Google Drive got a few updates today, in the form of an official "Save to Drive" Chrome extension and a few new features to images stored in your Drive. More »

The Stable channel has been updated to 23.0.1271.97 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeFrame platforms. This build contains the following fixes:

A few months ago we released This Exquisite Forest, a Chrome Experiment that lets you create collaborative animations using an online drawing tool. Thousands of people from all over the world have contributed to the project, creating unique animations like Looking Up / Looking Down, Wine after Coffee and Animated Typography. For any of these animations, you can click the button in the lower right to add to the story and branch it in a new direction.

Today, we’d like to share The Endless Theater, a new way to wander the forest by viewing a continuous stream of different animations. In addition, now you can embed animations directly into your site or blog, so it’s even easier to share your work with the world. Just go into the lightbox view and click “Embed.”

The Dev channel has been updated to 25.0.1354.0 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome Frame.  This build includes a test of new variations of the New Tab Page for a small set of users.  A full list of changes in this build is 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.

[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]
For many students and teachers, the hassles of traditional computing often prevent them from making the most of technology in the classroom. Schools that have adopted Chromebooks, however, have been able to bring the web’s vast educational resources—whether it’s conducting real-time research or collaborating on group projects—right into the classroom. Chromebooks are fast, easily sharable, and require almost no maintenance. Today more than 1,000 schools have adopted Chromebooks in classrooms, including some school districts like Richland School District Two (S.C.), Leyden High School District (Ill.), and Council Bluffs School District (Iowa) who have deployed Chromebooks to tens of thousands of students.

Google’s Chrome browser ships with a minimalistic layout by default which many users find beneficial as less chrome means more screen estate for the websites that you open in the browser.  If you are used to working with a bookmarks bar in other web browsers you may miss it in Chrome as it is not displayed by default.While it takes away some vertical screen estate it speeds up accessing sites that you have added to the toolbar.

There are a couple of options to display the bookmarks bar in Chrome. You can for instance use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl-Shift-B to hide and display it. The shortcut gives you some flexibility in this regard as it allows you to display and hide the bar near instantly.

You can alternatively click on the settings button at the top right corner of the Chrome window and select Bookmarks > Show Bookmarks Bar from there.

Now that you have displayed the bar you are free to add new sites or folders to it. I personally like to add a couple of folders to it as it gives me room to add more than a couple of visible bookmarks to the bar. Some bookmarks take up lots of space on the bar due to their title. You can right-click any bookmark here and select Edit to cut the title to reduce the space the bookmark requires on the toolbar. If you do not mind working only with icons, you can remove all of the page’s title to save lots of space.

You can add bookmarks by dragging and dropping the site address or the favicon if the site to the bookmarks bar, or by bookmarking a page with the shortcut Ctrl-D and selecting the bookmarks bar as the destination for the new bookmark.

Other options include importing bookmarks from other web browsers or using the built-in bookmark manager to move existing bookmarks to the toolbar. To import bookmarks click on Settings > Bookmarks > Import Bookmarks and Settings to load the import module.

Here you can pick a web browser you want to import the bookmarks from. If you have an HTML file you need to click on Organize > Import bookmarks from HTML file instead in the Chrome Bookmark Manager which you can open with the shortcut Ctrl-Shift-O or by clicking on Settings > Bookmarks > Bookmark Manager.

Use drag and drop to order bookmarks, to move them to another position or into our out of folders. A right-click on the bar opens options to open all bookmarks that you have added to the bar in new tabs or a new window of the browser. That’s useful if you often open a sequence of sites in the browser that you visit one after the other.

There are a couple of extensions that you can use to improve your experience. Bookmark Bar Switcher for instance lets you switch between multiple bars in Chrome with the click of a button, Atomic Bookmarks makes all bookmarks accessible via a single icon in Chrome’s default toolbar and Bookmark Sentry makes sure you do not have duplicate or broken bookmarks in the browser.

The Beta channel has been updated to 23.0.1271.97 (Platform version: 2913.251.0) for the new Samsung Chromebook.  

The Dev channel has been updated to 25.0.1347.5 (Platform versions 3337.1.0) for most Chromebook devices (except for Acer C7 Chromebook and Samsung Chromeboxes). This build contains a number of stability fixes.


Release highlights:

The Dev channel has been updated to 25.0.1349.2 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome Frame. A full list of changes in this build is 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.

Now here is something for the Android users. Guys from TomsHardware took massive list of Android 4.1 (Jellybean) supported web browsers and tested all of them. If you got confused by too many alternatives, this article should give you a pretty good indicator on who’s leading and who’s lagging in this area. You will be [...]

The Stable channel has been updated to 23.0.1271.91 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and ChromeFrame platforms.

