In the two years since we announced SPDY, we’ve been working with the web community on evolving the spec and getting SPDY deployed on the Web.

Chrome, Android Honeycomb devices, and Google's servers have been speaking SPDY for some time, bringing important benefits to users. For example, thanks to SPDY, a significant percentage of Chrome users saw a decrease in search latency when we launched SSL-search. Given that Google search results are some of the most highly optimized pages on the internet, this was a surprising and welcome result.

We’ve also seen widespread community uptake and participation. Recently, Firefox has added SPDY support, which means that soon half of the browsers in use will support SPDY. On the server front, nginx has announced plans to implement SPDY, and we're actively working on a full featured mod-spdy for Apache. In addition, Strangeloop, Amazon, and Cotendo have all announced that they’ve been using SPDY.

Given SPDY's rapid adoption rate, we’re working hard on acceptance tests to help validate new implementations. Our best practices document can also help website operators make their sites as speedy as possible.

With the help of Mozilla and other contributors, we’re pushing hard to finalize and implement SPDY draft-3 in early 2012, as standardization discussions for SPDY will start at the next meeting of the IETF.

We look forward to working even closer with the community to improve SPDY and make the Web faster!

To learn more about SPDY, see the link to a Tech Talk here, with slides here.

The Beta channel has been updated to 17.0.963.43 (Platform versions: 1412.142) for Chromebooks (Samsung Series 5 , and Cr-48).

Highlights:

The Beta channel has been updated to 17.0.963.44 for all platforms other than Chrome OS.  This update fixes a number of stability and UI issues.  Full details about what changes are in this build are available in the SVN revision log.  Interested in switching release channels?

One of my favorite features of Chrome got a boost earlier today, as we announced support for an experimental new “autocomplete type” attribute for form fields. The new attribute will allow web developers to unambiguously label text and select fields with common data types such as ‘full-name’ or ‘street-address’ and guarantee that their site’s forms work correctly with Chrome Autofill and other form-filling providers.

We’ve been working on this design in collaboration with several other autofill vendors. Like any early stage proposal we expect this will change and evolve as the web standards community provides feedback, but we believe this will serve as a good starting point for the discussion on how to best support autofillable forms in the HTML5 spec. For now, this new attribute is implemented in Chrome as x-autocompletetype to indicate that this is still experimental and not yet a standard, similar to the webkitspeech attribute we released last summer.

For more information, you can read the full text of the proposed specification, ask questions on the Webmaster help forum, or you can share your feedback in the standardization discussion!

Cross-posted from the Google Enterprise Blog.

Editor's note: We’re posting this electronic communication from sunny Orlando, where we’re chatting with schools at the annual FETC ed-tech conference. We wanted to share highlights from our keynote this morning, which featured a panel moderated by Tom Vander Ark, author of Getting Smart: How Digital Learning is Changing the World. You can watch a replay of the keynote on YouTube in a few hours. If you’re in town, come visit us at our booth #1101 - we’d love to say hi!

When we first conceived of Chromebooks, we were focused on providing a device that brought you to the web in the fastest, simplest and securest way possible. What we didn't realize at the time was that this device would be so welcome and popular in classrooms! Many schools are eager to improve access to the web and technology for students and are planning to provide each student with their own device – a concept known as "1-to-1" computing. We've heard from our customers that they choose Chromebooks for 1-to-1 because the simplicity of the web takes away the hassle for teachers, students and administrators.

During our keynote at FETC this morning, we had the opportunity to share some exciting news: hundreds of schools in 41 states across the U.S. are using one or more classroom sets of Chromebooks today. As a highlight, three new school districts in Iowa, Illinois and South Carolina are going 1-to-1 – that is, one Chromebook each for nearly 27,000 students.

• Council Bluffs Community School District in Iowa is planning a Chromebook 1:1 Initiative for all 2,800 students in their two high schools and will use an additional 1500 Chomebooks in their two middle schools
• Leyden Community High School District in Illinois will roll out devices to 3,500 students in their two high schools
• Richland School District Two in South Carolina is going 1-to-1 with a total of 19,000 students

It's great to see this positive momentum for Chromebooks in classrooms. It's similar to where we were about five years ago when Google Apps was just getting off the ground. At that time, educational institutions were the most interested and it was inspiring to hear the different ways schools and districts had begun using Gmail, Calendar and Docs. At FETC we’ve been similarly excited to see how teachers have formed communities around professional development for Chromebooks, districts all across the US are piloting Chromebooks in their classrooms, and more and more reach out to us to learn about Chromebooks for Education every day. We believe Chromebooks and the web have the ability to facilitate learning in a powerful way, and we’re committed to helping schools recognize their goals to go 1-to-1.

But enough words from us. We’d like to close with thoughts from representatives of each of these school districts.

“From my perspective, Chromebooks couldn’t get any simpler; setting up this many laptops would have typically taken our team at least 3 months. And from the instructional side, we are teaching content not technology, and Chromebooks simply support teachers in what they do best while giving students the resources they need to be productive citizens. As just one example the quality of work that students turn in has improved literally overnight - from incomplete sentences to full paragraphs, in some cases - because they are much more engaged and participating readily in class.”

David Fringer, executive director, information systems at Council Bluffs Community school district, Iowa

“When we started on our digital evolution path we were looking for just the right tool - one that is invisible and gets out of the way to allow students and teachers to focus on instruction. With Chromebooks our students are publishing, producing and sharing with each other, and best of all, we don’t have to assign students a particular device number. Any student can use any device because all their work is saved online - for that matter they could access their work from home while logged in from the Chrome browser.”

Bryan Weinert, director of technology at Leyden school district, Illinois

Student at East Leyden high school selects a Chromebook from the charging cart. With Chromebooks, students can work on any device in any class period and access their work from anywhere - including from the Chrome browser installed on a home computer.

“Chromebooks make our 1-to-1 computing dream a reality. Teachers don't need to add ‘help desk’ to their job description, and they save valuable class time knowing they can instruct students to close the Chromebooks to stay on task and they won't have to wait when it’s time to open them again. Furthermore, we’ve seen that any behavior issues become an absolute non-issue because the technology is so compelling.”

Tom Cranmer, executive director of information technology, Richland School District Two, South Carolina

Fifth grade student teaches a younger student how to use a Chromebook in the Chrome Buddy project in Tim Swick's classroom at Pontiac Elementary School in Richland School District Two.

Learn more about Chromebooks for Education on our website, and join us for the Chromebook Classroom webinar series, Wednesdays at 9AM PT/12PM ET.

The Dev channel has been updated to 16.0.912.77 (Platform versions: 1193.194.0) for Chromebooks (Acer AC700, Samsung Series 5, and Cr-48).

Do you have a favorite bookmarklet you love to use but hate having it cluttering up your bookmarks bar? An easy to use webapp solves the problem for you, no coding experience required.More »

The Stable channel has been updated to 16.0.912.77 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame

Google AdSense is one the biggest revenue generator for small and medium traffic websites. The AdSense team have been revamping their reporting interface which makes it easier for publisher to see their earnings and other related reports.

However, as a publisher I have always been comfortable using desktop reporting software to keep an eye on my AdSense earnings. However, of late most of the software have stopped working.

Also Read: Useful Tips and Tricks To Grow Your AdSense Income

This meant that, I have to constantly login into the AdSense web interface to check on my earnings every now and then. However, thanks to Google that will now be a thing of the past. Google has released a extension for Google Chrome which will allow AdSense publishers to view basic details of their earnings in Google Chrome.

The AdSense Publisher Toolbar extension (Download) allows you to view your current days earnings, yesterdays earnings, current months earnings and last months earnings. In addition to that it also displays the top custom channels and lifetime earnings.

Once you have installed the extension, you will have to click on the extension icon and then authorize your Google account. If you use different account for AdSense and Gmail, you can easily sign in to another account thanks to Google’s multiple account sign in. 

The AdSense Publisher extension is definitely a nice way to keep an eye on your AdSense earnings without having to constantly login to the actual AdSense website. I would highly recommend this extension if you are in a habit of checking your earnings multiple times through a day.

Of course, it is always a healthy habit to login to the actual AdSense reporting interface to check on detailed reports and performance of your channels and other data from time to time to increase your performance.

Chrome: Text This To Me is a Chrome add-on that allows you to quickly send yourself SMS messages from your browser with links, notes, and other snippets of text with a single click. Whether you just want to send yourself a URL to open on your phone's browser, or you want to remind yourself to pick up the milk on the way home, Text This To Me gives you a quick way to do it without installing anything on your device. More »

The Beta channel has been updated to 17.0.963.38 for all platforms other than Chrome OS.  This update fixes a number of stability and UI issues.  Full details about what changes are in this build are available in the SVN revision log.  Interested in switching release channels?  Find out how.  If you find a new issue, please let us know by filing a bug.

Since we open sourced WebRTC this past summer, we’ve been working hard with browser vendors to integrate WebRTC technology in their products. Today, we reached an important milestone: WebRTC is now integrated in the Chrome browser available on the dev channel.

Building industry-leading voice and video capabilities into the browser makes it easier for web developers to incorporate real time communications in their apps. Instead of relying on custom, OS specific, proprietary plug-ins, they can now easily build and maintain their apps using a few simple JavaScript APIs and have the browser do the heavy lifting.

Even though WebRTC is still evolving, we are receiving feedback from the standards process in W3C and IETF and there are already plenty of apps in development. For example, companies like Polycom, Vonage, Vehix.com, Firespotter, Siemens, Nimbuzz and PCCW are currently actively developing browser based solutions using WebRTC.If you are interested to learn more on how you can use WebRTC in your app, review our documentation, join our developer discussion group and go to the WebRTC blog for more details. We are looking forward to seeing what you come up with!

Chromebooks for Education: Crook County Middle School, Prineville, OR
Chromebooks for Education connect students and teachers at Crook County Middle School with the power of the web. To learn more about the benefits of a Chromebook classroom, visit: www.google.com/chromebook/education.

From: googlechrome
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