Since speed is critical for a good experience when using the web, at Google we’re always exploring ways to make the web faster. As it turns out, one of the biggest bang-for-the-buck ways to do that is by replacing JPEG and PNG images with WebP. WebP offers significantly better compression than these legacy formats (around 35% better in most cases), and when you consider that over 60% of typical page sizes are images, the benefits can be substantial. WebP translates directly into less bandwidth consumption, decreased latency, faster page loads, better battery consumption on mobile, and overall happier users.

Case in point: the Chrome Web Store uses many large promotional images and tiles on its home page, making it a very heavyweight page. The team was eager to find ways to improve its speed, without sacrificing the user experience or giving up image quality. WebP to the rescue!

Last year, Chrome introduced manifest V2 to Apps and Extension developers, which brings a variety of security and API improvements such as a default Content Security Policy. As of Chrome 18, manifest V1 was officially deprecated. At the time, we published our manifest version support schedule to give developers transparency and insight into our plans for migrating to the new version.

Today, we’re announcing a slight update to that schedule, to let developers know that they have until Monday, March 4, 2013 to make updates to their existing manifest V1-based items. After that date, the Chrome Web Store will block all updates to products based on manifest V1 unless the update includes switching it to manifest V2.

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.

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 

Chrome packaged apps aim to deliver an app experience with the appearance and capabilities of native apps, but built using the growing capabilities of HTML5. These apps can access APIs for better filesystem handling, direct access to hardware devices, raw network communication and many others. One of the new APIs that just landed in an experimental state is TCP Listen, which allows an app to accept incoming TCP connections.

Since the developer preview launch earlier this year, Chrome packaged apps have been able to connect to remote servers using TCP or UDP, and bind to a UDP port. For example, this Media Center application searches for and connects to media servers in the local network. Now, through the new TCP Listen API, a Chrome packaged app can also act as a TCP server itself and accept incoming connections on specified ports.

Chrome Web Store developers can create and distribute apps and extensions that use NPAPI plug-ins. However, platforms such as ChromeOS and Windows 8 don’t support NPAPI. Today, we’re making the installation of apps and extensions that use NPAPI smarter, to help users avoid installing items that they can’t use on their particular platform.

If a user visits the Chrome Web Store on a platform that doesn’t support NPAPI, the store will filter out all items that use it from the home page and the various category pages. These apps and extensions will still show up in search results, and can be visited from direct URL links, but the Details dialog for each item will display a message that the app or the extension in question cannot be installed and the Install button will be disabled.

If you are a developer whose apps or extensions use NPAPI but can still work without it, we’ve provided a way for you to prevent your items from being filtered out. In your manifest.json file under the requirements section, specify the “npapi” flag like this:

"requirements": {

To publish an app in the Chrome Web Store, developers need to prove they own the domain that hosts their application. Until recently, the only way to do this was through Google’s Webmaster Tools. Today, we are simplifying the process further by allowing you use Google's site verification service to prove your association with a verified site.

Suppose you want to publish an app on the Chrome Web Store and have it associated with your company’s existing site, but you don’t have the ability to use any of the current verification methods e.g. you’re not allowed to upload a verification file to the root directory. The site verification service option in the edit page for each item listed in your Chrome Web Store developer dashboard allows you to request association of your app with your organization’s site:

When you choose an existing site from the drop-down menu or click “Add a new site”, the current registered owner for the site will receive a notification of your request to be associated. The owner can see who is making the request, and then approve or deny the request appropriately. That’s all there is to it! (Note: if this checkbox isn’t available, it may be because there’s no current owner of the site or you already have an outstanding association request).

We hope that this new feature will further streamline the process for publishing new apps on the Chrome Web Store, and allows you to focus more on developing your app and less on process. Have any questions or comments about using Google’s site verification service? You can reach us on our developer forum for store-related questions or head on over to the Webmaster Help forum.

Just over a month ago, at Google I/O, we announced significant changes to Chrome’s packaged application platform. These changes are intended to allow apps to break out of the browser, work offline by default, and enable richer, more immersive experiences.

With the latest version of Chrome in the developer channel, you can build, load, debug and test your apps without command-line flags, although you may need to enable experimental APIs in some cases. Because we’re still in developer preview mode, the Chrome Web Store doesn’t yet accept uploads of these new packaged apps. We’ll enable web store support later this year, and when we flip that switch, users will be able to discover and download your apps directly from the store.

In order to get started building apps, visit our developer documentation at developer.chrome.com/apps and check out our growing list of sample applications on Github (thanks for the pull requests; keep them coming). If you’d like to reach us while you’re building apps, you can join us on the #chromium-apps Freenode IRC channel, join the chromium-apps group or report an issue.

