In with the old and out with the new, that’s what I always say. Google seems to be thinking the same way, as the Chrome team this past week replaced its newer card-based, tiled bookmarks manager, pictured above, with the previous link-based one. You can access the now old bookmarks manager by visiting chrome://bookmarks.
After rolling out the ability to edit Microsoft Word and Excel files for the developer build of Chrome OS back in June, Google Chromium evangelist François Beaufort today notes that the feature is now on by default in the latest build:
Microsoft Office files editing is now enabled by default in the last Dev Update of Chrome OS. As we can see below, the UI has been slightly updated since the first time we’ve seen it. Moreover if you encounter any issue, don’t forget to open the “Help” Menu and click on “Report an issue”.
Previously the feature had to be enabled by the user, but it appears that Google might be getting closer to introducing the functionality in the stable build of Chrome OS in the near future.
Earlier this year, Google released a Chrome Office Viewer beta allowing users to view Office files in the browser, but not yet the ability to edit the documents.
When we think of Google and browsers we usually think of the latest Chrome build, the fastest real world use desktop browser around. While the browser currently shipping on Android is nothing to sneeze at, Google’s real innovation in the browser space is arguably happening with Chrome. That’s why it’s surprising we haven’t heard more about a potential port of Chrome to Android, a project the Android team is now actively working on with the open source WebKit community.
Googler Andrei Popescu, along with a couple others working on the project, took to WeKit-Dev group today (via TechCrunch) to announce their focus on the port:
We would like to give an update about WebKit on Android. A while ago, we started the effort to upstream the Android port of WebKit. For a variety of reasons, this work took longer than anticipated and was never finished. We realize that the incomplete Android port that exists today in WebKit ToT has caused quite a bit of confusion and inconvenience to the project as a whole and we are very sorry for that.
In case you’re confused, the browser currently running on Android was originally based on the WeKit layout engine and Chrome’s V8 Javascript engine, but also varies from the desktop version of Chrome enough that two separate teams work on the two browsers.
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