Tune in to I/O Live at 2:30 a.m. EST on 28th June

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog


Google I/O, our annual developer conference, begins in just two days, and this year, we’re bringing you more than 130 technical sessions, 20 code labs and 155 Sandbox partners. If you’re not here in San Francisco, you can still sign up for one of our 350+ I/O Extended events around the world or tune in to I/O Live to watch the live stream from wherever you are. This year’s conference kicks off on June 28 with the first day’s keynote at 2:30 a.m. EST and the second day’s keynote on June 29 at 3:00 a.m. EST, so tune in early at developers.google.com/io to avoid missing the action!

Bookmark developers.google.com/io to watch I/O Live from your desktop, or download the Google I/O mobile app to access the live stream from your phone or tablet. For the truly entrepreneurial, check our liveblogging gadget, which lets you add your commentary and the live video feed from the Google I/O keynotes to your blog.

More than 40 sessions on Android, Chrome, Google+ and your favorite APIs will be streamed live, and all remaining session videos will be recorded and available shortly after the conference on Google Developers Live and the conference website. Between sessions, we’ll bring you behind-the-scenes footage featuring interviews with Googlers and attendees, tours of the Sandbox and more. The stream will also continue through our After Hours party (June 28 starting at 12:00 p.m. EST), where we've teamed up with top entertainers, inventors, artists, educators and visionaries from all over the world for an amazing evening. (Or lunchtime, if you're in Australia!)

Posted by Mike Winton, Director of Developer Relations

Build: Bringing LEGO bricks to Chrome

We love building with LEGOR bricks. We loved it as kids, and we still love it now. Visit any Google office, you’re going to see LEGO bricks all over the place.

So it’s with childish delight that today we can announce Build. Over the last few months we’ve been working with LEGO Australia, thinking about what would happen if we brought bricks to the browser. Build is the result: our latest Chrome Experiment which lets you explore and build a new world of LEGO creations together online. With 8 trillion bricks, think of Build as the largest LEGO set you’ve ever seen.

Build may look simple, but this collaborative 3D building experience would not have been possible a couple of years ago. It shows how far browser technology has come and how the web is an amazing platform for creativity. We made the bricks with WebGL, which enables powerful 3D graphics right in the browser and demonstrates the upper limit of current WebGL graphics performance.  We then mixed in Google Maps (another Aussie invention) so you can put your creation in a LEGO world alongside everyone else’s.

Right now Build is an experiment we’ve been working on in Sydney. We’re launching first in Australia and New Zealand and hope to open up in other countries soon. This year is the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick in Australia and Build joins the celebration of the LEGO Festival of Play online.

Over the next few weeks and months we hope to see you fill the Build world up with everything from medieval castles to sea snakes, giant mouse cursors to smiling monsters and even a Kiwi! Share your creations with us on +Google and we’ll re-post the most inventive.

You can start building at buildwithchrome.com.

Posted by Lockey McGrath, Product Marketing Manager, Google Australia and New Zealand

Introducing Chrome for Android

This is a cross-post from the Google Mobile Blog.

In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we're introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet. Like the desktop version, Chrome for Android Beta is focused on speed and simplicity, but it also features seamless sign-in and sync so you can take your personalised web browsing experience with you wherever you go, across devices.

Speed With Chrome for Android, you can search, navigate and browse fast—Chrome fast. You can scroll through web pages as quickly as you can flick your finger. When searching, your top search results are loaded in the background as you type so pages appear instantly. And of course, both search and navigation can all be done quickly from the Chrome omnibox.

Simplicity Chrome for Android is designed from the ground up for mobile devices. We reimagined tabs so they fit just as naturally on a small-screen phone as they do on a larger screen tablet. You can flip or swipe between an unlimited number of tabs using intuitive gestures, as if you’re holding a deck of cards in the palm of your hands, each one a new window to the web.

One of the biggest pains of mobile browsing is selecting the correct link out of several on a small-screen device. Link Preview does away with hunting and pecking for links on a web page by automatically zooming in on links to make selecting the precise one easier. And as with Chrome on desktop, we built Chrome for Android with privacy in mind from the beginning, including incognito mode for private browsing and fine-grained privacy options (tap menu icon, ‘Settings,’ and then ‘Privacy’).

Sign in You can now bring your personalised Chrome experience with you to your Android phone or tablet. If you sign in to Chrome on your Android device, you can:

• View open tabs: Access the tabs you left open on your computer (also signed into Chrome)—picking up exactly where you left off.
• Get smarter suggestions: If you visit a site often on your computer, you'll also get an autocomplete suggestion for it on your mobile device, so you can spend less time typing.
• Sync bookmarks: Conveniently access your favorite sites no matter where you are or which device you’re using.