This version fixes several issues including:

• No audio from Flash content when speaker configuration is set to Quadraphonic (Issue: 159924)
• Aw, Snap renderer crash on Windows Server 2003 (Issue: 160559)

Security fixes and rewards:

Please see the Chromium security page for more detail. Note that the referenced bugs may be kept private until a majority of our users are up to date with the fix.

Occasionally, we issue special rewards for bugs outside of Chrome, particularly where the bug is very severe and/or we are able to partially work around the issue:

• [$1000] [152746] High CVE-2012-5131: Corrupt rendering in the Apple OSX driver for Intel GPUs. Credit to Justin Drake.

And back to your regular scheduled rewards:

• [$1000] [156567] High CVE-2012-5133: Use-after-free in SVG filters. Credit to miaubiz.
• [$500] [148638] Medium CVE-2012-5130: Out-of-bounds read in Skia. Credit to Atte Kettunen of OUSPG.
• [155711] Low CVE-2012-5132: Browser crash with chunked encoding. Credit to Attila Szász.
• [158249] High CVE-2012-5134: Buffer underflow in libxml. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Jüri Aedla).
• [159165] Medium CVE-2012-5135: Use-after-free with printing. Credit to Fermin Serna of Google Security Team.
• [159829] Medium CVE-2012-5136: Bad cast in input element handling. Credit to Google Chrome Security Team (Inferno).

Many of the above bugs were detected using AddressSanitizer.

With Microsoft publishing a developer preview version of Windows 8 back in 2011, it’s time to find out, which (if any) of the web browser companies actually did their homework and optimized the software for the latest OS. Web Browsers Internet Explorer 10 Firefox 16 Google Chrome 23 Opera 12.10 Benchmark Results Conclusion Overall, a [...]

Many popular applications today help users consume, share, manage, and edit media content, as evidenced by the rise of web apps like Google Play Music and YouTube. For Chrome packaged app developers, the new Media Galleries API introduces a simple way for apps to access media stored on a user’s device (with the user’s permission, of course).

To use the API, you first have to determine what kind of permission your app needs to access user’s media:

• read-only: allows media content to be read, but not modified 
• read-write: allows media content to be read and modified 
• add-files: allows media to be added to the galleries but prevents modifying existing media files. 

Currently, only read-only access is supported. Support for read-write and add-files will be introduced in a future release.

To retrieve media content, use getMediaFilesystems(). If this is the first time your app is accessing the user’s media libraries, the system will prompt the user to grant access:

You can also make your app explicitly ask the user to designate specific galleries. This is useful if, for example, your app is only interested in pictures. Once access is granted, your app can then retrieve a list of LocalFileSystem structures. At that point, you can use the W3C FileSystem API to access the media gallery content.

NOTE: The file system APIs will only return files that the Chrome platform natively supports, and only the asynchronous version of the FileSystem API is currently supported.

The Dev channel has been updated to 25.0.1324.1 (Platform versions 3196.3.0) for Samsung Chromebooks. This build contains a number of stability fixes.

Sandboxing is a layer of security that Chrome places between attackers and their computer, aiming to isolate an attacker who has successfully exploited a vulnerability. When contained in a sandbox jail, an attacker will typically look for porous or fragile bits in the walls to throw rocks at. That is, he’ll try to gain additional privileges by taking advantage of other vulnerabilities. Our job is to make the virtual walls of the sandbox as strong and impenetrable as possible.

One juicy target for attackers is the operating system’s kernel: a large and complex code base. The latest stable version of Chrome introduces a new layer of sandboxing of Chrome renderers for the 64-bit versions of Chrome OS and Linux, based on a new kernel feature called seccomp-bpf. With seccomp-bpf we’ll install a small filter in the kernel that will quickly reject many of the rocks thrown by an attacker. A simple example: if we know that Chrome renderers don’t need a system call such as vmsplice, or a facility such as “inotify”, we can just deny them completely. We use a broker process model to keep the list of allowed system calls small.

Installing this filter in the kernel improves the security of our users. But it is just the beginning: using this new facility, we’ll continue to make the sandbox safer.

This new sandbox layer is automatically baked into the latest version of Chrome OS. On Linux, you can check by going to chrome://sandbox and look for “Seccomp-BPF sandbox Yes”. If this is not available, ask your Linux distribution to include and enable seccomp-bpf in its kernel, as Ubuntu has done since version 12.04.

As always, you can report bugs and issues here, by clicking on “New issue”.

The Dev channel has been updated to 25.0.1324.1 (Platform versions 3196.1.0 for most platforms and 3196.2.0 for Samsung Chromeboxes) for all Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of stability fixes. [Updated 5:18pm PST with additional highlights.]


Release highlights: