Official Web Master Blog

Chrome for iOS doesn't have a lot of things in common with the desktop Chrome or Chrome for Android. It doesn't use the latest WebKit rendering engine and can't switch to Blink, it doesn't use the V8 JavaScript engine, it doesn't have a multi-process architecture. These are iOS limitations and all third-party iOS browsers are built using UIWebView, so they use the same rendering engine and the same JavaScript engine, which is slower than Safari's Nitro (Opera Mini is just an OBML reader, not a browser, because pages are rendered using Opera's servers).

I was surprised to see an ad for Chrome when visiting Google's homepage in Safari for iPad: "Browse fast on your iPad. Install Google Chrome." Chrome for iOS is not fast, it's a lot slower than Safari and that's not Google's fault. It's even a little bit slower than other third-party browsers.


Even the Chrome for iOS homepage claims that you can "browse fast and sign in to bring your Chrome experience from your computer, anywhere you go". Sure, Chrome combines the address bar and the search box, preloads web pages and shows the most visited pages, but it's not a faster browser than Safari.

From Tom's Hardware: "In the end, any third-party Web browser on iOS is essentially tantamount to using an older version of Safari with a slightly different user interface and additional features. Due to Apple's App Store mandate that all third-party iOS browsers utilize Safari's stock engines, browser competition on this mobile operating system is practically non-existent. Unless Apple reverses course, allowing other developers to compete using their own unique rending and JavaScript engines."

Sometimes it's a good idea to question browser stats. While some companies claim that Chrome loses market share, Google says that the number of active Chrome users increased from 310 million (June 2012) to 750 million. According to Google, Chrome is now the most popular browser in the world.

"With over 750 million active users on Chrome, we're now focused on bringing to mobile the speed, simplicity and security improvements that we've seen on the desktop," says Google.

Sure, this number includes Android users and iOS users. The Android app has less than 100 million downloads, but the number of active users should be lower than the number of downloads.


But what if Google's stats are wrong? After all, Google is the most popular site in the world and owns the most popular analytics service. Not to mention YouTube and Blogger, two other very popular sites.

If you've ever wanted a Chrome extension that combines the most important Google services and lets you quickly switch between them, check Black Menu. It's based on the short-lived vertical menu launched by Google in 2011, but it offers more features than Google's menu.

Mouse over each menu item and you'll get a gadget-like interface for a Google service. You can check your mail, compose new messages, create calendar events, add tasks, check your Google+ notifications, share pages to Google+, read the latest news, use Google Translate and Google Search, upload files to Google Drive, quickly search Google Drive and more.



Mouse over the links section and you'll see some useful links for the Google service you've selected. It's great for quickly checking your favorite YouTube videos or creating a Google contact.

You can rearrange menu items and add new ones from the "more" section. For example, you can add the URL shortener option to quickly create a short URL for the current page. Add the Chrome Apps menu item to get a Chrome launcher that includes the apps you've installed in Chrome.

Black Menu is like a simplified iGoogle for Google services. Actually, the extension uses some iGoogle gadgets, but they'll need to be replaced before iGoogle is gone.

Wired publishes an interview with Sundar Pichai, Google's Senior Vice President for Chrome, Apps and now Android. Back in March, Larry Page announced that "Andy [Rubin] decided it's time to hand over the reins and start a new chapter at Google". Now Sundar Pichai is in charge of Android and many people wondered if Android and Chrome OS will merge.

"Android and Chrome are both large, open platforms, growing very fast. I think that they will play a strong role, not merely exist. I see this as part of friendly innovation and choice for both users and developers. (...) So in the short run, nothing changes. In the long run, computing itself will dictate the changes. We're living through a pivotal moment. It's a world of multiple screens, smart displays, with tons of low-cost computing, with big sensors built into devices. At Google we ask how to bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens. The picture may look different a year or two from from now, but in the short term, we have Android and we have Chrome, and we are not changing course," Sundar says.

He compares Android and Chrome OS with iOS and Mac OSX, which are different, but have a lot of things in common. "We want to do the right things at each stage, for users and developers. We are trying to find commonalities. On the browser layer, we share a lot of stuff. We will increasingly do more things like that. And maybe there's a more synergistic answer down the line."

That explains features like Cloud Messaging for Chrome, launched one year after Cloud Messaging for Android. Chrome also experimented with intents, but this feature is no longer supported.

It's interesting to note that Sundar's biggest Android challenge is to "improve the whole world's end-user experience without changing the open nature of Android". That's difficult to do, considering that most Android devices run old Android versions and some are rarely updated, not to mention that the most popular Android devices run custom operating systems based on Android, with custom interfaces, frameworks and different built-in apps.

For now, both Android and Chrome OS will continue to exist. Chrome's new packaged apps will also be available on mobile devices and it will be interesting to see if they look like native apps. Android tries to fight fragmentation by introducing new APIs using Google Play Services. For now, native apps make more sense on a mobile device than on a desktop computer, but this could change. Chrome OS could follow Firefox OS and run on smartphones and tablets.

Whether your laptop runs Windows, Android or Chrome OS, whether your phone or tablet runs Android, iOS, Chrome OS or Firefox OS, Google's goal is to "bring together something seamless and beautiful and intuitive across all these screens". I call it Google Operating System and it's not Android or Chrome OS.

There's a weird regression in Google Image Search if you use Chrome 27+ and enable "Extended Instant API" in chrome://flags. Extended Instant is a feature I've mentioned a few months ago and it's still a work in progress. It integrates Chrome with Google Search, replaces the new tab page with a special version of the Google homepage and removes the navigation bar and the search box from Google's search pages.

Back to Google Image Search. For some reason, when Extended Instant is enabled, Google Image Search switches to the old interface: thumbnails are smaller and you can mouse over to see more details about the images. When you click an image result, Google sends you to a new page that loads the original image file.

Speaking of new-style packaged apps for Chrome, here's a new app: Google Keep. It's another way to access the recently launched service for taking notes.


The app looks just like the Google Keep site, but it works offline. This means that you can access your notes or create new notes even if you don't have an Internet connection. Unfortunately, you can't insert images when you're offline. Another limitation is that new notes aren't uploaded in the background when you're back online, so you need to open the app.


{ via Chrome Blog }

Back in 2010, I wrote a post about the Chrome Web Store and the two kinds of apps that were available: hosted apps (mostly links to web apps) and packaged apps (local apps that work offline and are closer to native apps). At that time, many people complained that the apps from the Chrome Web Store are mostly bookmarks and Google didn't distinguish hosted apps from packaged apps. "Unfortunately, Google's store doesn't properly label apps, so it's difficult to find apps that work offline, apps that have a rich user interaction, apps that only live inside Chrome," I mentioned back then.


The Web Store has improved: Google started to label the apps that work offline and the two types of apps will have different names. Only packaged apps will be called "apps", while hosted apps will be called "websites".

Today's packaged apps are actually new-style packaged apps and have a lot of new features: "powerful APIs have been added so your apps can have native-like capabilities, and a serious security model is enforced to make sure these APIs are not abused." Package apps launch from outside of the browser, using the Chrome App Launcher - a new icon that will be added to the operating system's taskbar.


"Packaged apps deliver an experience as capable as a native app, but as safe as a web page. Just like web apps, packaged apps are written in HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS. But packaged apps look and behave like native apps, and they have native-like capabilities that are much more powerful than those available to web apps." The apps launch in a new window that has no chrome and no browser interface elements.


"These combine the best of websites and native applications — they're available offline & from any computer, are always up to date, and they can communicate with devices like USB drives & Bluetooth speakers," explains Google.

Here's the new Chrome Web Store interface that's displayed if you use Chrome 28 (Dev/Canary) for Windows or Chrome OS:


Install the Gliffy Diagrams app and you can use it almost instantly. Add some shapes, close the window, open Gliffy again from the App Launcher and your data is there.


"Many of these apps are works in progress, which is why we're only making them easily available on Chrome's dev channel. If you've written a packaged app, or are working on one, now is a great time to get some early feedback and polish your app before Chrome packaged apps become more broadly available," informs the Chromium Blog.

