If you install the "Save to Google" extension for Chrome, you can now import your Chrome bookmarks into the Google Save site. Just open the sidebar menu from the Google Save site, click "import Chrome bookmarks" and wait a few minutes until all your bookmarks are saved online. Reload the pages and you'll see all of your Chrome bookmarks next to the pages and images you've previously saved.


Folders and subfolders are converted into tags. Let's assume that the folder "Google" has a subfolder called "Blogs". The two folders are converted into two tags: "Google" and "Google > Blogs", while the bookmarks from the "Blogs" subfolders get both tags.


For now, there's no way to sync Google Save with Chrome bookmarks and the Bookmark Manager extension doesn't integrate with Google Save, even if they're closely related.

{ Thanks, Mukil Elango. }

It looks the Google Save site is not restricted to bookmarking image search results. The "Save to Google" Chrome extension lets you save any web page and add tags. "One spot for webpages and Images: Your saved webpages and saved images from Google Image Search will live together at google.com/save," mentions Google.

In fact, the saving feature from Google Image Search actually bookmarks the web page that includes the image and automatically selects the image you are saving to display it next to the site's name. The Chrome extension lets you save any web page and you can pick an image from that page.


If there's no image to pick, Google shows the first letter from the title of the page.



If Google wants to create a general-purpose bookmarking site, then it could also integrate with Google Web Search and sync with Chrome bookmarks.

{ Thanks, Carlos. }

In addition to the stable channel, there are 3 other Chrome channels you can use to check the latest features before they're released for everyone: beta, dev and canary. Canary builds are only for Windows and Mac, the dev channel is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS and Android, while the beta channel is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android and now iOS.

That's right, you can try out Chrome Beta for iOS. You need to enter your email address and confirm you "understand that Google will share your information with Apple in order to participate in the TestFlight program". Google will send a confirmation email. "Once you have confirmed your e-mail address, you can expect to receive an invitation to join TestFlight within a few minutes."




Install the TestFlight app on your iOS device, tap "redeem" and enter the code from the invitation. If you've already installed Chrome on your phone or tablet, TestFlight will ask you if "you want to replace the current app version with the test version".

Right now, you can upgrade from Chrome 46.0.2490.73 to Chrome 47.0.2526.53. The new version adds support for more Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts (open/close/change tabs and voice search) and adds 3D touch support on iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus (force touch the Chrome icon to open a new tab, a new incognito tab or start a voice search).



{ Thanks, Stefan. }

A lot has changed since Google launched Chrome back in September 2008. Chrome's popularity has been growing ever since then and all the other important browsers became more like Chrome. Google focused on the things that mattered and transformed the browser from a simple application into a "modern OS" for web apps.

While there are many services that claim to measure the market share for browsers, I tend to think that StatCounter is the most accurate. StatCounter's stats for 2008-2015 show that Chrome's market share grew from 0% to 53% in 7 years, while IE's share declined from 67% to 15%. According to StatCounter, Chrome is now the dominant browser, while IE and Firefox are continually losing market share.


It's clear that Google did a lot things right when it launched Chrome, but few people anticipated that Google's browser will take over the world. Most people didn't know what's a browser and only knew that they were supposed to click on the blue E icon to go online. Google changed this by promoting a constantly evolving browser, which was faster and more secure.

It looks like the Google Notifications section is not only for Google+ and Google Photos. Daniel Fletcher, a reader of this blog, noticed a Chrome notification from a supervised user who sent a permission request.


It's likely that more Google services and products will show notifications in the navigation bar. Google already stacks the notification cards for Google Photos.

{ Thanks, Daniel. }

Google has a cool Chrome extension called Earth View, which replaces the new tab page with a stunning satellite image from Google Earth. The latest release brings a lot of new features: there are 500 new images, you can see the images from the last 10 tabs you've opened, there's a download feature in the menu and a sharing button. You can share images on Google+, Facebook, Twitter or copy the URL and paste it somewhere else.



How to see the images from the last 10 tabs you've opened? Just mouse over the bottom of the new tab page and click "recent imagery". You should see a list of 10 clickable thumbnails.



If you don't want to install the extension or you use a different browser, there's a web gallery that shows all the 1500 images. Click the arrow button or use the left/right keyboard shortcuts to navigate between images. There's also a slideshow feature called "leanback mode".


"Earth View is a collection of the most striking and enigmatic landscapes available in Google Earth. The colors, shapes, textures and patterns all contribute to the strange beauty of our planet, reminding us of nature’s uncanny geometry and bewildering simplicity. Each of the 1500 images featured in this collection was hand curated and available for download as wallpaper for your desktop or mobile," informs Google.

