After being introduced in August, Google just announced improvements to its Gmail offline Chrome app. The first improvement, which the Chrome team called their favorite, is the ability to choose whether you want to synchronize 7, 14 or 31 days worth of mail. The second improvement includes attachment support, keyboard shortcuts, and enhancements when it comes to performance. You can download the Gmail offline Chrome application in the Chrome Web Store.
The specifics of the agreement are not being disclosed at this time, but it is likely Microsoft’s latest license agreement with LG is similar to those signed with just about every other major Android vendor including Samsung, HTC, Huawei, Acer, and over 10 others. Microsoft is already collecting millions from Android vendors in patent agreements stemming from an original deal to collect a $5 royalty per device from HTC in May, and will now begin to profit off LG’s line of Android-based tablets, smartphones, and televisions as well.
Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President and Deputy General Counsel of Intellectual Property Group Horacio Gutierrez made the announcement on the company’s website:
Specs and price are similar to past models, but these are much better looking with an aluminum shell and thinner profile.
Perhaps most interesting (and fitting to the mission of Chrome) is the Chrome Box. It is a Mac Mini-looking ChromeOS device with two separate outputs for lots of Web browsing on up to two monitors. You do not have to worry about losing an Internet connection on the ChromeBox because you are stationary and hard-wired to the Web. This is going to hit more of the target kiosk/corporate environment than the previous models of ChromeBook. Samsung would not give a price but mentioned the loss of a display and keyboard/trackpad could save customers around $100.
All three hit stores in April, and we will be looking for a demo.
Google announced on the Chrome Blog today that the latest Chrome Beta release rolled out with a number of new improvements to speed and security. When it comes to speed, the beta release of Chrome will now pre-render pages you visit most often. When typing a URL into the omnibox, URLs that auto-complete will now also start loading before you hit enter.
To get you where you want to go even faster, Chrome will now start loading some web pages in the background, even before you’ve finished typing the URL in the omnibox. If the URL auto-completes to a site you’re very likely to visit, Chrome will begin to prerender the page. Prerendering reduces the time between when you hit Enter and when you see your fully-loaded web page–in some cases, the web page appears instantly.
The release also includes a number of security improvements including updates to Chrome’s Safe Browsing feature that allows executable files, including “.exe” and “.msi”, files to be scanned after downloading. If the file is found to be malicious, Chrome will warn the user to delete it. Google further explained the matter below:
The latest Android platform versions distributions chart was announced yesterday after the Android Developers’ website collected data for two weeks, and the share results reaped a few surprising figures.
Gingerbread gobbled 55 percent of the share, and Froyo landed at second place with 30 percent. However, according to last month’s results, Gingerbread increased from 50.6-percent while Froyo decreased from 35.3-percent. The statistical difference may be due to Froyo smartphones receiving an upgrade or Gingerbread smartphones seeing an increase in activations over the holiday season. Google recently announced it added 3.7 million devices on Christmas.
Android 4.0, also known as Ice Cream Sandwich, is making the biggest amount of noise with these latest results. Ice Cream Sandwich devices -only the Galaxy Nexus and Nexus S for now- account for just .6-percent of the share of all of the devices that have called the Android market in the last two weeks. If that total is near the 200 million that Google announced in November, that means over a million Galaxy Nexus Devices have been activated in the few weeks since release.
Google searches for “browser” no longer reveal the Google Chrome homepage, because the globally popular search engine decided to apply a penalty against the browser’s website after coming under fire for its sponsored post campaign.
The Mountain View, Calif.-based company actively fights paid links and junk content under its Webmaster guidelines. However, earlier this week, SEO Book’s Aaron Wall noticed a Google search for “This post is sponsored by Google” displays over 400 websites written by Google marketing campaigns.
Bloggers were found posting low-quality content related to Google Chrome to promote Google content, and at least one of the posts had a hyperlink to the Chrome download page. Hyperlinks can help a website rise in Google search results through Google’s PageRank algorithm.
According to The New York Times, Google penalized JC Penney, Forbes and Overstock last year due to paid links and similar guidline violation issues. Search Engine Land suggested that Google should penalize its own Google Chrome download page to be fair.
Well, that is exactly how Google responded.