Chrome is now available in Beta from Android Market, in select countries and languages for phones and tablets with Android 4.0, Ice Cream Sandwich. We’re eager to hear your feedback. Finally, we look forward to working closely with the developer community to create a better web on a platform that defines mobile.

Posted by Sundar Pichai, SVP, Chrome and Apps

Happy third birthday, Chrome!

This is a cross-post from the Official Google blog.

It’s that time of the year again for the Chrome team, when we pause on our anniversary to reflect on the amazing life and times of the web. It’s hard to believe that it’s already been three years since we launched our open source web browser, Chrome.



In that time, the web community has continued to inspire us, bringing the power of the web into all kinds of apps and experiences, with all modern browsers making great strides in speed, simplicity and security. To pay homage to the goodness of the web, we’ve put together an interactive infographic, built in HTML5, which details the evolution of major web technologies and browsers:

(With thanks to our friends at Hyperakt, Vizzuality, mgmt design, and GOOD)

In our third year, we’ve also brought Chrome's principles of speed, simplicity and security to a new model of computing: the Chromebook. The Chromebook is pure Chrome—a computer built for everything you ever need to do on the web while doing away with all the usual annoyances of an old, slow PC.



Here’s a quick fly-by through the some of the highlights of the past 12 months on the Chrome platform:



Faster and faster

• We kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a new compilation infrastructure for the V8 JavaScript engine, codenamed “Crankshaft,” which improves JavaScript performance by up to 66 percent.
• Chrome’s new settings interface helps you find the right settings quickly with an integrated search box. It also provides direct links to each settings page, which can be copied and pasted for easy troubleshooting.
• The omnibox is improved to better suggest partial matches for webpage titles and URLs.
• You can optionally enable Chrome Instant, which shows relevant content in the browser window as you type, before you press Enter.
• Chrome’s built-in prerendering technology enables sites to build even faster experiences for their users—such as Instant Pages in Google search, which in some cases makes search results appear to load almost instantly.

Simpler and more accessible

• Chrome supports many popular screen readers such as JAWS, NVDA and VoiceOver to help visually impaired people better experience the web.
• Print Preview, a popular feature request, uses Chrome’s built-in PDF viewer to display the preview, and enables you to save any webpage as a convenient PDF file using the “Print to PDF” option.
• Chrome’s icon takes on a simpler look to embody the Chrome spirit, since Chrome is all about making your web experience quicker, lighter and easier for all.

An even more secure platform

• Our integrated and sandboxed PDF viewer enables you to view PDF files on the web without installing additional software. Furthermore, we built an additional layer of security around the PDF viewer called a “sandbox” to help protect you from security attacks that are targeted at PDF files.
• Adobe Flash Player is sandboxed on Windows, further protecting you from security attacks and malware targeted at Flash content on the web.
• Chrome warns you before downloading some types of malicious files with enhanced Safe Browsing technology. In order to protect privacy, malicious content is detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs that you visit or the files you download.
• To provide greater transparency and control over the data that websites store on your computers, Chrome lets you delete Local Shared Objects created by Adobe Flash Player using the browser’s built-in setting dialogs.

Wowzah, the modern web!

• The Chrome Web Store is an open marketplace where you can search for and discover web applications, both free and paid, along with ratings and reviews. Developers can add in-app payments to their apps for a flat 5 percent transaction fee.
• Chrome supports WebGL, which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser with no additional software needed. For a taste of what WebGL can do, check out “3 Dreams of Black,” a 3D music experience for the web browser.
• Chrome’s support for the HTML speech input API enables developers to give web apps the ability to transcribe your voice into text. Try it out on www.google.com by clicking on the microphone icon in the search box.
• Hardware-accelerated 3D CSS enables snazzier experiences in webpages and apps which use 3D effects.

Delivering a new, simpler model for computing

• Chrome is enterprise ready, with an MSI installer and support for managed group policies. Many organizations such as Vanguard and Proctor & Gamble have successfully deployed Chrome to thousands of users in an enterprise setting.
• As of this past July, Chromebooks are now available for purchase in eight countries—the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the Netherlands and South Korea. And just like Chrome, the Chromebook always keeps getting better. When you turn your Chromebook on, it updates itself automatically: you get the latest and greatest version of the operating system without having to think about it.

There’s more to come. Keep an eye on the Chrome blog to hear about new features and performance improvements as we continue to ship stable channel updates every six weeks. As always, on both Chrome and Chromebooks you’ll be automatically updated to the new versions as soon as they’re released.



Posted by Ben Goodger and Darin Fisher, Software Engineers

3D dreams in the modern browser

This is a cross-post from the Official Google Blog.