Google Earth celebrates its 10th birthday and the desktop software adds a new layer called Voyager, which integrates Earth View, Street View highlights, 3D cities, a map of recently published satellite images and a tour that shows a few of the thousands of Voyager locations to choose from.

Chrome Web Store now shows if an app, extension or theme is "compatible with your device". Google also uses a small icon to reassure users that they can install the app, extension or theme and it will work on their device.


If the app is not compatible, the blue "add to Chrome" button is replaced by a red "not compatible" button, just like before. Click the "not compatible" button and you'll see a message like: "This application is not supported on this computer. Installation has been disabled. The following problems are detected: This app runs only on Chrome OS".

{ Thanks, Mukil Elango. }

Google Play Services brings an interesting feature: a Smart Lock for passwords and connected accounts. This feature is enabled by default and it allows the passwords of your apps and websites to be saved to your Google account. By default, Google automatically signs in to apps and websites connected to your account, but this feature can be disabled.


Chrome already has a syncing feature for passwords, so the new Smart Lock uses it to bring the same passwords to apps. For example, Google could save your Facebook password and it could use it to sign in to your account in the native Facebook app.

Android Police reports that Smart Lock works in the Netflix app and developers need to use a new API to add support. Other Android apps that support this feature: Eventbrite, Instacart, New York Times, Orbitz.



"Google Smart Lock for Passwords takes the hassle out of keeping your accounts safe for your favorite apps and websites. Smart Lock can save passwords to your Google Account and then help you use your passwords securely and conveniently on the websites you use in Chrome and the apps you use on your Android devices," informs Google.

There's also a page that shows your saved passwords: you can find it at passwords.google.com. "Your passwords from Chrome and Android are saved with Google Smart Lock and accessible to you across devices," explains Google. Unfortunately, this page doesn't show your passwords if you use a sync passphrase to encrypt your synced data in Chrome: "you can access your data within Chrome on your syncing devices, but not from this website." A help center page mentions that you can't use Smart Lock for Passwords on Android if you set a sync passphrase.


If you don't have a sync passphrase, the page shows your passwords and lets you delete them. Click the eye icon to see a password.


You can remove the sync passphrase from this page, but this also deletes your Chrome data from Google's servers. The good news is that this doesn't clear data from your devices, so you can sign in again to start syncing.

{ Thanks, Herin Maru. }

Google Tone is an experimental Chrome extension for sharing the URL of the current tab with other computers. It doesn't use Bluetooth, NFC or WiFi: it only sends audio tones. "Google Tone turns on your computer's microphone (while the extension is on) and uses your computer's speakers to exchange URLs with nearby computers connected to the Internet."

For some reason, Google requires to be logged in to a Google account and to be online. Your Google Profile name and picture are displayed next to the notification. I'm not sure why this feature isn't optional.


Google Research Blog has more information about this experiment. "Tone provides an easy-to-understand broadcast mechanism that behaves like the human voice — it doesn't pass through walls like radio or require pairing or addressing. The initial prototype used an efficient audio transmission scheme that sounded terrible, so we played it beyond the range of human hearing. However, because many laptop microphones and nearly all video conferencing systems are optimized for voice, it improved reliability considerably to also include a minimal DTMF-based audible codec. The combination is reliable for short distances in the majority of audio environments even at low volumes, and it even works over Hangouts."

The extension doesn't work all the time, so make sure to turn up your volume, turn on your computer's microphone and unplug your headphones. When it works, it's a cool way to share the current tab with all the computers around you, assuming that they use Chrome and this extension is installed.

A few Google engineers wrote an interesting paper (PDF) about Flywheel, Google Chrome's data compression proxy. The paper only talks about the data compression feature from Chrome for Android and iOS and offers a lot of stats.


Flywheel focuses on the mobile web because mobile devices "are fast becoming the dominant mode of Internet access", while "web content is still predominantly designed for desktop browsers" and mobile data is expensive. Google's proxy compresses web content by 58% on average and relies on the SPDY protocol and the WebP image compression formats, which are used by a small percentage of the sites (0.8% of the images use WebP and 0.9% of the sites use SPDY). The most significant data reduction comes from image transcoding, which decreases the sizes of the images by 66.4%, on average.


Data compression is disabled by default and only 9% of the mobile Chrome users enabled it. "Segmented by access network, 78% of page loads are transferred via WiFi, 11% via 3G, 9% via 4G/LTE, and 1% via 2G." Flywheel is not enabled for HTTPS pages and for incognito tabs and it's interesting to notice that only 37% of the bytes downloaded by Chrome users who enabled the proxy are received from Flywheel, while 50% of the total received bytes are from HTTPS and 13% of the bytes are from incognito mode, bypassed URLs and protocols other than HTTP/HTTPS. For example, the proxy bypasses audio/video files and large file downloads.

