Chromium Blog: 2010

WebGL now in Beta: here comes the 3D web!

Thursday, December 16, 2010

fully 3D web apps

Music Visualizerbeta channelsubmit your cool 3D appsPosted by Kenneth Russell, Software Engineer

Chrome is Ready for Business

Wednesday, December 15, 2010

Chromium projectadministrative templatesdownloading the MSI installerfiling bugsPosted by Glenn Wilson, Product Manager and Daniel Clifford, Software Engineer

Break on UI and network events in Chrome Developer Tools

Monday, December 13, 2010

Breakpoints TutorialPosted by Pavel Podivilov, Software Engineer

A Year of Extensions

Thursday, December 9, 2010

The gallery has grown to over 8,500 extensions and 1,500 themes.

A third of Chrome users have at least one extension installed.

Over 70 million extensions and themes have been installed.

New APIs for things like notifications and omnibox and sidebars and development tools.

Thanks for all your support over the last year, from bug reports to testing new APIs. It’s been a bit frantic at times, but mostly it’s been fun.

Posted by Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer

A New Crankshaft for V8

Tuesday, December 7, 2010

Today we are introducing Crankshaft, a new compilation infrastructure for V8, Google Chrome’s JavaScript engine. By using aggressive optimizations, Crankshaft dramatically improves the performance of compute-intensive JavaScript applications - often by more than a factor of two! This will give users a faster and more responsive experience loading web pages and applications built with complex JavaScript. Here is a comparison of Chrome with and without Crankshaft on the V8 benchmark suite:

The benchmarks that benefit the most from Crankshaft are Richards, DeltaBlue and Crypto. This shows that we have taken the performance of JavaScript property accesses, arithmetic operations, tight loops, and function calls to the next level. Overall, Crankshaft boosts V8’s performance by 50% on the V8 benchmark suite. This is the biggest performance improvement since we launched Chrome in 2008.

In addition to improving peak performance as measured by the V8 benchmark suite, Crankshaft also improves the start-up time of web applications such as GMail. Our page cycler benchmarks show that Crankshaft improves the page load performance of Chrome by 12% for pages that contain significant amounts of JavaScript code.

Crankshaft uses adaptive compilation to improve both start-up time and peak performance. The idea is to heavily optimize code that is frequently executed and not waste time optimizing code that is not. Because of this, benchmarks that finish in just a few milliseconds, such as SunSpider, will show little improvement with Crankshaft. The more work an application does, the bigger the gains will be.

Crankshaft has four main components:

A base compiler which is used for all code initially. The base compiler generates code quickly without heavy optimizations. Compilation with the base compiler is twice as fast as with the V8 compiler in Chrome 9 and generates 30% less code.
A runtime profiler which monitors the running system and identifies hot code, i.e., code that we spend a significant amount of the time running.
An optimizing compiler which recompiles and optimizes hot code identified by the runtime profiler. It uses inlining. The optimization decisions are based on type information collected while running the code produced by the base compiler.
Deoptimization support which allows the optimizing compiler to be optimistic in the assumptions it makes when generating code. With deoptimization support, it is possible to bail out to the code generated by the base compiler if the assumptions in the optimized code turn out to be too optimistic.

V8 with Crankshaft for the 32-bit Intel architecture is available today in the V8 canary builds of Chrome. Work on the ARM and 64-bit ports has started.

We are excited about the JavaScript speed improvements we are delivering with Crankshaft today. Crankshaft provides a great infrastructure for the next wave of JavaScript speed improvements in V8 and we will continue to push JavaScript performance to enable the next generation of web applications.

Kevin Millikin, Software Engineer and Florian Schneider, Software Engineer

Rolling out a sandbox for Adobe Flash Player

Wednesday, December 1, 2010

work we’ve already donePosted by Justin Schuh and Carlos Pizano, Software Engineers

App Permissions

Thursday, November 18, 2010

This is part of a

Some privileges are relatively low-risk, so we infer permission to use them from the act of installing the application. An example of this is the notifications API. The only reason it isn’t allowed to normal web sites by default is that it could be used annoyingly. When a user installs an app, we interpret that as a sign of at least some trust, and allow that application to use the Notifications API without additional prompting. If users do not like the notifications that the application generates, they can either disable them in the app’s notification UI or they can simply uninstall the app.

In this first version of apps for the Chrome Web Store, we support permission request declarations for the geolocation, notifications, and unlimited storage privileges. Over time we’ll be adding even more.

To learn more about how to build apps for the Chrome Web Store, visit the developer documentation at code.google.com/chrome/webstore.

Posted by Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer

Compatibility Issues With EMET

Tuesday, November 16, 2010

morePosted by Ian Fette, Product Manager and Carlos Pizano, Software Engineer

Creating a Great User Interface For Your Web App

Friday, October 29, 2010

Today we are kicking off a series of blog posts that provide tips and tricks on how to create better web apps as well as insights behind the technology of the Chrome Web Store - EdOpenID and Google AccountsHTML5 WorkerPosted by Erik Kay, Software Engineer

V8 Benchmark Suite Updated

Thursday, October 7, 2010

The Give it a spin on the new version of the V8 benchmark suite.
Posted by Kasper Lund, Software Engineer

WebP, a new image format for the Web

Thursday, September 30, 2010

WebPlayerconversion toolPosted by Richard Rabbat, Product Manager

Extensions, Packaged Apps, and Hosted Apps in the Chrome Web Store

Monday, September 27, 2010

discussion groupPosted by Michael Mahemoff, Developer Advocate

New features for the Chrome Web Store developer preview: Google Checkout integration & previewing for your apps

Thursday, September 23, 2010

developer discussion groupPosted by Qinming Fang, Software Engineer

Google Chrome Frame: Stable and Speedy

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

A stable release is just the beginning for Google Chrome Frame. We’ve set aggressive goals for future releases: we’re working on making start-up speed even faster and removing the current requirement for administrator rights to install the plug-in. Expect more improvements and features in the near future, as we plan to release on the project forumPosted by Tomas Gunnarsson, Software Engineer and Robert Shield, Software Engineer

HTML5 World Tour

Tuesday, September 21, 2010

The Google Chrome team is hitting the road. From now through October, we’re giving 21 talks about HTML5 and related Google Chrome topics at 16 events, in 16 cities and 9 countries, and on 4 continents. Phew!Check out our schedule below. Registration for almost all these events is open, so come say hi and learn a thing or two about HTML5.

Date

Locations

Event

Topics

Speakers

9/24

Atlanta, United States

Web Directions USA

HTML5

Michael Mahemoff

9/25

San Francisco, United States

NYC GTUG Meetup

Chrome Web Store

Jan Kleinert

10/1

Taipei City, Taiwan

Google DevFest Indonesia

HTML5

Arne Roomann-Kurrik

10/9

Hilversum, Netherlands; San Francisco, United States

jQuery Boston Conference

HTML5

Paul Irish

10/29

São Paulo, Brazil

Google Developer Day Brazil

HTML5, Installable Web Apps, Google Chrome Extensions, Chrome Web Store, Google Chrome Developer Tools, Native Client, Google Chrome Frame

Eric Bidelman, Ernest Delgado

Posted by Brian Kennish, Developer Advocate

Unleashing GPU acceleration on the web

Tuesday, September 14, 2010

Posted by James Robinson, Software Engineer and Gregg Tavares, Software Engineer

Web Graphics – Past, Present and Future

Thursday, September 9, 2010

Mozilla's SVG butterfly
<?xml version="1.0"?>
<!DOCTYPE svg PUBLIC
"-/W3C/DTD SVG 1.1/EN"
"http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/1.1/DTD/svg11.dtd">
<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">
<path style="stroke-width:1; fill:rgb(246,127,0); stroke:none" d="M204.33 13..."/>
<path style="stroke-width:1; fill:rgb(0,0,0); stroke:none" d="M203.62 139.62..." />
<path style="stroke-width:1; fill:rgb(255,246,227); stroke:none"
d="M363.73 85.73 C359.27 86.29 355.23 86.73..."/>
</svg>

*note: ellipses replace many more points

Learning WebGL has done a great job of keeping up with the latest libraries, tools and demos and has a substantial archive of WebGL resources.

Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Google are all working on putting the finishing touches on the WebGL spec in a Khronos working group, which is expected to hit v1.0 by the end of the year, but we’ve turned it on by default to get early feedback on Chromium’s implementation.

Thanks for reading to the end, we hope this helps explain the current state of graphics on the Web!

Posted by Henry Bridge, Product Manager

Get more data about your extensions with Google Analytics

Thursday, September 9, 2010

developer discussion groupPosted by Qian Huang, Software Engineer

An overview of the Chrome Web Store Licensing API

Friday, September 3, 2010

standard OpenID libraryChrome Developer DashboardGetting Started tutorialdeveloper discussion groupPosted by Munjal Doshi, Software Engineer

Chromium Graphics Overhaul

Friday, August 27, 2010

design docPosted by Vangelis Kokkevis, Software Engineer

New Flock Browser Based On Chromium

Tuesday, August 24, 2010

Foreword: When we released Google Chrome almost two years ago, we also released the source code under an open-source license. Just as Firefox, WebKit, and other open source projects helped to drive the web forward, we wanted to follow suit and ensure that others could use the code we developed to make their products better. The Chromium codebase provides a complete browser to build on, so that if you want to focus on one particular piece, such as drastically changing the user interface, you can do that without having to worry about how to get amazing performance in the rest of the browser.Recently, Flock released a new beta version of their browser built on top of the Chromium codebase. For those of us in the Chromium project, this is extremely exciting and encouraging. We believe that users having a choice between multiple browsers is a great thing, as it spurs innovation and competition, and lets users choose a browser that provides the best experience for them. Flock brings an innovative approach to their "social web browser," and we are glad to welcome them into the Chromium community. As part of that, we wanted to offer the team behind Flock an opportunity to talk about the ideas behind Flock, how Chromium helped them in achieving their goals, and their vision for the future. What follows is a perspective from Clayton Stark, VP Engineering at Flock.
When Flock began developing its first web browser five years ago, "the social web" was a small, niche market. Today social is the mainstream web, and this evolution in the market drove our development roadmap. With the new Flock browser, our engineering team focused on designing a straightforward and integrated social dashboard that delivers an experience simple enough for a mass audience. This is where the technology behind Chromium came into the picture for Flock. As Chromium emerged, we saw that not only was there significant improvements to performance, but also apparent was a simple and elegant user interface and architecture across all the various systems.
A core goal of new Flock is to keep our users in touch with all of their friends and feeds with a minimum of configuration, and at the same time, make it fun and simple. With all of the users’ feeds and social activity streams flowing into the scrolling sidebar, we knew the performance had to be first-rate, and that techniques we used for earlier versions of Flock were unlikely to perform at scale. With Chromium under the hood, we were able to leverage web workers, and that, combined with the raw horsepower of V8, allowed us to scale the use of the sidebar to manage very large data sets (in the first few weeks after the beta launched we saw a few hundred million activities flowing into Flock’s sidebar). Most importantly, benchmark testing shows us that New Flock with Chromium performs in the top-tier of all browsers available in the market.
Clearly the web is evolving very quickly, and we are seeing more and more people discovering content through their friends. The Flock team is energized by the big developments coming fast in this emerging, interest-graph-enabled web, and we have a roadmap in front of us that we are really excited about. The browsing platform needs to continue to mature at a rapid pace to support the dramatic changes in online user behavior. And, as it does, we already see the performance and power in Chromium that we need to allow us to focus on the innovations we want to bring forward, on top of the platform.
So, I’d like to send out a huge thanks on behalf of the Flock team to all those who have contributed to the Chromium project. Your work has made our project possible, and made new Flock our best release ever.
Clayton Stark, VP EngineeringFlock, Inc.
Posted by Ian Fette, Product Manager

New in Google Chrome Beta: More Extension APIs, Free Hoodies

Monday, August 23, 2010

Since we launched the Google Chrome extension system, one of the most frequent context menu API allows extension developers to register menu items for all pages or for a subset of pages. Developers can also register menu items for specific operations, like right-clicking on an image or movie. For example, you could create an extension that makes it easy for users to share interesting images from images.google.com with their friends on Google Buzz.
Some users have lots of extensions installed. To help these users avoid ending up with gigantic unwieldy context menus, Google Chrome automatically groups multiple menu items from the same extension into a sub-menu.
infobars APIFor the complete list of new extension APIs in Google Chrome beta,

We look forward to seeing what you come up with!