We’re also starting a regular weekly hangout every Tuesday at 9:30am (Pacific Time). Our first one will take place on Tuesday, August 14th. You can add a reminder to your calendar and then tune in at Google Developers Live. And be sure to add +Google Chrome Developers to your circles to keep up on the latest from the Chrome team.

If you’re a Chrome extensions power user, you may be familiar with a task manager that looks like this:

That’s a lot of extensions running! Most of the time, they’re probably just sitting idle, waiting for the user to interact with them. Do they really need to be running and using your memory all the time?

Over the last several months, we've been working on a new feature for the extension system called Event Pages that we think will help reduce the memory used by these idle extensions. 

How They Work 

Event pages are an evolution of background pages, with one major improvement: rather than running in the background all the time, an event page only runs when it is handling events. Once an event page becomes idle, it is unloaded, freeing memory until the next time it’s needed. Learn more from the event page documentation.

To help event pages support some important use cases, we’re also developing a few new APIs.

• The alarms API allows an extension to wake itself up at set times, to support features like periodically syncing data to the cloud. 
• Some new events let extensions know when they have been installed, or when their event page is being unloaded. 
• A declarative version of the webRequest API lets extensions do network interception without the need for a background page at all. 

Try it Out 

We plan to release event pages to Chrome’s beta and stable channels late this summer, but you can start experimenting with them on the developer channel today. Try converting your overweight extension to event pages, and let us know how it works.

As Chrome Web Store apps and extensions have become more popular, users have been generating a large amount of reviews and feedback for developers. Until now, there was no way to separate a user’s review of an app’s features and quality from developer-focused feedback, such as the reporting of bugs, feature requests, and general questions.

To improve the feedback loop between developers and users, we’ve added a new way to get feedback directly from your users:

This feature provides a clean separation between reporting bugs and compatibility issues to developers and the rating / comments users can leave in the store relating to the functionality and usefulness of a given app. The contents of the feedback forum are publicly visible to everyone, which helps to cut down on duplicate issue reporting.

Turning the Feedback Feature On

In order to enable this feature for your store items, go to your developer dashboard and click on the “Edit your User Feedback preferences” option (highlighted below):

Engaging With Your Users

You should encourage your app’s users to engage with you via the new feedback feature by placing links to your app’s feedback page directly on your site after you’ve activated it. To do so, use the url format “https://chrome.google.com/webstore/support/yourappid”. Doing so will increase the likelihood that users will discover the feature and reinforce the idea that you actively support it.

We hope that this new feature will give users a better experience in reporting issues, requesting new features, and asking questions. Similarly, developers will now have a much easier forum to use to have an ongoing social conversation about their products.

Cross-posted from the Google Developers Blog.

A year ago, we released a preview of the PageSpeed Insights Chrome Developer Tools extension, which analyzes the performance of web pages and provides suggestions to make them faster. Today, we’re releasing version 2.0 of the PageSpeed Insights extension, available in the Chrome Web Store.

PageSpeed Insights analyzes all aspects of a web page load and points out the specific things you can do to make your page faster. For instance, PageSpeed Insights can inform you about an expensive JavaScript call that blocks the renderer for too long, remind you about that new photo on the front page of your web site that you might have forgotten to resize or optimize, or recommend changing the way you load third-party content so it no longer blocks the page load.

PageSpeed Insights for Chrome is a Chrome Developer Tools extension that analyzes all aspects of the page load, including resources, network, DOM, and the timeline. If you're already familiar with Chrome Developer Tools, you'll find that PageSpeed Insights integrates with a toolset you're already using.

Using technologies like Native Client, PageSpeed Insights is able to run the open-source PageSpeed Insights SDK securely and with the performance of native code. Leveraging the Insights SDK enables the Chrome extension to automatically optimize the images, CSS, JavaScript and HTML resources on your web page and provide versions of those resources that you can easily deploy on your website.

We hope you’ll give PageSpeed Insights for Chrome a try and start optimizing your web pages today. We’d love to hear from you, as always. Please try PageSpeed Insights for Chrome, and give us feedback on our mailing list with questions, comments, and new features you’d like to see.

During these last few weeks, the Chrome Web Store team has been focused on launching the store in more countries and building some new features for developers that can help them reach and engage with more users.

New Countries 

We recently launched the Chrome Web Store in six additional countries: Turkey, Ukraine, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Morocco and the United Arab Emirates. This means that developers can now distribute and sell their apps to millions of additional potential users.

To be successful in these new markets, we highly recommend localizing your apps in as many languages as possible. This will make them more accessible to users around the world, and more likely to be promoted in the 42 countries the store is available in.

New Offline Apps Collection

To recognize developers who have made their apps work offline - and help users find them - we created a special collection just to highlight them in the store.

If you are a developer, getting your app listed in this collection is as simple as adding the offline_enabled flag to your app’s manifest file (note: to avoid negative user feedback, please ensure that your app does indeed work well offline before you do this).

Better Information in the Developer Dashboard 

One of the common requests we’ve received from developers, is that they’d like better insight into how well their apps are doing in the store. Many of you would especially like to know how many times your apps and extensions are being viewed vs. how many installations are occurring.

To help you with your data needs, we’ve created a new graph view to help you understand the performance of your apps. To make this data more accessible, you can easily download it as a CSV file. Currently, we provide 90 days of history information.

In the near future, we plan to further refine this feature - for example, we may increase the historical period for which data is available and add other features to help you understand how your apps are being adopted.

Over the past several months, the number of daily app and extensions downloads from the Chrome Web Store has more than doubled. We are now seeing millions of downloads per day. Some apps and extensions have grown even faster thanks to inline installation, a feature we launched a few months ago.

With inline installation, you can allow Chrome users who visit your web site to install your apps and extensions directly without requiring them to visit the Chrome Web Store. This creates a smoother experience for your users as it eliminates an extra step where potential users could drop off.

Here are a few examples of the impact of inline installation:

• Chrome extensions Evernote Clearly and Evernote Web Clipper derive 15% and 25% of their Chrome installations (respectively) from their inline installation implementation 
• Rovio implemented inline installation for their Angry Birds Chrome game and saw their install rate jump by almost 10%) 
• Equire, a CRM extension that integrates with Gmail, saw a 66% increase in Chrome user retention after they implemented inline installation. 

Example: Installing Evernote Web Clipper from Evernote’s Site

Implementing inline installation is very easy:

Last week, the Chrome team participated in the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We all enjoyed talking to attendees about how game developers can benefit from the latest browser technologies such as Native Client and HTML5.

For those of you who were not able to attend, we recorded videos of our talks. Check them out and let us know what you think.

During GDC, several developers presented some new and upcoming games for the Chrome Web Store. From AirMech to the highly anticipated From Dust, these games provided a sneak peek to the future of browser-based games.

Besides being able to use the latest technology the web has to offer, creating a game for Chrome means you can distribute and monetize your game successfully. This is evidenced by our 4 brand new case studies with Kabam, Hlafbrick, Game Salad, and Limex Games.

To learn how you too can develop games for Chrome, start by visiting our game developer site.

When we launched the Chrome Web Store a year ago, our app taxonomy system reflected the apps that were available in the store at the time. However, since then, the store’s app inventory has grown and changed in composition. So, yesterday we made important changes in the Chrome Web Store’s app category system to allow more great apps of all kinds to stand out.

Until now, you could list your app into two categories. With the new category structure, we will show your app only in the primary category that you select for your app in the developer dashboard. We've found that secondary app categories contributed to a confusing experience for Chrome users and developers so from now on, we're going to start ignoring the secondary category.

We also updated the list of top level app categories and created multiple sub categories in each of them.

More specifically, given the growing use of Chrome and Chromebooks in large and small businesses, we created a new category called “Business Tools” that can help enterprise focused developers target these users. Also, “Shopping” has been reclassified as a subcategory, within the “Lifestyle” category.

The new structure of the store will improve discoverability for apps. For example, users searching for a photo album app can now easily drill down to the “Photos” subcategory level and track down the app they are looking for. At the same time, apps assigned to a subcategory show up in the category page as well giving them wider exposure; an app in "Photos" will appear on both the "Photos" page and the "Entertainment" page.

The categories will continue to evolve over time. To that effect, in the Developer Dashboard you will see a few more subcategory options than the ones that are live in the Chrome Web Store today. We plan to expose these subcategories to users once we confirm we have enough interesting apps in each one of them. In the meantime, items assigned to these subcategories will show up at a related subcategory. For example all items on “Online Documents & File Storage” will show up for now in “Office Tools”.

This transition required our team to take a stab at automatically assigning all apps to one of our new categories / subcategories. Please take a look at the developer dashboard and make sure the placement of your app accurately reflects your business goals and the experience you offer.

Tabbed browsing has definitely changed the way we access webpages in browsers. However, I have faced a few problems with multiple tabs, one of them being  a scenario where I have 20 tabs open in Google Chrome and one of them suddenly starts playing loud video or music.

Finding the offending tab is often like finding a needle in a haystack and the best recourse is to just mute your system music. But what if you are playing music on another app? You would mute that too right. Another solution would be to just close all the tabs at once and get rid of the annoyance. Neither of these solutions are really graceful.

There have been several forum threads about this issue, but Google engineers have stated that it is hard for them to isolate a tab which is playing music or video and allow users to mute them, thanks to limitations in the operating system.

However, there is an option in the form of a Google Chrome Extension which will allow you to mute music or video sounds in all the tabs at once, using a toolbar option or a keyboard shortcut (Alt + W).

The extension in question is the Chrome Toolbox Options, which also provides with several other interesting features to enhance your Google Chrome experience including preventing Google Chrome from closing down when you close the last tab and more.

The "Mute all tabs" is definitely a great feature, but what if you want to now find and close the tab which is playing the loud music or video? Are you going to go through each individual tab and find the culprit? Well, that would take a long time. Well, another extension to the rescue for that.

Mute Tab is an extension  which will allow you to find out which tabs are playing videos, music or flash and then allow you to mute them. This is definitely handy if you want to find a culprit tab and shut it down rather than having to browse through individual tabs.

That’s it, using these two extensions will save you a lot of trouble and probably embarrassment when you are using Google Chrome. Do feel free to post your own suggestions If you use different methods to get rid of this annoyance.

Interested in making your Chrome Extension (or packaged app) talk using synthesized speech? Chrome now includes a Text-to-Speech (TTS) API that’s simple to use, powerful, and flexible for users.

Let’s start with the "simple to use" part. A few clever apps and extensions figured out how to talk before this API was available – typically by sending text to a remote server that returns an MP3 file that can be played using HTML5 audio. With the new API, you just need to add "tts" to your permissions and then write:

chrome.tts.speak('Hello, world!');

It’s also very easy to change the rate, pitch, and volume. Here’s an example that speaks more slowly:

chrome.tts.speak('Can you understand me now?', {rate: 0.6});

How about powerful? To get even fancier and synchronize speech with your application, you can register to receive callbacks when the speech starts and finishes. When a TTS engine supports it, you can get callbacks for individual words too. You can also get a list of possible voices and ask for a particular voice – more on this below. All the details can be found in the TTS API docs, and we provide complete example code on the samples page.

In fact, the API is powerful enough that ChromeVox, the Chrome OS screen reader for visually impaired users, is built using this API.

Here are three examples you can try now:

    TTS Demo (app)
    Talking Alarm Clock (extension)
    SpeakIt (extension)

Finally, let's talk about flexibility for users. One of the most important things we wanted to do with this API was to make sure that users have a great selection of voices to choose from. So we've opened that up to developers, too.

The TTS Engine API enables you to implement a speech engine as an extension for Chrome. Essentially, you provide some information about your voice in the extension manifest and then register a JavaScript function that gets called when the client calls chrome.tts.speak. Your extension then takes care of synthesizing and outputting the speech – using any web technology you like, including HTML5 Audio, the new Web Audio API, or Native Client.

Here are two voices implemented using the TTS Engine API that you can install now:

    Lois TTS - US English
    Flite SLT Female TTS - US English

These voices both use Native Client to synthesize speech. The experience is very easy for end users: just click and install one of those voices, and immediately any talking app or extension has the ability to speak using that voice.

If a user doesn't have any voices installed, Chrome automatically speaks using the native speech capabilities of your Windows or Mac operating system, if possible. Chrome OS comes with a built-in speech engine, too. For now, there's unfortunately no default voice support on Linux – but TTS is fully supported once users first install a voice from the Chrome Web Store.

Now it's your turn: add speech capability to your app or extension today! We can't wait to hear what you come up with, and if you talk about it, please add the hashtag #chrometts so we can join the conversation. If you have any feedback, direct it to the Chromium-extensions group.

We recently expanded the reach of the Chrome Web Store from the U.S. to 24 more countries. Developers from around the world have already launched successful apps in the Chrome Web Store to US users. Now all developers can reach a global user base.

What makes this global reach even more interesting is the global payments infrastructure that goes along with it. The store allows developers from 20 countries to sell apps in the store, and users to buy apps in their local currency. We also recently launched the In-App Payments API, which allows developers (U.S.-only for now; international soon) to sell virtual goods in their apps. Integration is easy and transaction fees are only 5%. Graphicly, an early user of in-app payments, saw its net revenues double after starting to use the API and experienced an even bigger rise in profit margins due to increased conversions and lower transaction fees.

In keeping with our international theme, we’d like to highlight a few developers from different parts of the world who have utilized Chrome’s global reach to find success in the store:

• Audiotool is an online music production app that was built by a team of German developers. They saw the Chrome Web Store as a way to present their app to an international audience. Audiotool’s traffic increased by 20% after launching in the store, and this motivated the team to release another app in the store.

• Psykopaint is the brainchild of French developer Mathieu Gosselin. The Chrome Web Store provided Mathieu an opportunity to get his photo painting app noticed outside of France. Traffic to Psykopaint has jumped by 700% since it launched in the store and Mathieu has found that Chrome Web Store users tend to be more engaged than other users.

• Finally, Nulab, a Japanese company, launched its online diagramming app, Cacoo, in the store to expand its user base outside Japan. In just a few months after Cacoo was released in multiple languages in the Chrome Web Store, the app already accounts for 20% of Cacoo’s user base.