Pokemon Go clearly has a lot of fans, but if you’re one of the many that simply have no interest — whether it be in Pokemon itself, gaming in general, augmented reality, or giving Google all your data — there’s now a Chrome extension made just for you. “Pokemon NO!” is a free extension that allows you to mute all mentions of Pokemon Go on the web…

If you — like me — have enabled auto-upload to Google Photos on pretty much all of your devices, you’ve surely noticed that some photos just don’t arrive on the site with the correct orientation sometimes. The Google Photos editor — which also has filters, brightness control, etc. — is an easy fix for this (it only take a few clicks), but now Google has made rotating photos in the app even easier with a quick keyboard shortcut that you can use when viewing any photo…

Google frequently says they’re working to get the next billion users online and onto its services. With seven different products that have a billion users, the company knows how to design for large audiences. To help Android and web developers do the same, Google has published a new site that details best practices for scaling to billions of users.

After adding a new Goals feature on Android and iOS, Google Calendar will now send users event notifications on the web. Google is likely moving away from using email notifications as Drive recently added a similar capability.

Following the introduction of AMP articles to Android, iOS, and the mobile web, Google News will now highlight local coverage of national stories by using a new “Local Source” tag. The feature is live on all platforms, including the full web, starting today.

Google announced today that it’s bringing the “Smart Reply” feature previously only available to mobile users to Inbox by Gmail on the web.

Google is rolling out a new feature for Google Docs on Android and the web today that will make navigating through long documents much easier. The new “outline tool” adds a new pane on the left of the page adds quickly links to the document’s headers so you can quickly jump to that section without having to scroll through the whole document to get there.

Displayed in a pane to the left of the page, the outline features headers for each section of your document, making it simple to quickly jump from section to section. If you haven’t manually applied headers, no worries—we’ll do it for you, intelligently detecting the logical divisions within your work. You can then edit or remove these headers as necessary.

And there’s also a second component to it that lets users scroll through documents easier with a new “navigation handle” that will appear once you start to scroll. “Touching that handle will display the entire document’s structure, allowing you quickly skip from section to section, instead of slowly swiping up and down.”

Here’s a look at the feature in action:

Look out for the feature in Google Docs on Android and the web starting today.

HTTPS has become the rule, rather than the exception to the rule, in recent years. And in an effort to usher in the encrypted and more-secure communication protocol, Google announced last month that it would begin prioritizing HTTPS sites over HTTP sites when indexing the web. Unsurprisingly, Google is also slowly-but-surely making sure all of its own web properties use HTTPS over standard HTTP. Google’s cached pages available on the search site are now part of the club…

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.

The new Google+ interface is rolling out on the web today, and if you’re anything like me, you don’t have much patience for slow rollouts. I still hadn’t been prompted to click the “Let’s go” button and get the new layout, but luckily I stumbled on a way (via Sean S) to opt myself in without any wait time. Here’s how…

If you’re a Chrome or web developer, you’re probably already aware that the Chrome Dev Summit is set to take place today and tomorrow. The event brings Chrome engineers and web developers together for a two-day “exploration of building beautiful and fast mobile web applications.” This is an important event for many people, especially considering the growing relevance of web apps.

This is a two-day event, as I mentioned, and day 1 is set to start at 9 AM PT on November 17th. Google has provided livestreaming video of the entire event, and you can tune in below…

Google is rolling out updates this week for Google Docs and Sheets for Android as well as Google Drive on the web, the company announced in two separate blog posts today.

For Sheets, the update brings the ability to “add new and reply to existing comments,” while the updated Google Docs for Android app gets the ability to see suggestions and comments when in the app’s Print Layout view. “resolve, close, accept, or reject those comments and suggestions—making it simpler to move between their desktop and mobile devices.”

Google also highlighted improvements to editing charts in the Sheets app on Android:

…if a user a selects a single cell and inserts a chart, we’ll automatically expand that data selection to include the immediately surrounding cells. This will make it easier for users to create robust charts with relevant information. In addition, when an employee creates a new chart, they’ll now see three recommended chart types, which we’ll suggest based on the data they’ve selected.

And lastly for Sheets, users will start to notice the 400 new fonts Google began rolling out to Sheets on the web this week.

As for Google Drive, the web app gets improved organization with new smarter sorting in the app’s ‘Recent’ view:

The new sorting experience removes the existing sorting dropdown options (‘Last modified,’ ‘Last modified by me,’ and ‘Last opened by me’) and replaces them with a dynamically-generated view based on the actions of the person using Drive. Items will continue to be segmented into time-based sections (‘Today,’ ‘Earlier this week,’ etc), and will now indicate whether each item was opened, modified, or uploaded by the user directly in the UI. The smarter sorting ensures that items acted upon by the user are more likely to be shown than items acted upon by other collaborators.

The updated Google Sheets and Docs apps are rolling out now.

Google’s giving the web Hangouts a revamp today. The interface (as seen above) is more minimalist and takes advantage of the full screen. Under the hood, calls should start quicker and have higher resolution. Rounding up the list of changes is a simpler invite system.

Here’s what Googler Eduardo Fernández had to say about the update:

Today, we’re introducing a new calling experience for Hangouts on the web that loads more quickly, renders video more sharply, and streamlines the interface so you can focus less on where to click and more on what to say. We’ve been using this new calling experience at Google for a while now. It’s early days, but we hope you like it as much as we do. (Note: This is not available for Google Apps for Work customers.)

