Dreams in 3D: a WebGL experience for the modern browser

By Ricardo Cabello (aka Mr.doob), Google Data Arts Team



Last August, we released “The Wilderness Downtown”, a music experience that brought together HTML5 and JavaScript, as well as the Google Maps and Street View APIs. Today, we’re excited to introduce our newest project, “3 Dreams of Black”, made with WebGL, HTML5 and JavaScript, and designed for modern browsers like Google Chrome. We previewed this music experience yesterday with web developers at Day 2 of the Google I/O keynote.

“3 Dreams of Black” takes you on a journey through three dream worlds constructed through a combination of rich 2D drawings and animations interwoven with interactive 3D sequences. Throughout various points in these dream worlds, you can grab your mouse and guide the protagonist’s point of view through the experience. This music experience also includes a 3D model creator that allows you to create your own relics and contribute to the shared collective dream. “3 Dreams of Black” is written and directed by Chris Milk, and developed with a few folks here at Google.



In creating “3 Dreams of Black”, we’ve had the opportunity to build many tools, libraries, and models. We’ve fully opened up the source code and made it available for web developers to tinker with us at www.ro.me/tech. In addition to the code, a few other highlights include eight WebGL demos, a fun model viewer for interacting with some of the animals from the web experience, and the Three.js 3D library used for building the experience. In addition, a big part of the project was to define a good pipeline for getting all the animals and environment models right in WebGL -- for this, we extended Blender with custom plugins so we could manipulate and export the data with ease.







“3 Dreams of Black” is set to the song “Black” off the album ROME, presented by Danger Mouse & Daniele Luppi, featuring Jack White and Norah Jones on vocals, to be released soon on the record label EMI. Because it’s built in WebGL, it requires a WebGL-supported browser like Chrome, and Windows Vista / Mac OS X 10.6 and above to help ensure that your computer has the necessary and up-to-date graphics drivers. We hope you’ll take a moment to dive into the experience and the developer resources at www.ro.me

Ricardo Cabello is a designer/developer in the Google Data Arts Team. He is the creator of several popular Chrome Experiments, including Google Gravity, Ball Pool, and Harmony.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

A new kind of computer: Chromebook

Sundar

Linus

By Linus Upson, Vice President of Engineering, and Sundar Pichai, Senior Vice President, Chrome

Cross-posted from the Official Google Blog

Update 5/11 3:00 PM: Added video of keynote

A little less than two years ago we set out to make computers much better. Today, we’re announcing the first Chromebooks from our partners, Samsung and Acer. These are not typical notebooks. With a Chromebook you won’t wait minutes for your computer to boot and browser to start. You’ll be reading your email in seconds. Thanks to automatic updates the software on your Chromebook will get faster over time. Your apps, games, photos, music, movies and documents will be accessible wherever you are and you won't need to worry about losing your computer or forgetting to back up files. Chromebooks will last a day of use on a single charge, so you don’t need to carry a power cord everywhere. And with optional 3G, just like your phone, you’ll have the web when you need it. Chromebooks have many layers of security built in so there is no anti-virus software to buy and maintain. Even more importantly, you won't spend hours fighting your computer to set it up and keep it up to date.

At the core of each Chromebook is the Chrome web browser. The web has millions of applications and billions of users. Trying a new application or sharing it with friends is as easy as clicking a link. A world of information can be searched instantly and developers can embed and mash-up applications to create new products and services. The web is on just about every computing device made, from phones to TVs, and has the broadest reach of any platform. With HTML5 and other open standards, web applications will soon be able to do anything traditional applications can do, and more.

Chromebooks will be available online June 15 in the U.S., U.K., France, Germany, Netherlands, Italy and Spain. More countries will follow in the coming months. In the U.S., Chromebooks will be available from Amazon and Best Buy and internationally from leading retailers.

Even with dedicated IT departments, businesses and schools struggle with the same complex, costly and insecure computers as the rest of us. To address this, we’re also announcing Chromebooks for Business and Education. This service from Google includes Chromebooks and a cloud management console to remotely administer and manage users, devices, applications and policies. Also included is enterprise-level support, device warranties and replacements as well as regular hardware refreshes. Monthly subscriptions will start at $28/user for businesses and $20/user for schools.

There are over 160 million active users of Chrome today. Chromebooks bring you all of Chrome's speed, simplicity and security without the headaches of operating systems designed 20 to 30 years ago. We're very proud of what the Chrome team along with our partners have built, and with seamless updates, it will just keep getting better.

For more details please visit www.google.com/chromebook.



Watch the keynote here:




Linus Upson is Vice President of Engineering and Sundar Pichai is Senior Vice President, Chrome

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Cooliris builds visual search for Chrome with next-generation web APIs

By Austin Shoemaker, CTO, Cooliris

This post is part of Who's at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O.

At Cooliris, we develop media applications targeting two broad categories – web applications that run in any standards-compliant web browser, and native applications that target specific platforms with tailored user experiences (e.g. iOS, Android, Windows, Mac OS X).

When we developed the Cooliris Extension for Google Chrome, we set out to create an efficient and visually stunning media browsing experience for the web. To deliver on this promise, we developed a native runtime specialized for multiple operating systems and browsers. While we were delighted with the result, the cost of developing native code for multiple platforms was significant. Ideally we could target a single cross-platform API that provided the performance, flexibility, and native feel of platform-specific code.

The new generation of high-performance graphics APIs supported by Google Chrome enables developers to create cross-platform web applications with a presentation layer that looks and feels more like a native application. Our latest Chrome extension, Image Search by Cooliris, leverages these APIs to provide an immersive visual search experience. The following technologies were key to making this product possible:

1. WebGL: The ability to render our user interface with OpenGL ES enabled us to recreate our original 3D Wall experience without the use of plug-ins. Because it is a web standard, our extension is already available on both Windows and Mac versions of Google Chrome with no additional effort on our part. The new requestAnimationFrame API enables the app to render frames only when the display refreshes, significantly improving performance and power usage.
   
2. Google Image Search API: The AJAX search API brings a rich source of relevant content into the wall. Users begin typing in the search box and instantly see results appear on the wall, allowing for effortless discovery and navigation.

Now that we have built the Image Search by Cooliris extension, we are using next-generation web APIs to push the envelope even further. LiveShare, our next-generation communication platform, is built to take advantage of these capabilities from the beginning – for example, the demo of our upcoming product built on WebGL already uses Chrome's file drag-and-drop API to optimize upload performance.

We have never been more excited about the potential of the web platform to deliver great applications – with HTML5, WebGL, and other emerging standards, it has become possible to create products that rival the performance and user experience of native software.


Come see Cooliris in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O on May 10-11.

Austin Shoemaker is CTO and co-founder of Cooliris. Austin studied Computer Science at Stanford and leads product development for the Cooliris platform. Previously, Austin worked at Apple developing consumer applications.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Working offline with Cloud9 on Google Chrome

By Rik Arends, CTO of Ajax.org / Cloud9 IDE

This post is part of Who's at Google I/O, a series of guest blog posts written by developers who are appearing in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O.


Cloud9 is an online IDE for JS, Python, PHP and Ruby development. By placing all your code in the cloud, you can access your code anywhere, anytime and on any device. But what if you’re not online?

Working with web applications offline has been a difficult problem to solve. Traditional web applications required all the logic for HTML generation and user interaction to be located on a remote server. The "go offline" feature in some of the earliest browsers was hardly more than caching static content and could not deal with much interactivity.

Since the advent of AJAX, many websites and apps have moved to using JavaScript heavily on the client side, providing a much richer and smoother user experience. Now the ability to run a web application in full offline mode is within reach.

Cloud9 IDE is one such application. Built from the ground up to have the user interface running in the browser, the server application provides Cloud9 with WebDAV for file I/O, and APIs for project provisioning and authentication. For a rich offline experience, we would need to make the WebDAV API somehow available offline.