"For most users and most page loads, Flywheel increases page load time. For the majority of page loads, the increase is modest: the median value increases by 6%. Flywheel improves page load time only when pages are large and users are close to a Google data center."

The paper mentions that the Opera Turbo feature provides comparable data reduction, while the old Opera Mini proxy uses more aggressive optimizations, but breaks pages that rely on JavaScript or modern web platform features. "Maintaining an alternative execution environment to support whole-page transcoding is not feasible for Flywheel given our design goal of remaining fully compatible with the modern mobile web."

{ via Hacker News }

Chrome 42 for iOS brought a lot of new features. Some of them use the APIs introduced in iOS 8, while others make it easy to use Apple's bigger phones.

You can now reload a page, open a new tab or close a tab with one swipe. Go to the top of a page, pull down and you'll see three buttons: a reload button (pull straight down), a plus button for opening a new tab (pull down and left) and a button that closes the current tab (pull down and right).



Chrome for iOS 8 now has support for the Today View. You can open a new tab, use voice search or open copied links. For example, you can copy a link from Safari, open the Notification Center and tap "open copied link" to open the page in Chrome.


Chrome has its own app extension for the Today View, but it also supports third-party app extensions. For example, you can now use password managers like LastPass and 1Password right inside Chrome. Here are the instructions for LastPass. Basically, you need to tap the share button from Chrome's menu, enable LastPass in the extensions menu and then you can quickly log in using LastPass.


Another new feature allows you find answers more quickly. When you're searching from the address bar, Chrome now shows answers related to weather, stocks, unit conversions and more. Chrome also shows the latest URL copied to the clipboard.

Google added support for Android apps in Chrome OS, but there are only a few Android apps in Chrome Web Store. Developers tested the apps and tweaked them to work well in Chrome OS, even if they were created for phones and tablets.

Now there's an app for Chrome and Chrome OS that lets you run Android apps. It's called ARC Welder (ARC = App Runtime for Chrome, Weld = to unite) and it's mostly for Android developers that want to test their apps before submitting them to Chrome Web Store. You can select any APK file, but not all of them work, especially if they use Google Play Services APIs.


I've tried various APK files from APKMirror.com. A few of them worked properly (IMDb, BBC News, Wikipedia), while others crashed (for example: Amazon and Yahoo Weather), required Google Play Services (like YouTube and other Google apps) or didn't work that well (like Aviary). ARC is still in beta, so there are still many bugs that need to be fixed.

Angelo Giuffrida, a reader of this blog, noticed a new feature in Chrome for Android. There's a new menu item that lets you "share a reaction". You're supposed to take a selfie, Chrome adds a screenshot of the page you were reading and then you can share the #ChromeSelfie with your friends.

This looks like a special feature for April Fools' Day. In fact, you can enable this feature by changing the date of your Android phone or tablet to April 1st.





Update: Chrome's blog announced the new feature. "With #ChromeSelfie you can share sites with your family and friends on social media and via instant messages, along with a handsome selfie instead of cumbersome text."

{ Thanks, Angelo. }

If you're using the compression proxy from Chrome for Android or iOS and you'd like to see a similar feature in Chrome for desktop, there's a Chrome extension from Google that adds this feature. Data Saver is still in beta, but it works well and it's pretty useful: it reduces data usage by using Google servers to optimize the pages you visit.


"When this extension is enabled, Chrome will use Google servers to compress pages you visit before downloading them. SSL and incognito pages will not be included," informs Google.

It's nice to see that Google Web Accelerator is brought back to life. Even if Data Saver only works in Chrome and it doesn't have all the features from Google Web Accelerator, it's less controversial than Google's Labs project.

Last year, Chrome started to block downloads for applications that "make unexpected changes to your computer — for instance, switching your homepage or other browser settings to ones you don't want". Now Chrome shows a warning when you visit a site that "encourages downloads of unwanted software".

Here's the warning page: "The site ahead contains harmful programs. Attackers on example.com might attempt to trick you into installing programs that harm your browsing experience (for example, by changing your homepage or showing extra ads on sites you visit)". This is a new SafeBrowsing feature, just like malware and phishing warnings, and you can disable it from the settings.


In addition to displaying Chrome warnings, Google will also downrank search results and disable Google ads that lead to sites with unwanted software.