Some of the most compelling experiences on the web come when inspirations of old are brought to life with modern technologies. Last August, “The Wilderness Downtown” brought the wistful feeling of nostalgia to the browser as you run down the streets where you used to live in an HTML5 music experience based on the Arcade Fire song “We Used to Wait.”



“3 Dreams of Black” is our newest music experience for the web browser, written and directed by Chris Milk and developed with a few folks here at Google. The song, “Black,” comes off the album ROME, presented by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, featuring Jack White and Norah Jones on vocals and soon to be released on the record label Parlophone/EMI. ROME is inspired by Italian soundtracks from the 1960s and the classic Italian Western genre. In fact, the album was recorded with the original orchestra from Italian director Sergio Leone’s westerns (remember The Good, The Bad & The Ugly?).



“3 Dreams of Black” is a visual voyage through three dream worlds, told through rich 2D drawings and animations that are interspersed with interactive 3D sequences. At various points in this web experience, you can take control with your computer’s mouse and guide your journey through the unfolding narrative. You can even contribute to the dream by creating your own relics using a 3D model creator. Some of the best user creations will be integrated into the experience and become a part of others’ “3 Dreams” exploration.

In “3 Dreams in Black”, the browser is transformed into a theater for these lucid virtual dreams through WebGL, a new technology which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser. With WebGL in modern browsers like Google Chrome, you can interact with 3D experiences with no need for additional software. For curious web developers out there, we’ve made all the code completely open and available so that you can dig in, have a look around and try it out for yourself.



Because “3 Dreams in Black” is an experiment built with the latest web technologies, it requires a browser that supports WebGL like Chrome, and Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.6 or above to help ensure that your computer has up-to-date graphics drivers. For those of you who may have hardware constraints, we’ve put together a short video that we hope will provide a glimpse into this unique experience. To explore these dreamscapes, visit www.ro.me.



Posted by Aaron Koblin, Google Data Arts Team

Chrome is Ready for Business

This is a cross-post from the Google Chrome blog.

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 customisations 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 customise browser settings to manage security and privacy.

By deploying Google Chrome, organisations 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 organisations 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 organisation.



Over the past few months, we’ve worked to test Chrome with admins in a diverse set of large organisations interested in moving to a more secure, modern browser. Organisations 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 customisable 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

Australian presents for Chrome's birthday

Today marks the second birthday of our web browser, Chrome. Looking back today on Chrome’s history, it’s amazing to see how much has changed in just a short time. In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project. All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful.

Behind the scenes, we continue to extend the security features that help you browse the web more safely. This includes Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology—which serves as a warning system if you’re about to visit a site suspected of phishing or hosting malware; Chrome’s auto-update mechanism—which helps ensure that the browser is always up-to-date with the latest security updates; and the browser’s “sandbox”—an added layer of protection which prevents malicious code on an exploited website from infecting your computer.


Today, we’re releasing a new stable version of Chrome that is even faster and more streamlined. Chrome is now three times faster than it was two years ago on JavaScript performance. We’ve also been working on simplifying the “chrome” of Chrome. As you can see, we took the already minimalist user interface and stripped it down a bit more to make it easier to use. We combined Chrome’s two menus into one, revisited the location of the buttons, cleaned up the treatment of the URL and the Omnibox, and adjusted the color scheme of the browser to be easier on the eyes.

If you haven’t tried Chrome recently, we invite you to download our new stable version today at google.com.au/chrome. For those of you who have been using Chrome, thanks for a great second year! We hope that Chrome has made your life on the web even better, and look forward to the next year.

But what’s a birthday party without presents?! We thought we’d share the love around by compiling a list of some brand new Aussie Chrome extensions you might like to use to make life a little easier.

News and sports
Want some water cooler conversation for the office? You can find out what’s been happening with, for example, the election and the local economy simply by checking out the News.com.au and The Australian Business extensions. Or if you like sports, or acronyms, check out the AFL and NRL news sites with the click of a button.

Food, glorious food
Try our Menulog extension and browse for your food delivery options and special deals around the area, all from a handy map. If you are after a homemade meal, check out new recipes through the Taste.com.au extension.

Out on the town
The new Lasttix extension will provide you with hot last minutes deals for theatre, music concerts, comedy shows, sports games, opera, symphonies, and much more.

Collecting miles?
For all those who frequently travel to, from and around Australia there is the Qantas Frequent Flyer extension. Here you can get a snapshot of points earned plus great ideas on ways to use them.

Road trip
With the new CarSales extension you will be able to search 200,000+ cars for sale and get live notifications matching your search criteria.

You can find all these Aussie extensions and more in the Chrome extensions gallery. You might also want to make Chrome even prettier by using a Carla Zampatti or Akira Isogawa theme.

Enjoy and happy birthday Chrome!

Posted by Katharina Friedrich, product marketing manager