Chromium Blog: 2014

Chrome 40 Beta: Powerful Offline and Lightspeed Loading with Service Workers

Thursday, December 4, 2014

BetaService WorkersThis release adds service workers, a powerful new API that allows developers to make sites work offline by intercepting network requests to deliver programmatic or cached responses. Besides enabling a rich offline experience, developers can also use the API to achieve dramatic performance improvements by caching UI and other common resources between page loads.
A before and after comparison of a repeat visitor loading a site that uses Service Workers.
PushBackground SyncFetch APICache APIpolyfillHTML5 Rockscollection
Other updates in this release

This release brings support for the new directives introduced in Content Security Policy (CSP) Level 2.

The new reportValidity method causes Chrome to draw the user’s attention to form fields with validation errors, saving developers from needing to implement this feature manually in JavaScript.

Chrome now supports the minlength attribute, a validation feature that allows developers to declare a lower bound on the number of characters a user can input.

Thanks to a collaboration with Intel's Open Source Technology Center, Chrome on Mac now uses HarfBuzz for text shaping which improves performance and rendering of non-Latin text, brings new optimizations, and unifies the font system across all platforms.

Developers can use the theme-color meta tag to customize their toolbar color in the app switcher on Android Lollipop.

chromestatus.com/features+Google Chrome Developers

The Final Countdown for NPAPI

Monday, November 24, 2014

announcedlast updateMonthly Plug-in Launch Percentage

	Sept 13	May 14	Oct 14
Silverlight	15%	13.3%	11%
Google Talk	8.7%	8.7%	7%
Java	8.9%	7.2%	3.7%
Facebook	6%	4.2%	3.0%
Unity	9.1%	3.1%	1.9%
Google Earth	9.1%	0.1%	0.1%

page action UItemporarilyNPAPI deprecation guide

Learning Statistics with Privacy, aided by the Flip of a Coin

Thursday, October 30, 2014

[Cross-posted on the Google Research Blog and the Google Online Security Blog]protect our users' security and privacyrandomized responsedifferential privacystrongest form of privacyintense research in academiaon the Internet, nobody should know you’re a dogunwanted softwarehijackingopen-source projectreportACM Conference on Computer and Communications Securityfeedbackrappor-discuss@googlegroups.com

Noto on ChromeOS: No More “Tofu”

Tuesday, October 14, 2014

Google released Noto Sans CJK

Pan-CJK: Simplified and Traditional Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, all in a single font.

Seven weights: Thin, Light, DemiLight, Regular, Medium, Bold, Black. ChromeOS has default support for Regular and Bold, with more coming soon.

Free and open source: Freely available for everyone under the Apache License, v2.0.

Comprehensive character coverage: Covers all the CJK Ideographs in the Unicode Basic Multilingual Plane and a few hundred Ideographs in Unicode Plane 2. Also covered are over twelve thousand Korean Hangul characters with full support for Old Hangul. The total number of glyphs in each font instance is exactly 65,536, the maximum number of glyphs allowed by the OpenType font specification.

Region-appropriate glyph forms: CJK-shared ideographic characters follow region writing conventions to look appropriate to Chinese, Japanese, and Korean users.

Harmony: Noto Sans CJK and all other members of the Noto family are visually compatible with Noto Sans for English, so that text mixing English with another language looks harmonious.

Google Fonts: Early Access @import url(http://fonts.googleapis.com/earlyaccess/notosansjapanese.css); body {

font-family: Arial, 'Noto Sans Japanese', sans-serif;

}Noto homepage

Chrome 39 Beta: JS Generators, Animation Playback Control, and the WebApp Manifest

Thursday, October 9, 2014

BetaJavaScript Generatorsless than straightforwardread more about themsee them in actionWeb Animation Playback ControlWeb Animationsplay()pause()reverse()animations that can react in real time to user inputWeb Application Manifest<meta><link>extra bits on the critical pathManifestsadd to homescreensee how it works todayOther updates in this release

The Beacon API enables developers to queue asynchronous network requests that will be sent, regardless of whether the user navigates to a new page

Scroll offsets (scrollTop, scrollLeft) now return high-precision fractional values in preparation for high-DPI support

XMLHttpRequest progress event properties position and totalSize are now deprecated in favor of the loaded and total properties

chromestatus.com/features+Google Chrome Developers

Fewer bugs, mo’ money

Tuesday, September 30, 2014

[Cross-posted on the Google Online Security Blog]bug reward programsecurea clear breakdown of likely reward amountslast monthGoogle Hall of Fameanswered some new FAQs

Chrome Apps for Mobile: Now with a faster dev workflow and a modern WebView

Monday, September 22, 2014

told youChrome AppsidentityGCMrich notificationsChrome Dev EditorChrome Apps for Mobile command line toolCrosswalkTopeka Polymer Web Apptry out on Android

advantages and tradeoffsdocumentationStack OverflowG+ Developers

Responsive Web Design with DevTools' Device Mode

Monday, September 8, 2014

mobile emulation features

Now, you can turn on Device Mode right next to the "inspect element" icon. Once enabled, it automatically emulates a mobile viewport, along with complete emulation of touch events. You can test various viewport sizes easily with the large drag handles instead of resizing the whole browser window. You can select from popular device presets to automatically set viewport, touch, user agent and screen density settings in one fell swoop.

Screen Shot 2014-08-22 at 3.44.13 PM.png

While typical system-wide network conditioning throttles everything, DevTools will only throttle the current tab. This enables you to take your app offline and try out AppCache and Service Worker scenarios, and meanwhile browse documentation in another tab.

Please try out Device Mode your development workflow and let us know what you think. And if you're hungry for more DevTools goodness, check out my Google I/O 2014 talk: Developing Across Devices.

Posted by Paul Bakaus, Developer Advocate and Device Diviner

Gradually Sunsetting SHA-1

Friday, September 5, 2014

since at least 2005Collision attacks against SHA-1 are too affordableBaseline Requirements for SSLNISTleading vendorsscrambling for updatesChrome 39 (Branch point 26 September 2014)
used to highlight other deprecated and insecure practices

Chrome 40 (Branch point 7 November 2014; Stable after holiday season)

Chrome 41 (Branch point in Q1 2015)

Note: SHA-1-based signatures for trusted root certificates are not a problem because TLS clients trust them by their identity, rather than by the signature of their hash.
Posted by Chris Palmer, Secure Socket Lover and Ryan Sleevi, Transport Layer Securer

Moving Towards a Single Cloud Messaging API

Wednesday, September 3, 2014

chrome.gcmGoogle Cloud Messagingchrome.pushMessagingGoogle I/O Bytes videochrome.gcm API documentationtutorialGCM for Chrome Feedback

Chrome 38 Beta: New primitives for the next-generation web

Thursday, August 28, 2014

BetaNew HTML element: <picture><picture> elementYoav Weisssuccessful crowdfunding campaignresponsive design
<picture>
<source media="(min-width: 45em)" srcset="large.jpg">
<source media="(min-width: 32em)" srcset="med.jpg">
<img src="small.jpg" alt="The president giving an award.">
</picture>

New JavaScript features

Chrome 38 also enables by default several new JavaScript language features from the draft ECMAScript 6 (ES6) specification. Additions include:

Maps and sets, two highly-requested data structures which make storing and interacting with data simpler and more rational.
Iterators now provide an easy and extensible way to iterate over sequenced data types such as arrays and strings, as well as the new maps and sets.
Symbols, which help prevent object properties from unintentionally interfering with each other.
Math functions such as Math.sign and Math.log10, which prevents developers from having to re-implement these functions and provides the performance boost of built-in functions. Take a look at the full list of new functions.

Future releases of Chrome will contain even more ES6 features as the specification matures. Stay posted!

Other updates in this release

The Network Information ("NetInfo") API is now enabled, giving web applications access to the current type of network on a device running Android, iOS, or Chrome OS. This could allow an app to only do data-intensive activities such as syncing when connected to a Wi-Fi connection.
The addition of the Screen Orientation API allows developers to not only detect whether a device is in portrait or landscape mode, but also lock the screen orientation while a user is within that app.
The CSS value "image-rendering: pixelated" is now supported, which allows scaled images to appear to be composed of very large pixels. Example use cases include high-performance display of zoomed photos in image editing software without large bandwidth or load time costs.
The Encoding API enables the encoding and decoding of data from binary streams, such as converting between a raw ArrayBuffer and a string.
The new File interface allows developers to create and interact with File objects in the same way as Blob objects.
SVG fonts are no longer supported, except on Windows systems older than Windows 7. Note that while the feature works on those systems, it is considered deprecated.

As always, visit chromestatus.com/features for a complete overview of Chrome’s developer features, and circle +Google Chrome Developers for more frequent updates!

Update January 26th: "image-rendering: pixelated" has been delayed until Chrome 41.

Posted by Andreas Rossberg, Senior Symbolic Software Engineer

Mac Chrome: When I’m Sixty-Four (Bits)

Thursday, August 28, 2014

64-bit Chrome for Windowsbeta channelASLRNPAPIHTML5 APIsNPAPI support will be removed from Chromestable channelChrome 37let us know

64 bits of awesome: 64-bit Windows Support, now in Stable!

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

Today, after a successful experiment with Chrome 64-bit Windows in our Dev and Canary channels in June, 64-bit Windows support is coming to Chrome Stable with the release of Chrome 37.

64-bit Chrome offers many benefits for speed, stability and security. Our measurements have shown that the native 64-bit version of Chrome has improved speed on many of our graphics and media benchmarks. For example, the VP9 codec that’s used in High Definition YouTube videos shows a 15% improvement in decoding performance. Stability measurements from people opted into our Canary, Dev and Beta 64-bit channels confirm that 64-bit rendering engines are almost twice as stable as 32-bit engines when handling typical web content. Finally, on 64-bit, our defense in depth security mitigations such as Partition Alloc are able to far more effectively defend against vulnerabilities that rely on controlling the memory layout of objects.
At this point 64-bit will remain opt-in, so to take advantage of the improvements click on the new “Windows 64-bit” link on the Chrome download page. Currently, the only significant known issue is the lack of 32-bit NPAPI plugin support. The 32-bit channel will remain fully supported for the foreseeable future and we will continue to support 32-bit plugins until NPAPI is removed from Chrome.
We encourage you to give 64-bit Chrome a try. We’re looking forward to hearing your feedback so we can continue to make Chrome the fastest, most secure and stable browser.
Posted by Will Harris, Software Engineer and Embiggener of Bits

Chrome 37 Beta: DirectWrite on Windows and the <dialog> element

Thursday, July 17, 2014

Chrome BetaDirectWrite on WindowsDirectWritetop user request for years

New HTML element: <dialog><dialog> HTML5 elementcheck out some code samples and see <dialog> in actionrecently announcedOther updates in this release

The Web Cryptography JavaScript API is enabled by default starting in Chrome 37, allowing developers to perform cryptographic operations such as hashing, signature generation/verification, and encryption.

Subpixel font scaling is now supported, which enables smooth animations of text between font sizes.

TouchEvent co-ordinates are now doubles instead of longs, enabling higher-fidelity touch interactions on high-DPI displays.

CSS cursor values "zoom-in" and "zoom-out" are now unprefixed.

The number of cores on a physical machine can now be accessed by navigator.hardwareConcurrency.

The user's preferred languages are now accessible by navigator.languages, and the languagechange event is fired when this is updated.

The CSS Shapes Module allows developers to define non-rectangular text wrapping boundaries around floated elements.

NPAPI deprecation continues according to our previously-announced plan with a harder-to-bypass blocking UI.

The default monospace font on Windows is now Consolas instead of Courier New.

Cross-origin fonts are now blocked unless the response includes the appropriate CORS headers.

chromestatus.com/features+Google Chrome Developers

Disabling showModalDialog

Wednesday, July 16, 2014

deprecated earlier this yearless than 0.006% of pages use itnowwidelyregardedEnterprise Policy setting to re-enable showModalDialoggo forward is to leave the past behind

Migrate Your Legacy Packaged Apps to Chrome Apps

Monday, June 30, 2014

packaged appsextensionshosted appslaunchedUpdated 04/09/2015: The legacy packaged app deprecation schedule has been revised. In August, all existing legacy packaged app listings will be removed from the Chrome Web Store’s search and browse functions. Existing legacy packaged apps can be updated until Chrome stops loading them in February of 2016.migration tutorialchromium-appsour G+ page
Updated 03/22/2016: The legacy packaged app deprecation schedule has been revised. Existing legacy packaged app listings will be removed from the Chrome Web Store's search and browse functions in late 2016. Chrome will stop loading these apps soon thereafter.

Cast Away with Android TV and Google Cast

Wednesday, June 25, 2014

[Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog]

Coming to a Screen Near You
Get started with Android TV Help more users find your Google Cast appGoogle Cast SDK developer consolechromecast.com/apps

developer.android.com/tvdevelopers.google.com/castBy Dave Burke and Majd Bakar, Engineering Directors and TV Junkies

Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit: Resources for Modern Web Development

Thursday, June 19, 2014

Web FundamentalsWeb Starter Kitfundamentalresponsive layoutsformstouchmediaperformancedevice capabilitiessetting up a development workflowarticleperformance sectionPageSpeed InsightsWeb Starter Kitcontributorssourcecodefile an issuesubmit a pull request

See what your apps & extensions have been up to

Tuesday, June 10, 2014

introducedChrome Apps & Extensions Developer Tool

Try out the new 64-bit Windows Canary and Dev channels

Tuesday, June 3, 2014

CanaryDevcore principles

Speed: 64-bit allows us to take advantage of the latest processor and compiler optimizations, a more modern instruction set, and a calling convention that allows more function parameters to be passed quickly by registers. As a result, speed is improved, especially in graphics and multimedia content, where we see an average 25% improvement in performance.

Security: With Chrome able to take advantage of the latest OS features such as High Entropy ASLR on Windows 8, security is improved on 64-bit platforms as well. Those extra bits also help us better defend against exploitation techniques such as JIT spraying, and improve the effectiveness of our existing security defense features like heap partitioning.

Stability: Finally, we’ve observed a marked increase in stability for 64-bit Chrome over 32-bit Chrome. In particular, crash rates for the the renderer process (i.e. web content process) are almost half that of 32-bit Chrome.

feedback

Update on NPAPI Deprecation

Tuesday, May 27, 2014

Last September, we announced our plan to remove NPAPI support from Chrome by the end of 2014. This change will improve Chrome’s security, speed, and stability as well as reduce complexity in the code base. Over the last few quarters, we’ve been encouraged to see an overall 12.9% drop in per-user instantiations of NPAPI plug-ins and declining usage of the most popular NPAPI plug-ins:

Monthly Plug-In Launch Percentage

	Sept 2013	May 2014
Silverlight	15	13.3
Google Earth	9.1	0.1
Unity	9.1	3.1
Google Talk	8.7	8.7
Java	8.9	7.2
Facebook	6	4.2

We are actively helping still-popular NPAPI-based
services migrate to open-web-based alternatives.

Deprecation has proceeded as scheduled. As of September 23rd, 2013, the Chrome Web Store no longer accepts NPAPI-based Apps and Extensions. Webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins have been blocked by default since January 2014 using the infobar UI. NPAPI support was removed from Linux in Chrome 35.To further prepare users and developers for complete removal, we’ll be making two more updates in the coming weeks. Starting today, the Chrome Web Store will no longer show NPAPI-based Apps and Extension on the home page, search results, and category pages. In Chrome 37, webpage-instantiated NPAPI plug-ins will be blocked using the harder-to-bypass page-action blocking UI.Most use cases that previously required NPAPI are now supported by JavaScript-based open web technologies. For the few applications that need low-level APIs, threads, and machine-optimized code, Native Client offers the ability to run sandboxed native code in Chrome. To help ease the transition from NPAPI, NaCl recently exposed two new Pepper APIs for media playback and processing. The MediaStreams API enables low latency multimedia playback, and the Hardware Decode API enables efficient video decoding.For more information, please see the developer NPAPI deprecation guide. We look forward to the transition to a safer, more mobile-friendly web.Posted by Justin Schuh, Software Engineer and Plug-in Retirement Planner

Chrome 36 Beta: element.animate(), HTML Imports, and Object.observe()

Thursday, May 22, 2014

Betaelement.animate()Web Animations JavaScript APIa CSS style recalculation costelem.animate([ {transform: 'translateX(0px)'}, {transform: 'translateX(100px)'} ], 3000);
HTML ImportsHTML ImportsWeb Components standards umbrella<link rel="import"><head> <link rel="import" href="/path/to/imports/stuff.html"> </head>
Data-binding with Object.observe()Object.observe()framework authors implementing data-binding// Let's say we have a model with data var model = {}; // Which we then observe Object.observe(model, function(changes) { // This asynchronous callback runs and aggregates changes changes.forEach(function(change) { // Letting us know what changed console.log(change.type, change.name, change.oldValue); }); });
Other updates in this release

Chrome no longer sends touchcancel on touch scroll, improving compatibility with other browsers and making it possible to add touch UI effects like pull-to-refresh without re-implementing scrolling and fling physics in JavaScript.

Some CSS properties such as scrollTop and offsetHeight will now return fractional values in browser-zoom situations.

The new WOFF 2.0 Web Font compression format offers a 30% average gain over WOFF 1.0 (up to 50%+ in some cases).

DevTools now faithfully emulates touch with mouse, allowing you to test touch interactions on Chrome for Android using the mobile emulation feature of DevTools.

Unprefixed CSS Transforms enables rich web content by allowing elements to be transformed in two-dimensional or three-dimensional space.

The will-change property allows developers to give a hint about which properties are about to change, which can help reduce delays at the beginning of animations in some cases.

chromestatus.com/features+Google Chrome Developers

Testing Chromium: ThreadSanitizer v2, a next-gen data race detector

Monday, April 21, 2014

ThreadSanitizerdata racebinary translationalmost 180ThreadSanitizer v2LLVMGCCGoincorrect synchronization in LazyInstanceincorrect lock-free queue implementationissues with concurrent sweeping in V8raceson the WebKit stringsgarbage collection in Blinka use-after-free in Blinka handful of reports in WebRTCClusterFuzzThreadSanitizer pagepagedev.chromium.org

Chrome 35 Beta: More developer control over touch input, new JavaScript features, and unprefixed Shadow DOM

Thursday, April 10, 2014

BetaMore developer control over touch and zoom inputtouch-action CSS property300ms click delay on mobilepolyfills of Pointer Eventsthe main threaddelayedmouse scroll wheel events with the ctrlKey modifier setNew JavaScript functionalityECMAScript 6 standardPromiseWeakMapsWeakSetsObject.observeframework authors implementing data-bindingUnprefixed Shadow DOMWeb Components

Scope their HTML markup, CSS, hiding the implementation details of complex components.

Build their own first-class elements and APIs just like the <video> or <audio>, when combined with Custom Elements

made available in Chrome 25HTML5 Rocks articlesOther new features in this release

CSS Font Loading can be used to dynamically load font resources. It gives developers more control over the user experience on pages that use Web Fonts. For instance, you can ask Chrome to start downloading the web fonts you'll need on demand and be notified when they become available.

The SVG 'paint-order' property offers a way to control the order in which fill, stroke and markers are painted.

The unprefixed version of the Web Audio API.

Removed featuresHTMLVideoElement-specific prefixed fullscreen APITextTrackCue constructor<isindex>Legacy Web Notificationsdocument.createAttributeNSsupport for NPAPI on LinuxAttr.isId, ownerElement, prefix settermailing listRecently deprecated featureswindow.showModalDialogOpera’s explanation of the changeElement.setAttributeNodeNSoverflowchanged EventHTMLSourceElement.media,MediaError.MEDIA_ERR_ENCRYPTEDPrefixed media source extensionswebkitRequestAnimationFramechromestatus.com/features+Google Chrome DevelopersRick Byers

Sep	OCT	Nov
	21
2017	2018	2019

Chromium Blog

Chrome 40 Beta: Powerful Offline and Lightspeed Loading with Service Workers

The Final Countdown for NPAPI

Learning Statistics with Privacy, aided by the Flip of a Coin

Noto on ChromeOS: No More “Tofu”

Chrome 39 Beta: JS Generators, Animation Playback Control, and the WebApp Manifest

Fewer bugs, mo’ money

Chrome Apps for Mobile: Now with a faster dev workflow and a modern WebView

Responsive Web Design with DevTools' Device Mode

Gradually Sunsetting SHA-1

Moving Towards a Single Cloud Messaging API

Chrome 38 Beta: New primitives for the next-generation web

Mac Chrome: When I’m Sixty-Four (Bits)

64 bits of awesome: 64-bit Windows Support, now in Stable!

Chrome 37 Beta: DirectWrite on Windows and the <dialog> element

Disabling showModalDialog

Migrate Your Legacy Packaged Apps to Chrome Apps

Cast Away with Android TV and Google Cast

Web Fundamentals and Web Starter Kit: Resources for Modern Web Development

See what your apps & extensions have been up to

Try out the new 64-bit Windows Canary and Dev channels

Update on NPAPI Deprecation

Chrome 36 Beta: element.animate(), HTML Imports, and Object.observe()

Testing Chromium: ThreadSanitizer v2, a next-gen data race detector

Chrome 35 Beta: More developer control over touch input, new JavaScript features, and unprefixed Shadow DOM

Labels

Archive

Feed

Company-wide

Products

Developers