks later, more than 58,000 of their employees have Chrome installed.


US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton announces Chrome for employees at 35:10.

Read more from our guest blogger Chris Bronk from the US Department of State on the Google Enterprise blog, and check out the Chrome for Business website.

Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager