Chrome on Mac, Window, and Linux is being updated this week to version 48. The latest update contains the usual bug fixes and improvements for the desktop browser, but mobile devices will see the bulk of the improvements. Future updates to Chrome, we’ve learned, will bring a new compression algorithm that will help the browser load faster pages and use less power on all platforms.
While online content continues to develop, grow and become increasingly complex and media-rich, Google has been working to keep it fast and efficient. Last September it announced a new compression algorithm called Brotli which the company claims can get between 20-26% higher compressions ratios over its previous algorithm, Zopfli.
Googler, Ilya Grigorik announced on his G+ page that Brotli has reached ‘intent to ship’ status, which means it’s rolling out very soon to your Chrome browser.
Once widely rolled out, it won’t just see desktop pages load quicker, it should see mobile devices using less data and less power. Customers using an Android phone on a prepaid, or postpaid plan with a low data limit could benefit.
It’s worth noting that Brotli is currently restricted to HTTPS connections, but has seen some significant savings in html, javascript and css:
Advantages:
Brotli outperforms gzip for typical web assets (e.g. css, html, js) by 17–25 %.
Brotli -11 density compared to gzip -9:
html (multi-language corpus): 25 % savings
js (alexa top 10k): 17 % savings
minified js (alexa top 10k): 17 % savings
css (alexa top 10k): 20 % savings
If you’re using Chrome Canary, Google’s beta/developer version of Chrome, you can access a Brotli demo link via chrome://flags#enable-brotli. Google hopes that other browsers will support the new Brotli format in the near future, although so far, only Mozilla Firefox has given any public indication of its plans to do so.
As of today, the ability to cast content to your Chromecast from the desktop comes in the form of a Chrome extension called Google Cast. As of the latest beta build of Chrome, though, you can now cast content from the web without said extension installed. All you have to do is right-click the content and use the “Cast…” menu…
With the consumer version of the Gear VR now available for purchase in stores, Samsung is ramping up what owners can do with their $100 purchase. Besides playing immersive games and watching Netflix in a faux home theater, users can now surf the web on their virtual reality headset…
Google’s latest Chrome feature includes more ways to improve your web browsing experience by reducing data consumption by up to 70%. Chrome’s Data Saver achieves the impressive consumption savings by blocking images when the web page initially loads, although it does give users the opportunity to manually select to show images if they want to. Google announced the development in a blog post yesterday…
With the debate over ads and the speed of the mobile web growing every day, many web companies like Apple and Facebook have pushed for publishers to hand over their content in the name of a better experience for users. But content creators — for the most part — don’t want to do that, and Google knows that. So today, the Mountain View company has announced the Accelerated Mobile Pages initiative, a plan it’s leading to make the mobile web faster…
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Update: Check out a new video showing off Gello below.
There’s not much to know about this yet, but CyanogenMod staff member Joey Rizzoli has come out on Google+ today to announce a new browser project the team has been working on. It’s called “Gello,” and while we don’t know many real details at this point, it seems apparent that it’s built at least in some capacity on Google’s open source Chromium project (which the Mountain View company’s flagship Chrome browser is based on as well).
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Google employs a lot of engineers. Most software engineers know that when you have a box which can contain a variable amount of content – say, an input field or the title section of a blog post like the one above – that you need to make a decision as to what happens when more content than can initially fit into the box is inputted. Maybe you take the lazy way out and simply limit what the user can do so that their input doesn’t end up exceeding the character limit of the box, for example. Google has done something even lazier in Chrome for Android.
Let me preface this by saying that what I’m about to show you isn’t new, but I just learned about it so I’m sure it’ll be new to some of you too. Also it’s Friday, so why not see some neat stuff. With that out of the way, here’s what it looks like when you have any amount of tabs open in Chrome for Android under 100 tabs (images courtesy of Reddit user /u/Hamsna):
Normal, right? Right. Here’s what it looks like when you have 100 or more tabs open:
Let me help in the event that you haven’t noticed anything different in that second image:
It seems that someone at Google decided that it’d just be more work than it’s worth to come up with a more pragmatic solution, so it used an emoticon instead to say¯\_(ツ)_/¯ And how many people actually use more than 100 tabs, in a mobile browser no less? Only psychopaths, probably.