Some examples of apps: games, to-do apps, text editors, SSH clients, IRC clients, torrent clients, calculators, weather apps and more.

Last year, Google acquired Quickoffice, a mobile app for editing Microsoft Office files. The app is still available and it's not free. It's probably the only mobile Google app that's not free (there's a free version for Google Apps for Business users).

Google started to port Quickoffice to Chrome OS, first as a Microsoft Office viewer. Now the Office viewer is available as an extension for Chrome. It requires at least Chrome 27.0.1453.65 for Windows and Mac, so you can use it if you have Chrome Beta, Chrome Dev Channel, Chrome Canary or a recent Chromium build.

The extension lets you open Microsoft Office files that have the following extensions: .doc, .docx, .xls, .xlsx, .ppt, .pptx. It looks just like the PDF viewer, but it doesn't work as well yet probably because it's still in beta. Some files don't load, text selection doesn't work for presentations and zooming some documents sends you to a different page.


But why not open these files using Google Drive apps? Why not use the Google Drive Viewer? They're great options, but the Chrome Office Viewer is better than the Google Drive Viewer because it doesn't convert files to images. Opening files using Google Drive apps like Google Docs or Google Sheets takes more time: the files need to be downloaded and then converted to the Google Drive format. Another explanation: "Quickoffice has an established track record of enabling seamless interoperability with popular file formats" and this is especially important for business users. The viewer works offline, so Chromebook users can open Office files from a USB flash drive even when they don't have an Internet connection.

To test the extension, search Google for [fileype:doc essay], [fileype:ppt internet history], [fileype:xls gdp].

{ via Chrome Blog }

The latest release of Chrome Beta for Android added an interface for the data compression proxy. You no longer have to enable a flag, just open Chrome's menu, go to the settings, select "Bandwidth management", "Reduce data usage" and enable the feature.


You can start visiting your favorite sites and check back the "Bandwidth management" to see some stats. For more detailed stats, type chrome://net-internals in the omnibox and select the "Bandwidth" section in the left sidebar.


My total savings percentage is 33.5%. It's less impressive than Opera Mini's 90% savings percentage, but Opera Mini is not a browser. It's just a thin client app and all the rendering and JavaScript processing is performed on Opera's servers, so Opera Mini only needs a simplified OBML file. It's more appropriate to compare Chrome's data compression proxy with Opera Turbo, a feature available in the Opera Mobile browser. "In November 2009, the average compression rate for Opera Turbo was 63.6%," according to an Opera report [PDF], while in April 2011 the average compression rate was 60.5%. Apparently, Opera incorrectly defines compression rate as the savings percentage. An explanation for Opera's better performance could be that Chrome is more likely to load mobile pages than Opera Mobile, which usually loads desktop sites. Mobile pages are already optimized, so there's not much to compress.

Some readers of this blog spotted a new feature of the Google Voice extension for Chrome: desktop notifications. I didn't notice it, since Google Voice can't be used outside US.

"I've recently started getting notifications from the Chrome Google Voice extension every time I receive a SMS to my GV number. Of particular interest is the icon, which looks like an amalgamation of communications services' icons. Is it a harbinger of the new unified messaging service rumored to be on the way?" says Alec, a read of this blog.


Apparently, Google works on a new product called Babel that integrates Google Talk, Gmail Chat, Google+ Hangouts, Google+ Messenger. "You'll get a seamless messenger experience across Android, iOS, Chrome, Google+ and Gmail. From what we have seen, there is no mention of Google Voice or other services outside of the five we just mentioned, but that doesn't necessarily mean they won't be there at some point. As of now, this is being tested internally as a cross-platform service," reports Droid Life.

{ Thanks, Alec and Evan. }

Avi, a reader of this blog, found a great way to illustrate the enhanced spell checking feature from Chrome 26. Just type this short text:

"Is tehre a solution to tehre problem for when tehre traveling?"

I've compared Chrome 25 and Chrome 26. The difference is striking: Chrome 25 shows the same suggestions for the 3 spelling errors ("there", "ether", "three", "Tehran"), while Chrome 26 shows different suggestions for each mistake.

Here's the contextual menu from Chrome 25:


... and here are the suggestions from Chrome 26:




The most interesting thing is that Chrome shows the same suggestions even if you disable "ask Google for suggestions", so they're generated locally (only the errors with a green underline are detected by the web service). Obviously, the web service is useful in other cases, but it's surprising to see that Chrome's context-sensitive spell checking works offline, even if only in a limited way.

A few weeks ago, a post from the Chrome blog mentioned that Chrome for iOS will integrate the omnibox with Google Search. "Now you can see your search term in the omnibox, instead of the long search URL. This will help you refine search queries and view more content on the results page. This feature will roll out in the coming weeks, so you may not see it right away after upgrading."

I've noticed this feature when using the incognito mode. It's almost like the experimental feature from Chrome OS: Google's mobile interface no longer includes a search box and the query is displayed in the omnibox, where you can change it. If you go to google.com, you'll still see the regular Google search box and the query won't be displayed in the omnibox.


The query is preserved when you switch to other search services like Google Image Search, Google Video. Unfortunately, there's a bug that replaces the query with the Google search URL when you pick an image search result and go back to the list of results.


I still think that integrating Chrome with Google Search so tightly is a bad idea. Removing an essential navigation feature from a web page and moving it to the browser makes Google more difficult to use (users will think there's something wrong, other browsers show a different interface) and a small Chrome bug can prevent users from editing a query.

Another side-effect of the integration is that Google will not show search suggestions in the incognito mode. It's a regular feature of the omnibox that will make Google more difficult to use. All of this for shaving a few pixels and showing more content.

Chrome is the first browser that has a smart spell-checking feature powered by a web service. Originally, Chrome only relied on a local dictionary. Then Chrome's team started to add suggestions from a Google service to the contextual menu and improve the list of suggestions from the local dictionary.

Chrome 26 dramatically improves spell checking by bringing the Google Docs and Google Search spell checker to the browser. "We're now rolling out support for grammar, homonym and context-sensitive spell checking in English, powered by the same technologies used by Google search. Support for additional languages is on the way," informs Google. Right now, this feature is not available in Chrome for Mac, but it will be added soon.

The enhanced spell-checker is opt-in, so it's not enabled by default. You need to right-click a text field, go to "Spell-checker options" and make sure that "Ask Google for suggestions" is enabled. It's a privacy-sensitive feature, since everything you type is sent to Google's servers.



Context-sensitive spell checking, first available in Google Wave, is incredibly useful. Sometimes you can make mistakes and write "fund a place" instead of "find a place" or "took a brake" instead of "took a break". A regular spell-checking software can't detect these errors because "fund" and "brake" are words from the dictionary. Google uses the language models built for Google Translate to find the words that don't belong in a certain context and highlights them. Right-click the underlined words and click Google's suggestions.


Even if you enable online spell-checking, Chrome will still use the local dictionary feature. The spelling errors that have a red underline come from the dictionary, while errors with a green underline are detected by the web service.


Unfortunately, Google's technology is not smart enough to find mistakes like "its a wonderful life" or "their coming today".

One of the greatest Chrome features is that it's always up-to-date. You don't have to worry about checking for updates and installing a new version, at least when it comes to the desktop Chrome.

iOS doesn't update apps automatically. The App Store shows notifications when the apps you've installed are updated and you need to install updates manually. Google's Play Store for Android has an option for updating apps automatically, but it's not enabled by default.

The beta version of Chrome for Android started to display an infobar that informs you there's a new version you can install: "Chrome just got better! A new version is available. Update". Sterling, a reader of this blog, noticed the notification when visiting the Chrome Releases blog, but that could be a mere coincidence.


Maybe it would be more useful to ask users to enable automatic updates.