The first step in Cloud9’s offline experience has been to implement the HTML5 offline manifest, also known as Application Cache, to make sure the application loads smoothly while offline. The next step is to provide offline workspace synchronization using the new API provided in Google Chrome for local file system I/O. The Chrome file system implementation, based on the current W3C working draft, allows web applications to have access to the device (through a sandboxed file system). So even if you are marooned on a distant planet and disconnected from the collective, you can still work on your code.

Getting access to the local file system is very easy. The API method to call is the obviously named webkitRequestFileSystem, which takes options to create either a temporary or permanent file system, and to define the size of the sandbox location. The difference between temporary and permanent is quite clear, with temporary acting only as a cache: the files may disappear when the browser needs to free up disk space. Once the file system has been successfully created, you can do all the operations you expect, such as creating, deleting, copying, and moving files and directories.

More information on the full HTML file system API can be found at HTML5Rocks, which includes a detailed entry on what types of file system operations you can achieve with the API.

We are showcasing this feature at Google I/O, and will release this feature later this month on http://c9.io. We are working on creating a nice integration with Google App Engine too, so you can develop and deploy entirely online.

Update 5/11: Corrected information about temporary files; removed paragraph about having to start the browser with a special flag.

Come see Cloud9 in the Developer Sandbox at Google I/O on May 10-11.

Rik Arends has been a developer for 15 years and now manages the development team behind Cloud9 IDE.

Posted by Scott Knaster, Editor

Finding success in the Chrome Web Store

Even though the Chrome Web Store launched in the US just a few months ago, some developers are already seeing great results. From games to productivity apps, the store has helped all kinds of web applications grow.

Our friends from World Golf Tour, Sliderocket, Wikinvest, Todo.ly and Springpad share their experiences with the Chrome Web Store through five brand new case studies. While each of these developers has a unique view point, some common themes have surfaced:

1. The Chrome Web Store can help you acquire more users really fast: For example for Todo.ly, users of the Chrome Web Store app account for more than 50% of the web site’s traffic.
   
2. Chrome Web Store users are very engaged with apps: Springpad and Wikinvest report that Chrome app users spend up to 100% more time interacting with the app, than a typical visitor spends on their regular website.
   
3. You can improve the monetization of your app through the Chrome Web Store: Premium apps like the World Golf Tour and Sliderocket report significantly higher conversion rates for Chrome app users than the rest of the user base and a growing percentage of business leads originating from the store respectively.
   
4. Posting your app in the store requires relatively little effort: The app publishing process in the store is smooth and required little to no custom work for all the developers, profiled in the case studies.
   

If you are interested in publishing your app in the Chrome Web Store or learning more about how the Chrome Web Store can help your business, explore our developer documentation and join us in our developer forum.

By Christos Apartoglou, Product Marketing

WebGL now in Beta: here comes the 3D web!

(Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog)

We’re happy to announce that WebGL is now on by default in Google Chrome’s beta channel, with some shiny new demos to show off what the technology can do.

WebGL is a 3D graphics API for JavaScript that developers can use to create fully 3D web apps. It is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which should be familiar to many 3D graphics developers. Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and graphics hardware vendors have been working together to standardize WebGL for over a year now, and since the spec is just about final at this point, we wanted to get our implementation out there for feedback.

While you may not find much WebGL content on the web, we expect developers to quickly create a lot of content given the power and familiarity of the API. To inspire developers and give users a taste of the kind of apps they can expect in the near future, we’ve worked with a few talented teams to build a few more 3D web apps:

Body Browser, a human anatomy explorer built by a team at Google as a 20% project

Nine Point Five, a 3D earthquake map by Dean McNamee

Music Visualizer, a jukebox that synchronizes 3D graphics to the beat of the music by Jacob Seidelin

You can find these and other demos in the new Chrome Experiments Gallery for WebGL demos. Now that WebGL is enabled in the beta channel, the Chrome Experiments team is looking for your cool WebGL app submissions to show off this slick technology, so don’t forget to submit your cool 3D apps!

By Kenneth Russell, Chromium Team

HTML5, browsers, and books, twenty years later

Update: Thanks for all the interest and feedback on 20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web! We hope to open-source the code in the coming months and will post an update when we do. Stay tuned.

