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.

Cross posted at the Google Code blog

This year at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) Online we have organized a Developer Day on Oct. 10th full of Google information for game developers. It will feature hardcore technical information on Google products and platforms delivered by Google engineers and developer advocates. We’ll discuss the latest projects we’re working on and how our online technologies can help you better create, distribute, and monetize games that reach a larger audience than ever before. We’ll present everything from how developers can build hardware accelerated 3D games for the browser with WebGL to the game framework used to bring Angry Birds to the Web.

In addition to the Developer Day, we will also have a booth on the Expo floor on Oct. 11th-12th where we’ll have representatives from the Chrome Web Store, Native Client, WebGL, App Engine, Google+, In-App Payments, Google TV, and AdSense/AdMob demoing technologies and platforms for game developers. Come by booth 503 to try out Google products and ask questions, or hang out in our Google TV lounge.

For more information on our presence at GDC Online, including session and speaker details, please visit http://www.google.com/events/gdc/2011. Hope to see you in Austin!

Not able to attend GDC? Check out Google Game Developer Central to get an overview of Google products and services that are particularly relevant to game developers.

Yesterday we made a small change in Chrome Web Store’s app upload flow: when you upload new apps and extensions to the Chrome Web Store, or edit one of your existing items, you'll be prompted to provide us with new promotional image assets. We are asking you for these assets so that we can highlight your apps and extensions in a brand new store layout that our team is working on.

What's new:

• (Required) You’ll need to provide us with a large rectangular image to identify your app, in addition to assets you already provide - your app icon and at least one screenshot.
• (Optional) You can provide us with an even larger rectangular image format as well.

What's different

• The screenshot dimensions have grown larger with a wider aspect ratio.
• The (optional) marquee image dimensions have also grown larger.

What's the same

• The specification and dimensions for the icon file

To make things easier, we only require screenshots in the new dimensions going forward -- we'll automatically scale them as needed to make them visible in the current store layout. You can read the details about the new requirements on our image guidelines page. If you have any questions on these changes, feel free to reach us at our discussion group.

When we talk Chromebooks with our developer friends, a common reaction we get is “I can see why my [insert-relative-here] would use it, but I need my PC for coding”. Over the last few years, browser-based coding has grown from a research topic to a viable practice. You can already find many development apps on the Chrome Web Store today. Some are conventional code editors and IDEs, built right into the browser. Others are oriented more around prototyping and design. There are also many tools for project management.

First up, IDEs. You can now code, debug, and deploy real programs from the browser. A popular example at Google IO was Cloud9, an IDE for JavaScript, Python, PHP, and Ruby. Cloud9 uses the HTML5 FileSystem capability and AppCache to sync files, so you can even code offline. There are many other IDEs in the web store too, such as Kodingen, Codey, Akshell, eXo Cloud IDE, and PHPAnywhere.

It’s not all about coding though. There are also apps focusing on web design, for people who want to make a web page without coding or perhaps experiment with a few concepts early on. Being able to edit and design web pages inside the tool that will display them is a very powerful concept. BuildorLite and BuildorPro let you construct a web page via a graphical user interface, and publish it straight on their servers. Handcraft and Mockingbird are two apps aimed at design and prototyping. And if you want a scratchpad to try a few coding experiments, check out JSFiddle.

Launching software isn’t just about designing and coding your apps; it’s also about managing the entire workflow, from planning release schedules to triaging bug reports. One example is GitHub Issues, providing a quick, app-like, way to track project issues. Another is Launchlist Pro, a checklist you can use to launch your website.

Chrome aims to bring simplicity, speed, and security to all users, and that includes developers. Being cloud-based means these tools are always up to date, and running inside the browser’s sandbox minimises the security risk to your machine. There’s no complicated install process and the only dependency is Chrome itself, which is automatically kept up to date. Just install the app and get coding.

We’re especially excited about what this means for new developers, as programming tools have never been more accessible to everyone. So whether you’re a seasoned veteran or just looking to get started, visit the Chrome Web Store today and build something awesome in your browser!

