Chrome Blog
The latest news from the Google Chrome team
Appy Holidays from the Chrome Web Store
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
The winter holidays are my favorite time of the year: I get to spend quality time with friends and family and eat lots of delicious food. However, between booking airplane tickets, sending greeting cards and looking for the perfect gifts, the pre-holiday season can be busy...and even a bit stressful. This year though, I feel much more in control thanks to the apps I discovered in the Chrome Web Store’s
Holiday collection
.
If you are looking for last minute holiday gifts, try
Gilt for Chrome
. Within the app, you can find the latest designer fashion items on sale and search for specific items and sizes like “men’s shoes size 11.”
I also recommend
Amazon Windowshop
. You can use the app to browse through millions of products in a slick way. For example my cousin really likes cupcakes: a search in the app shows me cupcake related products organized across categories like books, groceries and clothing, helping me find unique gifts.
For those of you still planning your trip home, check out
Hipmunk
. Hipmunk sorts all available flights to your destination by “agony” -- a mix of price, duration, and number of connections. You can see all the flights that meet your needs in a single view.
Finally, if you are late like I am in sending holiday cards, I suggest checking out
Stupeflix Video Maker
. In the app you can select a theme (my favorite one is “Celebrate”), insert pictures, text, and music, and create a free 60-second greeting that you can email or post on YouTube and Facebook. Or, you can simply create beautiful photo slideshows with
DropMocks
and
comemories
.
There are hundreds more apps to discover at the
Chrome Web Store
.
Happy Holidays!
Posted by Christos Apartoglou, Product Marketing Manager
60 million tabs towards good causes
Wednesday, December 22, 2010
In 2010, the Chrome community has joined us in moments of
fun
,
invention
,
exploration
, and now, giving.
Last week
, we invited Chrome’s users worldwide to “donate” their opened tabs in Chrome to drive a charitable gift of one million dollars. We on the Chrome team were deeply impressed with the support and participation and now we’re happy to share the results with you.
The Chrome community responded with staggering enthusiasm and, acting together, raised
60,599,541 tabs
for charity.
Each Chrome user chose the causes their tabs would support, which determined how we allocated our one million dollar donation. Accordingly, we’re excited to make the following donations on behalf of the Chrome community:
$245,278 toward planting
trees
in the Atlantic Forest, one of the world’s endangered tropical forests.
$232,791 toward providing clean
water
, by building freshwater wells for communities in developing nations.
$112,078 toward building
shelter
, to be constructed by volunteers for impoverished families in Latin America.
$267,336 toward administering
vaccinations
against meningitis to combat outbreaks in Africa.
$142,518 toward publishing
books
by local writers and illustrators, which will be created and donated to schools and libraries across Asia and Africa.
We’ll be making the donations at year-end, and our partner charities are already looking towards applying the funds from Chrome for a Cause in 2011. Read more about how your donation will be applied specifically by visiting our partners’ websites:
The Nature Conservancy
charity: water
Un Techo para mi País
Doctors Without Borders
Room to Read
We're glad to connect Chrome users with these important causes all around the world -- so much so that we’re already thinking of more Chrome for a Cause projects for the future!
Feel free to keep your extension installed if you’d like to hear about future opportunities to work together with the Chrome community for a good cause. We’ll post all the details about how to participate on the Chrome blog, so make sure you check in when you hear about new opportunities.
Thanks for joining us in this endeavor. Happy Holidays!
Posted by Sarah Nahm, Product Marketing Manager
Guest post from the Demo Lab: Help us test the Cr-48
Tuesday, December 21, 2010
Here at the Demo Lab we have only one mission: to protect your data no matter what happens to your computer. To serve this mission we have been evaluating our Cr-48 prototype notebooks in challenging, some might say extreme, conditions. We’ve been in the lab testing notebooks exhaustively (I'm talking 24 hours a day here). But, to try out as many notebooks as possible, we’re opening up the lab to the public today.
Are you ready to help take the Cr-48 through its paces? If you are up to this challenge, take these mean machines through explosions, carbicide, and destruction by ravenous zombies at
google.com/demolab
. While you're at it, you can submit an application to the Chrome notebook Pilot program.
That's all from here. Good luck, remember to wear your safety goggles at all times, and see you in the lab.
Posted by Lab Tech, Demo Lab
Safer plug-ins, faster search, and richer graphics
Thursday, December 16, 2010
Last week, we
previewed
several upcoming features that will be available to users on Chrome and Chrome OS. Today we’re excited to introduce a few of these new security, speed, and open web platform features into Chrome’s
beta channel
.
As one of the engineers working on Chrome’s
sandbox
, I’m happy to announce that we’re bringing Chrome’s existing sandboxing technology for web pages to the
Flash Player
plug-in
in Chrome for Windows. The sandbox adds an
additional layer of protection
to further guard against
malicious pages
that try to hijack your computer or steal private information from your hard drive. Based on this groundwork in the beta, we’ll be bringing the sandboxed Flash Player to Chrome for Mac and Linux in future releases as well. For an explanation of how sandboxing technology makes Chrome safer, check out this animated video:
With the latest beta, you can turn on Chrome Instant (à la
Google Instant
), which lets you view web pages and search results faster than ever. With
Instant enabled
, web pages that you frequently visit will begin loading as soon as you start typing a URL in the
omnibox
, faster than you can say ‘Jack Robinson!’ (or in this case, faster than you can hit Enter). In addition, if supported by your default search engine, search results appear instantly as you type queries in the omnibox, and in-line predictions will also appear to help guide your search. Give it a whirl by enabling it on the Basics tab of Chrome’s options and see how you like it!