Twenty years ago this month, Tim Berners-Lee published his proposal for the World Wide Web. Since then, web browsers and web programming languages have come a long way. A few of us on the Chrome team decided to write an online guide for everyday users who are curious about the basics of how browsers and the web work, and how their evolution has changed the way we work and play online. Called "20 Things I Learned about Browsers and the Web," this online guidebook is illustrated by Christoph Niemann, and built in HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3, with our friends at Fi.

In building an online book app, HTML5, JavaScript and CSS3 gave us the ability to bring to life features that hearken back to what we love about books with the best aspects of the open web: the app works everywhere, and on any device with a modern browser. Here are a few features of the book experience that we’re particularly excited about:

• After the app has been visited once, you can also take the experience with you offline, thanks to the Application Cache API.
• You can resume reading where you had left off as the book remembers your progress using the Local Storage API. We also mark the chapters that have previously been read by folding the top right corner of the page in the navigation.
• The app utilizes the History API to provide a clutter-free URL structure that can be indexed by search engines.
• The HTML5 canvas element is used to enhance the experience with transitions between the hard cover and soft pages of the book. The page flips, including all shadows and highlights, are generated procedurally through JavaScript and drawn on canvas.
• The canvas element is also used to animate some of the illustrations in the book.
• CSS3 features such as web fonts, animations, gradients and shadows are used to enhance the visual appeal of the app.

This illustrated guidebook is best experienced in Chrome or any up-to-date, HTML5-compliant modern browser. We hope you enjoy the read as much as we did creating it, at www.20thingsilearned.com or goo.gl/20things.

By Min Li Chan, Google Chrome Team

WebP, a new image format for the Web

Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog

As part of Google’s initiative to make the web faster, over the past few months we have released a number of tools to help site owners speed up their websites. We launched the Page Speed Firefox extension to evaluate the performance of web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them, we introduced the Speed Tracer Chrome extension to help identify and fix performance problems in web applications, and we released a set of closure tools to help build rich web applications with fully optimized JavaScript code. While these tools have been incredibly successful in helping developers optimize their sites, as we’ve evaluated our progress, we continue to notice a single component of web pages is consistently responsible for the majority of the latency on pages across the web: images.

Most of the common image formats on the web today were established over a decade ago and are based on technology from around that time. Some engineers at Google decided to figure out if there was a way to further compress lossy images like JPEG to make them load faster, while still preserving quality and resolution. As part of this effort, we are releasing a developer preview of a new image format, WebP, that promises to significantly reduce the byte size of photos on the web, allowing web sites to load faster than before.

Images and photos make up about 65% of the bytes transmitted per web page today. They can significantly slow down a user’s web experience, especially on bandwidth-constrained networks such as a mobile network. Images on the web consist primarily of lossy formats such as JPEG, and to a lesser extent lossless formats such as PNG and GIF. Our team focused on improving compression of the lossy images, which constitute the larger percentage of images on the web today.

To improve on the compression that JPEG provides, we used an image compressor based on the VP8 codec that Google open-sourced in May 2010. We applied the techniques from VP8 video intra frame coding to push the envelope in still image coding. We also adapted a very lightweight container based on RIFF. While this container format contributes a minimal overhead of only 20 bytes per image, it is extensible to allow authors to save meta-data they would like to store.

While the benefits of a VP8 based image format were clear in theory, we needed to test them in the real world. In order to gauge the effectiveness of our efforts, we randomly picked about 1,000,000 images from the web (mostly JPEGs and some PNGs and GIFs) and re-encoded them to WebP without perceptibly compromising visual quality. This resulted in an average 39% reduction in file size. We expect that developers will achieve in practice even better file size reduction with WebP when starting from an uncompressed image.