Advertisements are important to finance the free distribution of high-quality content on the internet. However, some websites are loaded with annoying banners and intrusive popups, so surfing the internet has become quite annoying on these sites. Adblocking extensions for Google Chrome therefore are becoming increasingly popular.

Which is the best adblocker?

The two most popular extensions in the Chrome Webstore currently are “AdBlock” and “Adblock Plus”. Both extensions promise to do the same thing: Block all ads on every website. But what is the difference between the two, and which one is the better adblocker?

AdBlock was originally created for Google Chrome. It is the older one of the two and still has more users. Adblock Plus was only recently ported to Google Chrome, but the numbers of users are growing quickly. In no time, it has become the second most popular of all Chrome extensions. It is the equivalent to Adblock Plus for Firefox, with more than 120 million downloads, and is the most popular browser addon in the world. Chrome Adblock Plus is based on the same code as the Firefox version which has been developed for years as an open-source project by an international community of voluntary helpers.

When comparing the two extensions, it is noticeable that Adblock Plus has a much more sophisticated code base. While both adblockers have the same effectiveness in blocking ads, Adblock Plus is more stable and doesn’t cause the browser to slow down. Also, on video websites such as youtube.com, the normal blocking mechanism doesn’t work for ads embedded in the video. Adblock Plus has implemented a workaround so that blocking those ads becomes possible. So while both extensions do a great job, Adblock Plus works a bit faster and more reliably.

Setting up Adblock Plus

You can download Adblock Plus from the Chrome Webstore or the official Chrome Adblock Plus website. Setup takes only a few seconds, once installed, all ads are gone automatically. During setup you will receive a warning that extensions can access private data, such as your browsing history – this is a standard warning in Chrome for all extensions that modify webpages. Adblock Plus does not actually infringe on the user’s privacy.

After the installation, Adblock Plus does its job quietly in the background and no actions from the user are required. However, if you want to support a website such as techie-buzz.com you can easily disable Adblock Plus from blocking ads on this particular domain. Just click on the ABP logo in the right corner of the address bar and uncheck the “Enabled for this site” tickbox. This way, creators of great content don’t miss out on advertising revenues, while all ads on other websites are still blocked.

Add additional filter lists

Adblock Plus itself doesn’t block anything – the elements that are blocked are determined by filter rules. Advanced users can add filters themselves. Users without the time or knowledge to create filter rules can subscribe to one or more of many free filter lists. In the default setting, the “EasyList” is enabled, which blocks all ads on websites. If a user wants to block additional elements, such as malware domains, advertiser tracking or social bookmark buttons, the respective filter list needs to be added manually. Many free filter subscriptions can be found here.

To add a filter lists, it’s URL needs to be inserted into the Adblock Plus interface using copy & paste. After having copied a filter list’s URL, the user needs to right-click on the ABP icon and choose “Options” and the “Filter lists” tab. There you will find a field to add the filter list’s URL. By pasting the URL and clicking the “Add URL” button, the user has subscribed to the filter list.

For example, if you want to get rid of all Facebook like-buttons, you just need to add the Antisocial list by adding the following URL to your filter lists:

The next time you visit a website such as techie-buzz.com, all social bookmarking buttons will be gone. This is especially useful for users who never bookmark anything or are concerned about their privacy, because Facebook is well known to track and store user data from visits to websites which have the like-button implemented.

Chrome: If you wake in the morning and tune in the news as you start the day, the BBC News Alarm web app for Chrome lets you wake up and listen to the headlines from the BBC World Service, downloaded while you sleep. More »

Since we launched the Chrome Web Store, we’ve been working on several new improvements. Today, we’re happy to share our progress towards making the Chrome Web Store available to all Chrome users worldwide and the availability of Google In-App Payments for web app developers.

First, as we announced at Google I/O, the In-App Payments API is now available for app developers. We demo-ed the way Graphicly uses this API and Angry Birds announced that they will use it to offer users the Mighty Eagle for in-app purchase on the web. Integrating the API into your app is as simple as adding a single line of code and provides a frictionless user experience for making purchases within the app. We hope to gather feedback on the API before making it fully available this summer.