{ Thanks, Sterling. }

Update (March 19): The extension is back, but Google Reader and iGoogle have been removed from the list of default feed readers. Apparently, the extension was removed by mistake. {via François}

Three years ago I tried to convince the Chrome team that it makes sense to add native support to feeds. At that time, Google built an extension that showed feed previews and allowed you to subscribe to feeds. The explanation for building an extension instead of implementing the feature in Chrome was simple:

"This decision was made based on our philosophy of trying to limit ourselves to adding only the UI features that a vast majority of users need and allow each user to customize the browsers to fit their needs with Extensions. Given that most people are not familiar with and don't consume RSS feeds, we thought that RSS support would be a better fit as an extension, at least to begin with."

In 5 months, more than 300,000 people installed the extension. More than 1,600 people starred a feature request for implementing RSS detection natively. Chrome still doesn't have this feature and the extension released in 2010 has been removed from the Chrome Web Store a few days ago. The issue is that the extension used Google Reader to preview feeds and Google Reader will be discontinued in July.


"RSS Subscription Extension" had 869,743 users. You can still find at least two extensions based on Google's code.

I've recently updated my Chromebook to the latest dev channel release of the Chrome OS and I've noticed a lot of intriguing new features that are likely to be added to all platforms. All the features are still experimental, so they could change before they make it to the stable channel.

The new tab page is now Google's homepage without the navigation, the footer and the search buttons. The only thing that's kept from the old version of the new tab page is the list of frequently visited pages, but you can only see 4 pages instead of 8. The apps are available in the app launcher and there's also an "Apps" button in the bookmarks bar that links to a new internal page (it's empty right now).


What happens when you try to use the search box? It's just like the search box from Google's homepage, you're starting to type and the search box changes its position. This time, you're using Chrome's omnibox to type your query. As you can see, it's a clever trick: Chrome shows the familiar search box from Google's homepage, but it sends you to its own address bar.


The most interesting change is that Google no longer shows the URL in the address bar for Google search results pages. Instead you'll see the query you've just typed, so you can easily change it. In fact, Google's search results pages no longer include a search box and you're only left with Chrome's omnibox.


All of these features closely integrate Google Search with Chrome. Google will find a way to make these features work even if you use Bing or Yahoo as a default search engine, but it's obvious that they're optimized for Google Search. If you also enable instant search in Chrome, search results pages will load as you type the query in the omnibox.

There are some things I don't like. Loading Google's homepage (actually this page: https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&espv=2) every time you open a new page is inefficient and unnecessary. The updated new tab page lacks many of the features that made it useful: loading almost instantly and displaying a list of pages you are likely to visit, including frequently visited pages, apps, pages you've recently closed or pages from other devices.

Closely integrating Chrome with Google Search breaks a lot of things. For example, you can't edit the URL to tweak some parameters, the "I'm feeling lucky" feature is no longer available and the omnibox doesn't include visual spell checking, enhanced suggestions and probably other features. Suddenly, an important part of the search page will be included in Chrome and that's strange. And all of this to teach Chrome users to search from the omnibox.

"Since we launched Chrome, the team has continued to work on ways to make it fast and simple for people to use. To that end, we're going to begin testing variations of Chrome's New Tab page (NTP) in which a user's default search provider will be able to add a search box or otherwise customize the NTP. While you can search straight from the omnibox in Chrome, we've found that many people still navigate to their search engine's home page to initiate a search instead. The goal is to save people time by helping them search and navigate the web faster. We'll also allow search engines to display the user's search terms right in the omnibox, which avoids the need for a second search box on the results page," informed the Chromium blog in December.

Update: To try this feature in Chrome, open a new tab, type chrome://flags, press Enter, find "Enable Instant extended API" (use Ctrl+F), select "Enable" from the drop-down and click the "Relaunch now" button at the bottom of the window to restart the browser. To disable the feature, use the same instructions, but select "Disable".

The latest version of Chrome Beta for Android added the experimental data compression feature. It's not enabled by default, but here's how you can try this feature:

1. open a new tab, type chrome://flags in the address bar and tap "Go"

2. tap "Enable" next to the "data compression proxy" experiment (it's the first one right now)

3. tap "Relaunch now"


After relaunching the browser, you can see how much data you've saved by opening a new tab, typing chrome://net-internals and selecting the "Bandwidth" section in the left sidebar. Then visit different sites in a different tab and check the stats.

Google's proxy is faster than Opera Mobile's Turbo feature, while saving almost the same amount of data. For example, the savings for AnandTech.com were 48.9%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 50%. The savings for apple.com were 60.3%, while Opera Mobile Turbo's data savings were 57%. Chrome's major advantage is that the proxy doesn't slow down browsing, unlike Opera Mobile.

	Chrome	Opera Mobile
anandtech.com	48.9%	50%
apple.com	60.3%	57%
amazon.com (mobile)	20%	18%
m.stanford.edu	40%	27%
googleblog.blogspot.com (desktop)	5.4%	28%

Google says that "this feature has been shown to reduce data usage by 50% and speed up page load times on cellular networks. When the Data Compression Proxy feature is enabled, Chrome mobile opens a dedicated SPDY connection between your phone and one of the optimization servers running in Google's datacenters and relays all HTTP requests over this connection. (...) The browser-to-proxy connection runs over SSL, meaning that your browsing session is encrypted between your device and Google's servers." HTTPS connections and pages loaded in the incognito mode don't use the proxy. DNS lookups are performed by the proxy, while the images are converted to WebP and the resulting images are up to 80% smaller. "The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings."

{ via Chromium blog }

Speaking of Chrome for Android, there's a milestone that needs to be mentioned: it's the first time when the latest stable version of Chrome for Android matches the desktop Chrome.

You've probably noticed that Chrome for Android has always been a few months behind the desktop Chrome and the delay has continually increased. Chrome 18, the previous stable version, corresponds to the desktop version released in March 2012. That's one year of performance improvements, bug fixes, new HTML5 features, new WebKit and V8 releases. It's like using a completely new browser or travelling in time and skipping 6 Chrome versions.


Chrome for Android has a great interface and cutting-edge syncing features, but it was slower than the stock browser, buggy and used a lot of resources. Google addressed some of these issues, so let's hope that Chrome for Android will start to push the boundaries when it comes to speed, without neglecting the constraints of the mobile devices.

"Chrome for Android has been developed in a separate repository as a fork, which means that most of the code will have to be upstreamed," mentioned Peter Beverloo last year, when Chrome for Android was launched. "Of course, bringing a browser to a different - much more limited - platform goes further than simply re-using code. Mobile devices have a lot of limitations compared to desktop and laptop machines. Besides the lower amount of available memory and CPU power, other constraints lie in less memory bandwidth and VRAM on the device's GPU. Google Chrome has a complicated architecture which imposed some interesting challenges here: separating the browser from the renderers through its multiple process architecture, to name an example. Decreased rendering and scrolling performance were also an issue."

{ Image licensed as Creative Commons Attribution by CityGypsy11. }

I've always wondered when the Google Web Accelerator project will be resurrected. Now that Google has both a mobile operating system and a browser, it makes sense to find better ways to speed up browsing. A fast browser is not very useful if you have a slow Internet connection or you're limited to a few hundred megabytes a month. That's why browsers like Opera Mini and Opera Mobile are popular. Amazon Silk for Kindle Fire even uses Google's SPDY to make browsing faster.

Chrome for Android will add an experimental feature that uses Google's servers to compress pages. The purpose is to "reduce data consumption by loading optimized web pages via Google proxy servers." For the moment, it's just another option added to the chrome://flags page. You'll probably find it in the next releases of Chrome Beta for Android.


{ via François }

If you've read the previous post about the animated YouTube favicon, you should know I was wrong. It's not a new YouTube feature, it's a new Chrome feature that tries to detect the tabs that are producing sounds and adds an animation to the favicons.

The feature is currently available in the Canary channel and the latest Chromium builds, so it's not yet ready for primetime. For example, Chrome animates the Google Music favicon even if there's no music playing, but the feature works well for YouTube videos.



While it's nice to be able to tell which tabs are noisy, the animated favicons are distracting and many people find them annoying. Why not add a widget that lets you control the volume for each tab or mute some of tabs?

{ Thanks, everyone. }