To help you assess WebP’s performance with other formats, we have shared a selection of open-source and classic images along with file sizes so you can visually compare them on this site. We are also releasing a conversion tool that you can use to convert images to the WebP format. We’re looking forward to working with the browser and web developer community on the WebP spec and on adding native support for WebP. While WebP images can’t be viewed until browsers support the format, we are developing a patch for WebKit to provide native support for WebP in an upcoming release of Google Chrome. We plan to add support for a transparency layer, also known as alpha channel in a future update.

We’re excited to hear feedback from the developer community on our discussion group, so download the conversion tool, try it out on your favorite set of images, and let us know what you think.

By Richard Rabbat, WebP Team

What do Arcade Fire and HTML5 have in common?

This week, a lot.

Today we’re excited to announce the band Arcade Fire’s new project “The Wilderness Downtown,” an interactive HTML5 music experience that is being showcased on Google’s Chrome Experiments site. The project was created by writer/director Chris Milk with Arcade Fire and Google.

We put everything except the proverbial kitchen sink into this project: It features HTML5 audio, video, and canvas, animated windows with JavaScript controllers, mash-ups with Google Maps and Street View APIs, and an interactive drawing tool. You can take a look at how all this works by viewing the source code.

Check out the project or learn more about the techniques used to make it happen at www.chromeexperiments.com/arcadefire.

We hope you enjoy it.

By George Michael Brower, Google Creative Lab

HTML5 Rocks!

The term "HTML5" covers so many different topics that developers have a hard time getting up to speed on all of them. Some APIs and features are part of accepted standards, while some are still a work in progress. Additionally, there are a number of great resources out there, but most are still very hard to find. As announced on the chromium.org blog, Google is releasing a new developer resource dedicated to all that is HTML5, HTML5Rocks.com.

The site is broken up into four main sections:

Interactive Presentation
The presentation everyone is talking about! An interactive slide deck written entirely in HTML5 which demonstrates many of HTML5’s features. It even includes inline examples you can tinker with.

HTML5 Playground
The best way to learn this stuff is to try it out. The Playground is a sandbox area for editing and experimenting with live samples.

Tutorials
We're launching the site with an initial set of nine tutorials covering a bunch of different areas. We’ll continue to add more over time based on your input.

Resources
We've hand-picked some of our favorite tools, reference material, and sites; all generated by the online community. Do check them out. They’ll come in handy when developing your next web app.

We hope HTML5Rocks will help developers put HTML5 to use in the real world, today. We’d love to hear your thoughts on improving the site! Send us a tweet at @ChromiumDev or post to the Chromium HTML5 group with requests for content.

By Eric Bidelman, Google Chrome Developer Relations

Tech Talks and Fireside Chats at I/O 2010

Today we’re releasing videos from the Tech Talks and Fireside Chats at I/O 2010. A look back on each track:

Tech Talks:

From new programming languages to venture capital to 5-minute lightning talks, the Tech Talks track at I/O was a veritable potpourri of geeky goodness.

You can find videos and slides for the Tech Talks on the linked session titles below:

• Go programming - The Go programming language was released as an open source project in late 2009. Rob Pike and Russ Cox discussed how programming in Go differs from other languages.


• Opening up Closure Library - Closure Library is the open-source JavaScript library behind some of Google's big web apps like Gmail and Google Docs. Nathan Naze talked about the library, its design, and how to integrate it in with your setup.


• Optimize every bit of your site serving & web pages with Page Speed - Richard Rabbat and Bryan McQuade talked about Page Speed, an open-source Firefox/Firebug Add-on which allows web developers to evaluate and improve the performance of their web pages.


• SEO site advice from the experts - Matt Cutts, Greg Grothaus, Tiffany Lane, and Vanessa Fox offered SEO feedback on a number of actual websites submitted by the audience.


• Beyond design: Creating positive user experiences - John Zeratsky and Matt Shobe shared their tips on how to keep users coming back to your applications through a positive user experience.


• How to lose friends and alienate people: The joys of engineering leadership - Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman regaled the audience with tips on how to lead vs. manage.


• Ignite Google I/O - Brady Forrest and Ignite returned to I/O with an awesome line-up of speakers - Ben Huh, Matt Harding, Clay Johnson, Bradley Vickers, Aaron Koblin, Michael Van Riper, Anne Veling, and James Young.


• Technology, innovation, computer science, & more: A VC panel - This year was the first time that we had investors/VCs speaking at I/O. Albert Wenger, Chris Dixon, Dave McClure, Paul Graham, Brad Feld, and Dick Costolo (moderator) debated hot tech topics including betting on start-ups with non-technical founders and open vs closed platforms.
  

The Tech Talk videos are also available in this YouTube playlist.


Fireside Chats:

In the 9 fireside chats at I/O this year, Google teams were eager to talk about the latest ongoings with their respective product areas, as well as spend most of the time on audience Q&A.

This year, we decided to record fireside chats because we know how popular they are not just with I/O attendees, but everyone interested in hearing from the engineers behind our products. You can find videos for the fireside chats below:

• Android Team


• Android Handset Manufacturers


• App Engine Team


• Google Chrome Team


• Enterprise Team


• Geo Team


• GWT Team


• Social Web Team


• Google Wave Team

These videos can also be found in this Fireside Chats YouTube playlist or the YouTube playlist for each session track. (ex. the two Android Fireside Chats are also in the Android playlist)

On Monday, we’ll be posting the last batch of I/O videos from the Geo, Google APIs, and Google Wave tracks. Stay tuned!

Posted by Christine Tsai, Google I/O Team

Google Chrome at Google I/O 2010

We kicked off Day 1 of Google I/O this year by highlighting the progress of the web platform.

The Day 1 keynote included a number of exciting announcements and demos from the Chrome Team. To demonstrate the power of building with HTML5, Sundar Pichai invited on stage a number of Chrome partners, including Clicker who demonstrated the power of video and highlighted one of the big open questions for the web: the need for a freely available, high quality video codec for the tag. With the support of Mozilla, Opera, and Adobe, we announced the launch of the WebM Project, which makes a high quality video codec freely available to everyone.

We also announced the upcoming Chrome Web Store, which will launch later this year to help make great web applications more discoverable. We showed how rich web apps and content like Sports Illustrated will be discovered, launched, and even purchased from the Web Store when it launches later this year.

In addition to our keynote announcements, the Chrome Team also led a number of sessions throughout both days of the conference, focusing on Chrome, HTML5, and the web as a platform.

Here’s a recap of what was covered in our sessions:

• Beyond JavaScript: programming the web with native code - Although JavaScript performance is rapidly increasing, there are still applications for which native code is a better choice. Learn about Native Client and how you can use it to build rich applications with all of the advantages and power of the web.

• Chrome Extensions - how-to - Google Chrome shipped an extensions API in version 4.0. Since last year, new capabilites have been added to the extensions framework, and many people have already written powerful extensions with minimal effort. Find out how to write an extension, and what's coming next in Chrome Extensions.

• HTML5 status update - Where is HTML5 today? What new features are now broadly supported, what features are on the horizon, and what features are on the chopping block? How do we decide what to implement, what to propose, and what to drop? Find out.

• Developing web apps for the Chrome Web Store - Google Chrome is a powerful platform for developing web apps. With Chrome web apps, we're making it easier for users to discover and use these apps. Learn how to build and sell apps for the Chrome Web Store.

• WebM Open Video Playback in HTML5 - The new open VP8 codec and WebM file format present exciting opportunities for innovation in HTML5 . In this session, you'll see WebM playback in action while YouTube and Brightcove engineers show you how to support the format in your own HTML5 site.

• Google Chrome's Developer Tools - In this session we'll give an overview of Developer Tools for Google Chrome that is a part of the standard Chrome distribution. Chrome Developer Tools allow inspecting, debugging and tuning the web applications and many more. In addition to this overview we would like to share some implementation details of the Developer Tools features and call for your contribution.

• Developing With HTML5 - This session covers the HTML5 APIs available to Google Chrome and Google Chrome OS applications and Google Chrome extensions. Learn how to design web applications for a Google Chrome OS netbook using the latest web technologies.