Posted by Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer

Get your apps ready for the Chrome Web Store!

Thursday, August 19, 2010

licensingdeveloper discussion groupChromium blogPosted by Michael Noth, Software Engineer

Security improvements and registration updates for the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery

Thursday, August 19, 2010

We believe that these are important improvements to the security of the gallery. We understand that changes like these can create a lot of questions, so please reach out to us on our developer discussion groupPosted by Gregor Hochmuth, Product Manager

HTML5Rocks v2 - More Guides, New Studio

Friday, August 13, 2010

We think HTML5 will make your work more engaging and create a faster, more responsive experience for your users, so we're happy to add today a slew of new content to html5rocks.com.
If you want to not only get up to speed, but understand the browser differences and techniques for a robust implementation, please take a look through the new guides for implementing web workers and

If you'd like to contribute code, guides, or samples, please get in touch on the @ChromiumDev. We'd love to incorporate your work.

Posted by Paul Irish, Google Chrome Developer Relations

Google Chrome in a Coal Mine

Monday, August 2, 2010

Google Chrome Canary BuildPosted by Henry Bridge, Product Manager

Do You Know How Slow Your Web Page Is?

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

The endeavor. One of the most common challenges is simply getting a true start time. Historically, the earliest a web page could reliably begin measurement is when the browser begins to parse an HTML document (by marking a start time in a <script> block at the top of the document).
Unfortunately, that is too late to include a significant portion of the time web surfers spend waiting for the page: much of the time is spent fetching the page from the web server. To address this shortcoming, some clever web developers work around the problem by storing the navigation start time in a cookie during the previous page’s onbeforeunload handler. However, this doesn’t work for the critical first page load which likely has a cold cache.
Web Timing now gives developers the ability to measure the true page load time by including the time to request, generate, and receive the HTML document. The timeline below illustrates the metrics it provides. The vertical line labeled "Legacy navigation started" is the earliest time a web page can reliably measure without Web Timing. In this case, instead of a misleading 80ms load time, it is now possible to see that the user actually experienced a 274ms time. Including this missing phase will make your measurements appear to increase. It’s not because pages are getting slower – we’re just getting a better view on where the time is actually being spent.
work is underway to add window.mozPerformance to Firefox. The specification is still being finalized, so expect slight changes before the browser prefixes are dropped. If you’re running a supported browser, please try the Web Timing demonstration and send us feedback.
Posted by Tony Gentilcore, Software Engineer

Chromium Blog

WebGL now in Beta: here comes the 3D web!

Chrome is Ready for Business

Break on UI and network events in Chrome Developer Tools

A Year of Extensions

A New Crankshaft for V8

Rolling out a sandbox for Adobe Flash Player

App Permissions

Compatibility Issues With EMET

Creating a Great User Interface For Your Web App

V8 Benchmark Suite Updated

WebP, a new image format for the Web

Extensions, Packaged Apps, and Hosted Apps in the Chrome Web Store

New features for the Chrome Web Store developer preview: Google Checkout integration & previewing for your apps

Google Chrome Frame: Stable and Speedy

HTML5 World Tour

Unleashing GPU acceleration on the web

Web Graphics – Past, Present and Future

Get more data about your extensions with Google Analytics

An overview of the Chrome Web Store Licensing API

Chromium Graphics Overhaul

New Flock Browser Based On Chromium

New in Google Chrome Beta: More Extension APIs, Free Hoodies

Get your apps ready for the Chrome Web Store!

Security improvements and registration updates for the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery

HTML5Rocks v2 - More Guides, New Studio

Google Chrome in a Coal Mine

Do You Know How Slow Your Web Page Is?

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