Second, the Chrome Web Store is now available in 41 languages. This is our second step towards launching Chrome Web Store in 15 additional countries. Developers interested in targeting international users can now go to the Chrome Web Store and publish free apps in these countries in preparation for launch. We will also support publishing paid apps in selected countries later this year.

Localizing your apps will expose them to many more users and allow them to be featured in the local Chrome Web Store homepages. We hope this expanded functionality will allow you to create brand new international apps or to localize your existing apps.

They are coming. They are angry. Protect your pigs.

Angry Birds, the most popular game for mobile devices, has arrived in the Chrome Web Store. Built using the latest technologies, Angry Birds is as much fun on the web as on your phone. In addition, you can try beating the new web-only, Chrome-inspired levels.

While firing up that slingshot, you may also want to try out some of the other apps that were recently added to the store. To keep up with the world of finance, you can install the Reuters and Fortune 500 apps. ESPN Cricinfo brings the latest cricket news straight to your new tab page. For the photo enthusiasts among you, LiveShare helps aggregate your friends’ photos from events you attended together.

In addition to the new apps added today, popular apps such as Springpad and Graphicly have been updated to work offline. This makes them even more useful, especially to those of you who snap up one of our new Chromebooks.

Finally, for those of you who prefer to surf the web in a different language, we’ve made the Chrome Web Store available in 41 languages. This is just a first step towards launching the store in 15 more countries with locally relevant applications. Some, like SKY for the UK and EXAME for Brazil, have already appeared in the store.

To play with all of these goodies and the more than 19,000 other items in the Chrome Web Store, you can start by downloading Google Chrome at google.com/chrome.

Many users rely on apps to provide timely notifications for things like calendar events and incoming chat messages, but find it cumbersome to always keep a Chrome window open. Extensions and packaged apps can already display notifications and maintain state without any visible windows, using background pages. This functionality is now available to hosted apps - the most common form of apps in the Chrome Web Store - via a new background window mechanism.

Apps and extensions that use the new “background” feature can continue to run in the background—even if the user closes down all of Chrome’s windows. “Background apps” will continue to run until Chrome exits. The next time Chrome starts up, any background windows that were previously running will also be re-launched. These windows are not going to be visible but they will be able to perform tasks like checking for server-side changes and pre-emptively loading content into local storage.

One way you can use background windows is to preload content and data so that they are immediately available when the user opens your app. You could also issue HTML5 notifications to alert the user when important events occur—for example, a friend wants to initiate a chat session. There are plenty of possibilities here, and we look forward to seeing what you’ll do.

To protect our users’ privacy, we’ve made this functionality available only to apps and extensions; regular websites will not be able to open background windows. Developers will also need to declare the “background” capability on their apps.

Users can easily see which background apps (and extensions) are running in their system through the “Background Apps” menu of the Chrome icon in the system tray (Windows/Linux) or dock (Mac). Chrome will automatically load background components when the user logs in, and the Chrome icon will remain in the system tray or dock as long as background apps are running- even if all Chrome windows are closed. To close all background components, a user just needs to exit Chrome.

The feature is already available in Chrome’s Dev channel. For details on the API, check out our developer’s guide, which also includes sample apps to try out.

After months of anticipation, Google finally unveiled the Chrome Web Store this past December. But a lot of users were disappointed with the launch for one very big reason: it was U.S.-only. Starting today, Google is finally taking the initial steps to change that, as they’ve opened a developer preview of the Web Store for 15 more countries.

Note that this doesn’t mean the store is ready quite yet for international users. Google says that a full launch will happen “later this year”. “We are releasing this developer preview ahead of the consumer release so you have enough time to prepare your apps for international users,” Google notes. This is the same thing Google did for U.S. developers back in August of last year. If that timetable holds, international users should get access in about four months.

So which countries are getting access to this developer preview? Argentina, Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

And, significantly, there will be localized payment options in place for each of those countries. Notes Google:

If you are using Chrome Web Store Payments to charge for your app, you will also be able to set the app price for each country although if you’re not based in the United States you will not be able to complete your merchant account sign up just yet (this will be enabled soon).

The early talk about the store has been that web apps weren’t selling too well. But others have said their apps are doing fine. Regardless, opening up beyond the U.S. can only help.