Tab overload.
One of the things I struggle with on a daily basis—and forgive me, I know it’s a first world problem—is an overload of Google Chrome tabs. I have a bad habit of just opening countless new tabs without even thinking, and I’m really bad about managing them and closing the ones I’m no longer using. Chrome just makes it way too easy to end up with a few dozen tabs open, while only actually using a few.
I figured it wasn’t possible that I was the only one that struggled with this. With just a quick Google search, I found a free Chrome extension called “Tab Wrangler” to help rectify the situation. It’s a nifty little plugin. Without hardly any set up, it will help manage your tabs for you and close the ones you don’t need—and it will even keep you updated on your negligence with a little red badge telling you how many tabs it has closed for you…
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The latest build of Chrome Canary for Mac packs a great new feature that’s likely familiar to those who use Safari on a daily basis. While current stable builds of Chrome have a jaggedy pinch-to-zoom functionality that only zooms in 10% increments, the latest build of Chrome Canary provides a smooth buttery zoom experience like Apple’s browser.
As of right now, it looks like the feature works a little bit less fluidly than Apple’s offering, but that’s to expected in the most experimental public release version of Chrome. Zooming works the same way that it does in Safari and current versions of Chrome, so all it takes is pinching two fingers on the Trackpad.
If you’re sticking with Safari on your Mac for this reason or others (battery life, anyone?), it looks like this feature—once it makes its way to the stable release—will give you one more reason to switch over to Google’s browser. If you want to give it a try, head over and download the latest build of Chrome Canary.
Microsoft has a big day today at its Windows 10 press event, where in part it is expected to unveil a brand new web browser called “Spartan” as part of its latest operating system. ZDNet reports that Spartan will not simply be another Internet Explorer release, but rather a lightweight web browser that looks and functions more like Chrome, Firefox and Safari.
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Google’s Play Music service previously required installing the Music Manager app to upload music to the cloud service on Mac, Windows, and Linux. Today that changes as Google adds the ability to drag-and-drop your music collection to upload it directly through the browser within the Google Play Music web interface. It’s still in “lab” beta mode, but you can easily enable it:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r4TIkhm2tWc]
Google announced today that it’s opening a new Build With Chrome website to the public that originally started as a Chrome Experiment. In collaboration with LEGO, Build With Chrome uses WebGL 3D graphics technology to let users build any creation they can think of using virtual LEGO in an extremely slick web-based interface. The site also features the ability to explore creations by others and share your own through Google+ as well as “Build Academy” that features charcaters from the upcoming The LEGO Movie film.
The Build With Chrome site is already featuring a number of creations from the community and is now open for all to play with.
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Google’s open-source Chromium evangelist François Beaufort shared some interesting details today about new voice search integration in the latest Chromium build— Google’s open source browser project that is often used to develop and test features coming soon to its Chrome browser. While users have been able to download a browser extension for Chrome since November that allows them to activate a voice search with the “Ok Google” voice command (just like on Android), it appears Google is testing the command as a native feature without the need of the extension. Beaufort notes that the latest Chromium code shows the ability to toggle the feature through settings:
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The Opera Browser for Android has been updated with a host of new features this morning. Earlier this month the browser officially switched from Opera’s Presto engine to Google’s Chromium, and with version 15, the app now includes the newer Chromium 28. The start up time has also been improved with this version of Opera, as has general page loading. You can also now download video files from within the browser.
The full change log follows:
The update is available on the Play Store now.
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Google+ will receive a card-based interface redesign featuring a new three column view. The new interface is responsive to the user’s display size. The new multi-column view is customizable meaning you can toggle back to the previous single column view if you prefer.
Google+ will also begin rolling out intelligent hashtags for photos, meaning if you post a photo of the Eiffel Tower, Google+ can automatically recognize the subject and appropriately tag it for you.
Users will now be able to view related photos by clicking on the current photo and seeing related hashtags on the flip side of the photo. A video below highlighting the related hashtag feature is below.
