Whether your web app involves scrolling down a long list of news headlines or a game with flying birds and crumbling structures, you want your web app to look as smooth as native apps. It used to be tricky to chase down the cause of animation jitter and lag in user actions with Chrome Developer Tools. This is why we’ve added the Frame Mode to our Timeline panel to help you pinpoint offending long frames and understand what’s causing them to run slowly.

So, what’s a frame? A frame includes all the tasks that the browser needs to perform in order to update the screen upon a user action or a tick of the animation timer. A complex, but not uncommon, sequence might be:

The Stable channel has been updated to 23.0.1271.89 (Platform version: 2913.187.0) for the new Samsung Chromebook. Machines will be receiving update over the next several days.

Some highlights of these changes are:

• Stability fixes

If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our help site or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using ‘Report an issue...’ in the Chrome menu (3 horizontal bars in the upper right corner of the browser).

Josafat Garcia & Ben Henry
Google Chrome

Even though Chrome extensions and legacy packaged apps are similar at a technical level, users have very different expectations for how extensions and apps should look and behave. Users expect extensions to interact with the whole browser, whereas they expect apps to act solely in their containing tab or window.

Until now, all Chrome legacy packaged apps could request the same permissions and use the same APIs as extensions to interact with Chrome. In order to make the capabilities of legacy packaged apps more closely align with user expectations, we’ve decided to limit the extensions permissions that legacy packaged apps can request.

Beginning this week, you won’t be able to publish legacy packaged apps in the Chrome Web Store that request any of the following permissions:
(a) any host permissions, including "< all urls >" 
(b) the top-level "content_scripts" key 
(c) the "debugger", "devtools", "pageCapture", "plugin", "proxy", "tabs'", "history", "webNavigation" permissions 
(d) the top-level "npapi" key 

After a sugar coated promo from the Microsoft, it’s time to put their claims into a test and find out, how good or bad Internet Explorer 10 really is when it comes to gaming and HTML5 performance.

Visualizing the exact location of every star in the galaxy is a problem of, well, galactic proportions. With over 200 billion stars, capturing every detail of the Milky Way currently defies scientists and laptops alike. However, using imagery and data from a range of sources, including NASA and the European Space Agency (ESA), we were recently able to take one small step in that direction by plotting the location of the stars closest to our sun.

The result is a new Chrome Experiment called 100,000 Stars that visualizes the stellar neighborhood. Using your mouse or trackpad, you can zoom in and out to explore our galaxy. Zooming in reveals the names of the most prominent stars close to our sun – click each name to learn more about it and see a digital rendition.

The Beta channel has been updated to 23.0.1271.89 (Platform version 2913.187.0) for all Chrome OS devices. This build contains a number of stability fixes.

Release highlights:

• Pepper Flash updated to release 11.5.31.3
• Network stability changes

If you find new issues, please let us know by visiting our help site or filing a bug. Interested in switching channels? Find out how. You can submit feedback using ‘Report an issue...’ in the Chome menu (3 horizontal bars in the upper right corner of the browser).

Josafat Garcia and Ben Henry

Adobe Flash Player is a very widely used browser plug-in used to watch videos, play games and consume content on the web. Unfortunately, it’s also commonly used as a vector for malware, which tries to monitor your activities, steal information, or otherwise wreak havoc on your computer.

Since 2010, we’ve been working with Adobe to improve the security of Flash Player. As of last week’s Stable release, Chrome’s built-in Flash Player on Mac uses a new plug-in architecture which runs Flash inside a sandbox that’s as strong as Chrome’s native sandbox, and much more robust than anything else available.

Ever wonder why the phone carriers spent so much time on their own software apps and stores? So did Verizon, and, after due consideration, they're dropping out of the Android and BlackBerry app business.

The Dev channel has been updated to 25.0.1323.1 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.



Jason Kersey

Google Chrome

[cross-posted from the Official Google Blog]
Creating a better, simpler computer and making it available for everyone is at the core of the Chromebook vision. It’s exciting to see people using Chromebooks as the perfect additional computer in the home, and we continue to work with our partners to make them easy-to-use and more affordable. Today, we’re delighted that our partner Acer is introducing a new addition to the Chromebook family: the new Acer C7 Chromebook.