Finally, this beta will include WebGL, a new web technology for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser. For more on WebGL in Chrome, check out the
Chromium blog
. If you’d like to learn more about 3D in the browser and what hardware-accelerated graphics, read on in our
online guidebook to browsers and the web
.
We hope you’ll enjoy this safer, faster, and more powerful version of the Chrome beta!
Posted by Carlos Pizano, Software Engineer
Browse for a good cause
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
Whether it’s bug fixes to the Chromium open source project, dazzling apps and extensions arriving daily in our Web Store, or boundary-pushing Chrome experiments -- the Chrome community never fails to inspire us with their awesomeness.
This holiday, we wanted to enable the Chrome community to work together for a good cause. Starting today, we invite you to support
five worthy causes
by counting and “donating” the tabs you open in Chrome.
Everyone’s total tabs will determine a charitable donation made on behalf of the Chrome community, up to one million dollars. Here's what your tabs can do:
10 tabs = 1 tree planted
10 tabs = 1 book published and donated
25 tabs = 1 vaccination treatment provided
100 tabs = 1 square foot of shelter built
200 tabs = 1 person's clean water for a year
To find out more about this effort and the organizations we're partnering with, visit
google.com/chrome/intl/en/p/cause/
.
Want to participate?
Get the Chrome for a Cause extension
Browse the web with Chrome between December 15 - 19
At the end of each day, you’ll be prompted to click on the extension to submit your tabs
Choose which charity you’d like to support with that day’s tabs -- you can always support the same charity, or pick a different one each day
Next week, we’ll be sharing the details of the good deeds you’ve enacted. In the meantime, browse away!
Posted by Sarah Nahm, Product Marketing Manager
Added on December 15, 2010:
In order to prevent hackers, spammers and bots from manipulating the extension, and to maintain the integrity of the campaign, we ask that users login with their Google account before submitting their tabs. As part of this step, the account log-in process requires connecting to one of Google's APIs to connect with your account. The Google Contacts API is the lightest of all Google APIs and grants the least permissions. Though we use the Contacts API to verify your account we do not use any of your Contacts data in the Chrome for a Cause promotion.
Rest assured, Google's not going to spam your contact list or send you a single email about this.
Chrome is Ready for Business
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
When we announced that Chrome is now used by over
120 million users
and showed off some of its latest features last week, we saw a tremendous amount of excitement from both users and businesses. Many businesses asked how they can get the benefits of increased security, speed and the modern browser capabilities that Chrome offers with the configurability and customizations they need.
The good news is that businesses don’t need to wait any longer to deploy Google Chrome. Today, we’re announcing that Chrome offers controls that enable IT administrators to easily configure and deploy the browser on Windows, Mac, and Linux according to their business requirements. We’ve created an
MSI installer
that enables businesses who use standard deployment tools to install Chrome for all their managed users. We’ve also added support for managed group policy with a
list of policies
and a
set of templates
that allow administrators to easily customize browser settings to manage security and privacy.
By deploying Google Chrome, organizations can take advantage of improved security and web application performance without needing to upgrade other expensive software licenses or buy new hardware. Deploying Google Chrome also gives users access to productivity-enhancing HTML5 web applications. Since Google Chrome is the same as the browser on
Chrome OS
, admins considering Chrome OS for their organizations can start testing their mission-critical web applications by deploying the Google Chrome browser.
Support for these new administrative features is available to
Google Apps for Business
admins by
phone and email
as part of their Apps deployment. For those who are not Google Apps for Business customers, we’ve also posted
documentation
to assist administrators deploying Chrome inside their organization.
Over the past few months, we’ve worked to test Chrome with admins in a diverse set of large organizations interested in moving to a more secure, modern browser. Organizations such as Vanguard, Boise State University, and Procter & Gamble (and Google!) have already successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users. They’ve provided us with excellent feedback, and we’re continuing to work on the next set of features that they’ve requested.
What we’ve built is just the start of what we’d like to offer businesses with Google Chrome. We’re excited by the features built so far, and we’re working hard on polishing the next set of policies that will make Google Chrome even more customizable and useful to users in the future. Please
give the new features a try
and
let us know what you think
!
Posted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager and Daniel Clifford, Software Engineer
How to upgrade your browser (and 50 other things you might want to teach your parents)
Monday, December 13, 2010
The other day I told my parents about
a recent Chrome experiment
, but the site wouldn't load for them: turns out they were still using a browser released over nine years ago and weren’t sure how to update it. I ended up installing Chrome for them, as it stays up-to-date
automatically
(read: it's less work for me!).
For those of you who also have family members suffering from outdated browser issues, I’ve created a video tutorial that you can share with them so that they can walk through a few quick steps to ensure that they have the latest browser:
This video is one in a series of basic how-to videos that a handful of us at Google have put together at
TeachParentsTech.org
, a place where “kids” of any age can send tutorials to their moms, dads, uncles, and whomever they like. Send someone a tech support care package of your own!
Posted by Sean Liu, Associate Product Manager on the Google Apps team
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