Official Web Master Blog

With all this hype about quad-core and dual quad-core phones, I find it amazing that a smartphone from 2009 runs the latest OS version and the latest apps well. I'm sure that a 600 MHz single-core CPU and 256 MB of RAM no longer impress anyone today, not to mention a 480x320 resolution with 163 ppi. Well, a phone with these terrible specs is still relevant: in fact, it's the only phone released in 2009 that's still relevant today. It's the only phone from 2009 that runs Chrome and Google Search with Google Now and enhanced Voice Search without relying on jailbreaking, rooting and custom ROMs.

iPhone 3GS launched with iOS 3.0, which added basic features like cut, copy, and paste or MMS support. Then it was updated to iOS 4.0, which supported third-party apps multitasking. iOS 5.0 brought iCloud and better notifications, while iOS 6.0 for 3GS was a limited release that didn't include many features that were available for iPhone 4S/5. Apple got the foundation right and started to add features later, while Google started with the features and fixed the foundation later.


Back in 2009, Android was buggy and slow, so Google released new software updates quite frequently. Android 1.1, 1.5 and 1.6 added new features and fixed bugs, but didn't focus on the user interface. At that time, not many Android phones were available: G1, HTC Dream, HTC Hero, but Motorola Droid and Verizon's ad campaigns put Android on the map. Motorola Droid had better specs than iPhone 3GS: higher resolution screen, bigger battery, hardware keyboard, microSD support, multitasking, free turn-by-turn navigation. Droid does did look interesting and more feature-packed. Motorola Droid was only officially updated to Froyo (Android 2.2). The latest CyanogenMod release is based on Gingerbread and there are some other ROMs for Ice Cream Sandwich and Jelly Bean.

In January 2010, Google launched Nexus One, a phone with much better specs than Motorola Droid: 1 GHz Qualcomm Scorpion and 512 MB of RAM. It was updated to Froyo and Gingerbread, but the limited internal storage was the most important flaw that made it obsolete. In fact, the only Android phone released in 2010 that was officially updated to Ice Cream Sandwich is Nexus S (December 2010). Ice Cream Sandwich was launched in October 2011.

Meanwhile, Apple's iPhone 3GS is the only iOS device that received 3 major OS updates. Apple usually supports iOS devices for 2 years, so you get at least one major OS update and most often 2 updates. 3GS was still sold (free with contract in the US) until September 2012, when iPhone 5 was announced. 4 years of software updates is unprecedented in the mobile world, with hardware and software that evolves so quickly.

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."

Amit Singhal announced at Google I/O that this is "the end of search as we know it". The future of search goes beyond search results and it has more to do with answering questions, conversations and anticipating user's intentions.

Google has 3 products with similar goals: Knowledge Graph, Voice Search and Google Now. They go hand in hand to deliver the future of search today.

Voice Search has been available on the desktop if you're using Chrome, but now it's much better: it has been upgraded to the conversational voice search released last year for Android and iOS. Just click the microphone icon from the Google search box, ask questions and you'll get a spoken answer. Soon you'll be to just say "OK Google" to trigger voice search.


Google Search for Android added some new Google Now cards: reminders, last train home (Japan only), real time public transit updates and recommendations for books, games and music albums. Google Now can understand things like "remind me to call Susan tomorrow at 10", "when I go to Rome, remind me to buy a new suit" or "remind me to meet Dan when I get to work". You can create both time-based reminders and location-based reminders.


Voice Search is getting more sophisticated, the Knowledge Graph has more facts and connections between concepts, while Google Now gets smarter and tries to anticipate your searches.

{ via Inside Search blog }

The latest version of the Gmail app for iOS added a feature that opens links using other Google apps: Chrome, Google Maps and YouTube, assuming you've already installed them. It works well for Google Maps links and YouTube links, but not that well for other links: some open using Chrome, but most links open using the internal browser of the Gmail app.


If you don't like this feature, you can disable it by tapping the settings icon next to the account switcher, picking Google Apps and unchecking the apps you don't want to handle Gmail links.

You can't change the default browser in iOS, but some Google apps include an option to use Chrome. For example, the YouTube app opens all the links using Chrome, if you've installed the app, and you can disable this feature from the settings. When you open a page from a Google app like YouTube, Gmail or Google+, Chrome shows a button that sends you to the previous app, just like the Android back button.

If you don't like the tablet interface for Google News, there's a non-obvious way to switch to the desktop interface. Tap the "gear" button from the top-right of the page, select "Settings", uncheck "Use the new Google News (uncheck to revert to the old version)" and then tap "Save changes".


The tablet interface was launched in December 2012 and the goal was to add support for gestures. "You can find new articles, news sources, and even topics of interest with intuitive gestures. Swipe horizontally between sections – from Business to Entertainment, for example – or tap 'Explore in depth' to see multiple articles and other info related to a particular story." Google News for tablets is only available for English editions.


(<offtopic>Google Now Voice Search in a Forbes article? Really? From the article: "Google announced on Monday that the Google Now voice search capability is now available for your iPhone or iPad. The Google Now service is often compared to Apple's Siri – both are considered virtual personal assistants that will work by natural language voice commands." There are at least two mistakes: Google launched Google Now for iOS, not voice search, and Google Now has nothing to do with voice search.</offtopic>)

Google Now is finally available for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad. It's not a standalone application, it's just a new feature of the Google Search app.


Google Now for iOS has most of the features from Google's Android app and plenty of customization options that aren't available in the Android app. There aren't many missing cards: research topics, activity summary and events nearby.


I was surprised to see that Google added a lot of settings that let you tweak each card. For example, you can customize the traffic card and decide when it appears and the transportation mode for commutes and other trips.


Since most Google Now cards use location data, it's obvious that Google wants to update your location even when you're not using the app. "Location Reporting helps Google Now show you cards related to traffic alerts, directions, and more. Turning on Location Reporting allows Google to periodically access your location data, even when an app is not in use. If you have Location History enabled, reported locations are stored in your Location History. (...) Since Location Reporting has been optimized to use GPS as infrequently as possible, there should be minimal impact on your battery life." Location Reporting can be disabled from the app's settings section, while Location History can be disabled from the Google Latitude site.

It's interesting to notice that Google Now for iOS is placed less prominently, at the bottom of the screen. You need to swipe up to see the cards. Google Search for iOS doesn't show notifications yet, so you need to constantly open the application to see the new information.

One month ago, Google updated the Gmail app for iOS and added a swipe gesture that lets you move between conversations without having to return to the inbox. At that time, the mobile Gmail site didn't have this feature, but now it's available.

If you like to use Gmail in the mobile browser and you don't want to install a special app for Gmail, you can now swipe left or right to the previous or the next conversation. Unfortunately, this feature is more difficult to use in Chrome because Google's browser has a similar gesture for navigating between tabs. You should avoid swiping from the edge of the screen when you open mobile Gmail.


It's interesting to notice that the "swipe to archive" feature of the mobile Gmail site doesn't work in Chrome for Android, but it works in the stock browser, in Safari and Chrome for iOS.

Here's something I don't understand: why do so many people confuse Google Now with Google Voice Search? There are a lot of articles that compare Google Now with Siri or claim that Google Now is a voice assistant.


Google Now is a feature of the Google Search app for Android that shows information about what's happening right now or in the near future: weather, calendar events, reservations, travel information. Try this: disable Google Now in Google's search app and you can still use voice search. After all, Google Voice Search has been available before Google Now. Google Search for iOS includes Voice Search, but it doesn't have Google Now yet.

One of the explanations why many people confuse Google Now with Google Voice Search is that Google Now and the improved Voice Search have been announced at the same time, when Jelly Bean was released. Google Now is shorter and sounds better than Google Voice Search.

Even the Wikipedia article for Google Now is inaccurate: "Google Now is an intelligent personal assistant available for Google's Android operating system. An extension of Android's native Google Search application, Google Now uses a natural language user interface to answer questions, make recommendations, and perform actions by delegating requests to a set of web services. Along with answering user-initiated queries, Google Now passively delivers information to the user that it predicts they will want, based on their search habits."

I've mentioned in the previous post that Google launched a feature called Quick View that's designed to load search results faster on mobile devices. Right now, the feature only works for Wikipedia results and you'll only see it if you use google.com in English.



It's interesting to see how this feature works, especially when you consider Google's claim that pages load in less than 0.1 seconds. Like a magician, Google uses tricks to make people think that pages load faster than they really do.

All the Wikipedia results with a blue "Quick View" button have special sections in Google's source code that include the first part of the articles. When you tap the "Quick View" result, the article appears to load instantly, but you only see the first paragraphs, which are included in Google's code, just like snippets. Google loads in the background the rest of the article: it's a simplified version of the mobile Wikipedia article from the Google Cache. An example of page that includes the second part of a Wikipedia article: http://websearch-experiments.googleusercontent.com/B/08/d88ede51537960e3_926bb07ecb8a2bc1.htm.

Here's what happens if Google can't load the rest of the article: you get the error message "Error loading the entire article. Try again".


But is Quick View really fast? I've loaded the Wikipedia article about lettuce in the desktop Chrome and changed the user-agent to Galaxy Nexus/Android 4.0.2. Here are the load times obtained from Chrome's developer tools (I've only included the results for the main HTML file, the images are loaded from Wikipedia's site even when you use Quick View).

- Quick View: 120 ms


- Regular Wikipedia article: 522 ms


I've tested many other articles and Quick View pages consistently loaded in 100-130 milliseconds, while the original Wikipedia articles loaded about 4 times slower. It's a significant difference, especially if you use a slow mobile Internet connection with high latency.

Another improvement is that Google's search results pages already include the necessary CSS and JavaScript code for Wikipedia, while Wikipedia loads additional files: one CSS file and 7 JavaScript files.


Here's the total loading time for the page and its resources:

- QuickView: 30 requests, 143 KB transferred, 986ms total loading time

- Wikipedia: 36 requests, 296 KB transferred, 1.68 s total loading time

Google Search for mobile has a new feature called "Quick View". Right now, it only shows up for Wikipedia results and it allows users to load search results almost instantly.


"Quick view is an experimental project and is currently enabled for pages from Wikipedia when you search in English on Google.com. We are working to expand this to additional websites," explains Google. There's a form for getting updates "about participating in the mobile quick view field trial". Apparently, Quick View loads pages in less than 100 milliseconds.

I've noticed a Quick View link next to Wikipedia results, but nothing happened when I clicked it. Even the search result link for the Wikipedia page was broken. I've checked the source code of the search results page and the code included an excerpt from the Wikipedia article. It's likely that Google hosts a simplified version of the Wikipedia article and that's the reason why it's supposed to load so fast. Here's Google's version of the Wikipedia page for "salmon" (check the source code).

Google also announced the "expandable sitelinks" feature I've mentioned a few days ago. "Now, there's a faster way to get to the Rotten Tomatoes page with just the info you need most -- just look for a new quick link for 'In Theaters' underneath the main Rotten Tomatoes link when you search on your mobile phone. You'll see these expandable sitelinks appear for many sites to help you get to a specific section quickly."

Google's mobile search site experiments with a different interface for sitelinks. The updated version hides the snippets for sitelinks and lets you expand lists of sub-sitelinks. Instead of only listing the most important sections of a site, Google's new features also shows some popular subsections.

"The links shown below some of Google's search results, called sitelinks, are meant to help users navigate your site. Our systems analyze the link structure of your site to find shortcuts that will save users time and allow them to quickly find the information they're looking for," explains Google.

Here's the new interface:


... and here's what happens when you expand a sitelink:


Another example:


This is the regular mobile UI:


Google mentioned a similar feature for the desktop site last year: "this improvement digs deeper into megasitelinks by showing sub-sitelinks instead of the normal snippet." I haven't noticed this feature and it doesn't seem to be available in the desktop interface.

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.

Google updated the search interface for tablets to make it look more like the desktop interface. There's now a "search tools" button that replaces the wrench button, "more" is a regular menu and the icons for specialized search engines have been removed.

Here's the new interface:



... and here's the old one (screenshot from October 2011, when Google tested this interface):


This is a much more recent screenshot:

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.

There's a new version of the Gmail app for iOS that brings a very useful feature: swipe left or right to move to the previous or next conversation.

What's old is new again. The first version of the Gmail app for iOS included this feature, but it used arrow buttons instead of gestures, just like the desktop Gmail and the mobile site.


For some reason, the buttons have been removed in Gmail 2.0, released in December.


Gmail 2.1 uses swipes for navigating between messages, but this features is not yet available in the new mobile Gmail site.

While buttons may clutter the interface, gestures could be more intuitive if they're properly implemented. Google made at least two mistakes when it added gestures for navigation: the mobile interface for Blogger blogs and the mobile Chrome. The original version of the mobile Blogger interface was terrible because it was easy to accidentally load the next/previous post when scrolling. Chrome for Android/iOS still has an annoying feature that lets you navigate between tabs using swipes. Try to use Google Image Search and you'll notice how easy is to trigger this feature accidentally.

Fortunately, swiping works better in the Gmail app for iOS, just like in the Gmail Android app.

Webmaster level: Intermediate

As more and more users worldwide with mobile devices access the Internet, it’s fantastic to see so many websites making their content accessible and useful for those devices. To help webmasters optimize their sites we launched our recommendations for smartphones, feature-phones, tablets, and Googlebot-friendly sites in June 2012.

We’re happy to announce that those recommendations are now also available in Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Simplified Chinese, and Spanish. US-based webmasters are welcome to read the UK-English version.

We welcome you to go through our recommendations, pick the configuration that you feel will work best with your website, and get ready to jump on the mobile bandwagon!

Thanks to the fantastic webmaster-outreach team in Dublin, Tokyo and Beijing for making this possible!

Posted (but not translated) by John Mueller, Webmaster Trends Analyst, Zürich Switzerland

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. }