Google today announced a new service called Google Play for Education that allows schools to easier find and distribute Google Play content to Android devices in schools.
The Google Play Education store will allow schools to search for content by subject matter and grade level and provide content that has been recommended by other educators. Google is teaming up with partners such as NASA and PBS for content but it will also begin accepting app submissions from developers this summer before the education store launches this fall.
Rather than using credit cards in an education environment, teachers will be able to purchase bulk quantities of apps and charge licenses against a balance from the school’s purchase order. The Google Play for Education service will also allow school’s that use Google Apps to instantly distribute an app to multiple devices in a school by setting up a Google Group
Google Play for Education will be launching this fall. You can learn more at https://developers.google.com/edu/.
At its I/O keynote taking place right now, Google is going over improvements it’s made to Chrome and to kick things off the company announced that the browser is now home to over 750 million active users across all platforms. That’s means the company has added over 300 million users since it announced 450 million active users at its I/O event last year.
Chrome is the most-used browser worldwide with over 750 million users globally.#io13 #keynote #io13chrome
— Google for Developers (@googledevs) May 15, 2013
Chrome version 25 was released with a new Web Speech API that allows web developers to integrate speech-to-text dictation into their web applications.
The other feature of importance on the new version is the removal of “silent extensions.” Silent extensions are web-browser extensions that install without your knowledge. From now on, every web extension installation must be manually approved.
The updated version is available here, but Chrome’s auto-update feature may have already installed it for you.
We knew that Google would likely face fines in the Federal Trade Commission’s investigation into its method of bypassing Apple’s default iOS Safari browser settings. Last month, reports claimed the FTC would make a decision on the fines within 30 days. Today, Reuters reported sources close to the situation have confirmed Google is currently negotiating with the FTC over fines that “could amount to tens of millions of dollars”:
Google Inc. (GOOG) is negotiating with the U.S. Federal Trade Commission over how big a fine it will have to pay for its breach of Apple Inc. (AAPL)’s Safari Internet browser, a person familiar with the matter said. The FTC is preparing to allege that Mountain View, California-based Google deceived consumers and violated terms of a consent decree signed with the commission last year when it planted so-called cookies on Safari, bypassing Apple software’s privacy settings, the person said.
Cross-posted on 9to5Mac.com
A new Chrome Beta update now makes open tab information available on multiple devices in different locations.
In Chrome Beta, when users are logged into Chrome, the tabs open on one device are now accessible on all their devices under the “Other devices” menu on the New Tab page.
“Imagine you’ve looked up directions to a cool new restaurant on your home computer. Later, when you’re leaving work, you realize you can’t quite remember how to get there. If only you could quickly pull up the same directions on your office computer with one click,” explained Software Engineers Nicolas Zea and Patrick Dubroy on the official Google Chrome blog.
Google is designing a version of Chrome to run in touch-friendly Metro of Windows 8.
Windows 8 is the upcoming edition of Microsoft Windows and features a new Metro-style user-interface with input for touchscreen, mouse, keyboard, and pen. The platform’s Consumer Preview was just released Feb. 29.
A Google representative told Mashable that Chrome for Windows 8 is based on the desktop browser and not the Android form. The browser will highlight touch support to compliment the company’s interface principle that spans across many of its products and services, such as Xbox 360 and Windows Live. With that said, Chrome for Android indicates Chrome for Windows 8 might feature automatic syncing, swipe-able tabs, and a multitude of extensions.
“Our goal is to be able to offer our users a speedy, simple, secure Chrome experience across all platforms, which includes both the desktop and Metro versions of Windows 8,” announced a Google representative. “To that end we’re in the process of building a Metro version of Chrome along with improving desktop Chrome in Windows 8 such as adding enhanced touch support.”
More information is available below.
[youtube=http://youtu.be/19wK7ciBTdc]
Ubisoft unveiled the above teaser for the critically acclaimed “From Dust” videogame by Creative Designer Eric Chahi and announced it is coming to the Google Chrome browser next month.
“Chrome users will be able to play a High-End console game within their very own Google Chrome browser,” contended Ubisoft, the game’s developer.
More information is available below.
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.