Key changes include: • Calls that start faster and stay crisper, with higher quality video • A more streamlined and immersive full-screen interface • A simpler way to invite friends and family to your calls

Starting today, a small group of users should see the improvements and it will be fully released over the coming days. The update is not yet available for Google Apps for Work customers.

Adobe Flash is notoriously both resource intensive and ubiquitous on the web, which hasn’t helped the open web survive in the consumer shift to mobile devices that have smaller screens and processors. Flash isn’t even supported in most mobile environments anymore because of its poor performance. Google is as a result working hard to eliminate Flash content from its ad network and create a better web browsing experience. Today it announced September 1st is when it will begin pausing many of the Flash ads seen around the web for users of its Chrome web browser.

Fortunately for Google, it’s able to convert most of the Flash ads uploaded to its AdWords advertiser network to the less intensive HTML5 automatically. The company provides a section on its support site where advertisers can go to see what Flash ads are eligible for this conversion, and it has even made a step-by-step tool for converting ads which can’t be automatically converted or haven’t already been uploaded to Google’s servers.

Google first announced this shift back in June, and while the company has its own mobile operating system with a massive amount of native apps in the form of Android, it’s still a big proponent of the web. Perhaps because that’s where it was born, but really because the web isn’t closed off like mobile operating systems, and the underlying hypertext language of the web allows the company to easily scrape and index it for its Search business, among other things. The company introduced a setting to its Chrome browser in March which enables this disabling of Flash plugin content. Chrome for Android and iOS doesn’t support it at all.

The familiar Google App Launcher that you may or may not use on a daily basis — found on Google’s many web properties — has four rows of icons and the ability to move them around to organize them the way you’d like. You probably didn’t even notice when these features were added, but they’re nice to have. If you have a Google Apps account too, though, you may know that the App Launcher is stuck in the past for Apps users.

Google announced last night that the web interface for Google+ has received a facelift, bringing many visual cues from the company’s Material Design language. The new design sports a hamburger menu that slides in from the left side, a bright red toolbar at the top of pages, and a floating material-y circle in the bottom right that should look familiar to those using Google’s latest mobile operating system…

As per Danielle Buckley‘s Google+ page:

Today we’re excited to announce the new and improved Google+ experience for mobile web. We focused on making everything faster, more beautiful, and more intuitive. To check out all the new updates, visit plus.google.com on your phone or tablet’s browser. As always, we’d love to hear what you think!

This update brings the app up to 2015 standards, but there’s a still a lot of disparity between Google+ on different platforms. We have a newly redesigned web interface that is now closer in functionality to the Android app (but not quite the same), an iOS app that is unique in its own ways, and a desktop experience that is completely different than the mobile apps. Hopefully we’ll see a more unified experience over time.

Google announced today that it’s rolling out an updated version of its Google Drive interface on the web for mobile devices. That means if you visit Google Drive from a browser on your device (instead of using the native Google Drive apps), you’ll now arrive at a refreshed user interface specifically optimized for the web on smartphones and tablets. Google still recommends you go with its native Drive apps, but if you have to visit the mobile version, you’ll now have a much improved experience.

Starting today, you’ll find a much improved mobile web version of Drive that’s faster and easier to use. The apps are still the most optimized experience, but if you find that isn’t an option, the mobile web will do the job better than ever.

The new UI is rolling out starting today and should become available to all in the coming days at http://drive.google.com.

Google announced today on Google+ that it will be holding a two-day Chrome Dev Summit later this year to discuss “new web APIs, multi-device workflows, performance tips and the guts of Blink.” The event will be held at Google’s HQ in Mountain View and it will also be live streamed to all that can’t make it on YouTube.

The dev summit is scheduled for November 20-21 and Google says registration for developers will open soon. No word on whether or not we might see some new product announcements, but it’s likely this will be a much smaller event that Google I/O and its recent Nexus 7 event.

Google has a website for the upcoming Chrome Dev Summit for those that want to learn more and a survey to find out what developers are interested in learning about at the event. Here’s a bit of what to expect:

• Laughing in the face of dropped network connections
• Optimizing the performance across GPU, CPU, and network
• Maintaining and scaling your code
• Jank busting and smooth scrolling
• Testing workflows for multi-device deployments
• Designing UX patterns for mobile web apps
• Making friends with screens of all sizes
• Directing the evolution of the web
• Living in a declarative world with Web Components
• Working smarter not harder with better workflow and tools

Amazon is announcing today the roll out of a new service called “Login with Amazon” t0 allow developers to easily offer an Amazon sign-in option in their apps, games, and websites. Amazon says in a trial with Zappos.com customers chose to sign in using the Login with Amazon service about 40 percent of the time, while a trial with Woot found customers using Amazon sign in “had the highest rate of order conversion”:

“Login with Amazon enables app developers and website owners to leverage Amazon’s trusted sign-in solution, allowing them to focus on providing a great experience for their customers,” said Michael Carr, Amazon Vice President, eCommerce Services. “Amazon customers now have a hassle-free way to quickly and securely sign-in to apps, games and websites, without having to remember yet another password.”

Amazon is making the service available free of charge to devs and has SDKs for both Android and iOS available to download through its new login.amazon.com website.

Previously only available to Chromebook users, Google announced today on its Chrome blog that Mac and Windows users will now have the ability to open Microsoft Office files directly within Chrome. The functionality works for users running the latest Chrome Beta and requires installation of the Chrome Office Viewer (Beta) extension.

In addition to saving you time, the Chrome Office Viewer also protects you from malware delivered via Office files. Just like with web pages and PDFs, we’ve added a specialized sandbox to impede attackers who use compromised Office files to try to steal private information or monitor your activities.