There's a Google page that provides more details about unwanted software. According to Google, unwanted software has at least one of these characteristics: it's deceptive, it affects the user's system in unexpected ways, it's difficult to remove, it collects or transmits private information without the user’s knowledge, it's bundled with other software and its presence is not disclosed.

Google has updated the Play Music app for Chrome and you can now use it without having to open the Play Music site in a new tab.

I sometimes forgot about the Play Music tab, closed the tab and music stopped playing. Now the mini player continues to work even after I close the Play Music tab.


You can click the "I'm Feeling Lucky" dice button and start a radio based on your listening history. Another option is to open the Play Music site, start a radio or pick a playlist. Then you can close the Play Music tab and use the controls from the mini player: pause music, play next song, play previous song, thumbs up/down.

The mini player also supports keyboard shortcuts:

* left arrow - previous song
* right arrow - next song
* down arrow - decrease volume
* up arrow - increase volume
* p / space bar - pause/play music
* r - toggle repeat between off, all, and one
* s - toggle shuffle on or off
* = - thumbs up

{ via François Beaufort }

A few readers noticed that Chrome's stable version started to enable the account switcher added back in August to Chrome Beta.

"Get started by clicking on 'You' in the upper right corner of your Chrome window and then clicking 'Sign in to Chrome.' You'll be able to switch devices and pick up where you left off with all of your tabs, bookmarks, and history automatically kept in sync. If you share a computer, click 'Switch person' to add your profile and get your own bookmarks, apps, and theme. Switching lets you keep your stuff separate," explained Google.



There's also support for guest mode. "With the new 'Guest mode,' you can let others use Chrome without letting them see your stuff. And after they've closed out their tabs, their browsing information is deleted from your computer as well." That's the main difference between incognito and guest mode: guest mode is treated as a separate profile that doesn't have access to the data from your main profile.


You can also enable these features in chrome://flags:

1. copy this text in the address bar and press Enter:
chrome://flags/#enable-new-avatar-menu

2. select "Enable" in the dropdown below "Enable the new avatar menu"

3. (optional) select "Enable" next to "Enable fast user switching in the avatar menu" to quickly switch between profiles

4. click "Relaunch now" at the bottom of the page to restart the browser.

Pick "Disable" instead of "Enable" to turn off the new avatar menu.


With features like guest mode and account switcher, Chrome looks more and more like an operating system. After all, these features were borrowed from Chrome OS.

{ Thanks, Konstantin Yakovlev, Fede and Karol Kobos. ]

Google's Account History page has been updated and includes a few new features. The last time I checked this page, Google allowed you to pause or disable search history, location history and YouTube's search and watch history.

The search history card is now called Web & App Activity and deals with searches and browsing activity. In addition to the Google Search history, there's also an option to "include history from Chrome and other apps in your Web & App Activity." If this feature is enabled, Google saves information like your Chrome browsing history, the apps you use and the data they share with Google. "This lets you see things like sites or content that you've looked at in other apps in your Google search results," explains Google.


When you uncheck "include history from Chrome and other apps in your Web & App Activity", Google shows this warning: "Pausing this setting may result in fewer content suggestions in products like Google Now or Google+, and some autocomplete suggestions in Search will not appear. Remember, you can search or browse in incognito mode whenever you want to be more anonymous."


There's a page for Web & App Activity history: https://history.google.com/history/app and it shows the mobile apps you've used on your Android devices. You can remove this information.


Google added 2 new cards for Voice & Audio Activity and Device Information.


"Voice & Audio Activity helps recognize your voice and improve speech recognition by storing your voice and audio inputs to your account (for example, when you say 'Ok Google' to do a voice search)." This feature is automatically turned on by the mobile Google Search app when you enable the always-on OK Google hotword. You can see the audio history here: https://history.google.com/history/audio.

When you pause audio activity, Google shows this message: "Pausing Voice & Audio Activity may limit or disable features such as using 'Ok Google' to start a voice search and reduce the accuracy of speech recognition across Google products that use your voice. Note that this setting does not affect storage of information by Google products (like Voice) that can be used to store your audio or voice inputs. Google may also continue to collect and store audio data in an anonymized way."


There's also a section for device information, which "stores your contacts, calendars, apps, and other device data to improve your experience across Google". You can find the device history here: https://history.google.com/history/device, but it's not very useful. Google shows status messages like: "System state saved", "Contacts saved", "List of installed apps saved".


Click the Pause button and you should see this warning: "Pausing Device Information means you will receive fewer reminders about upcoming events, and features like speech recognition (especially of names in your contact list) may be less reliable. Note that this setting doesn't affect the storage of information by certain other Google products (like Calendar, Contacts, or Play)."


Some of these features were already available, but it's now easier to disable them from Google's account settings.