• Using Google Chrome Frame - Google Chrome Frame brings the HTML5 platform and fast Javascript performance to IE6, 7 & 8. This session will cover the latest on Google Chrome Frame, what it can do for you and your customers, how it can be used, and a sneak peak into what's planned next.

In case you couldn’t attend in-person, all the links above include videos and slides from each session. You can also find all the Chrome session videos on this YouTube playlist. Thanks to everyone who showed up this year and made Google I/O such a great event.

By Ian Fette, Google Chrome Team

Extensibility + new HTML and JavaScript APIs for Google Chrome

Today's new stable release of Google Chrome for Windows includes a bundle of browser goodness, including extensions and new HTML and JavaScript APIs.

Extensions -- previously available on Google Chrome for Windows on the beta channel -- and are now available to all users. Extensions enable you to provide additional functionality not just on your site, but to bring content and functionality from your site into the browser regardless of what sites the user has open. Google Chrome extensions use the same multiprocess technology that makes the browser fast and more secure, so that extensions won't crash or slow down your browser.


In addition, we're excited to introduce a number of new HTML and JavaScript APIs in Google Chrome, including the Web Storage and Web SQL Database APIs, WebSockets, and more. For more details about these APIs, read further on the Chromium Blog.

If you have questions about the extensions APIs, the extensions discussion group continues to be the best place to get answers. For the new HTML and JavaScript APIs, check out the newly created Chromium HTML5 group. And for those of you who are interested in attending Google I/O, check out the current list of Google Chrome sessions.

By Ian Fette, Product Manager, Google Chrome

A look back on 2009

2009 was a remarkable year for developers. Vic Gundotra, VP of our developer team declared at Google I/O, "The web has won!" and this year was full of launches and announcements that remind us how the web has become the platform of our day. We found lots of inspiration from the developers at Google I/O in San Francisco and at our Google Developer Days in Japan, China, Brazil, Russia and the Czech Republic.



Here's a look back at some of our favorite highlights from 2009:

• Faster Apps Faster - the theme for the recent Campfire One event letting developers know how GWT 2.0 decreases development time (it's being used by Google Wave & Adwords for this reason) and how Speed Tracer gives you new insight into speeding up your apps


• Make the Web faster - as part of an effort to Make the web faster we launched tools like Page-Speed and our DNS resolution service. We also made our internal JavaScript tools available, called Closure Tools, so you can rev up your js like the guys on Gmail. With PubSubHubbub all your feeds can be real-time streams.


• A faster browser - A few weeks ago we launched Google Chrome for Mac and Linux, along with an extension framework for Chrome and a gallery for developers to distribute their extensions -- there are over 900 to check out already! Chrome has a set of developer tools built on WebKit to help optimize your code. Plus, we released details of Chrome OS...a netbook operating system for speed freaks. Along the way, we've worked with the larger web community contributing to the exciting future of the web with HTML5.


• Mobile - Android launched on one device in one country on one carrier in 2008. This year, 20 devices in 26 countries on 32 carriers have been launched or announced. Developers have created over 16,000 apps in the Android Marketplace. Some were winners of our second Android Developer Challenge. We launched new mobile versions of gmail and calendar using HTML5. You can take a picture to search using Google Goggles and get turn-by-turn navigation with Google maps. Plus, we recently announced our mobile lab for Android hardware.


• Hosting - App Engine apps were allowed to scale beyond free quotas and Java developers were invited to try it out at Campfire 1 in April. Developers responded, with over 100K apps  built on App Engine. Open source developers using Project Hosting were able to host projects on Mercurial, in addition to Subversion.


• New APIs - Google Wave was released early to developers at Google I/O in May. Wave is "equal parts conversation and document" and showcases what is possible in the browser. Developers can build robot extensions to automate common tasks or build gadget extensions to provide a new way for users to interact. Google Maps released v3, Friend Connect got more personalized and then got cozy w/ Twitter, Google Analytics released an API and then added asynchronous tracking.


• Google Web Elements - From maps to search to translate and more, Google Web Elements made it even easier than ever to add Google products to your site.


• Labs - Google Code Labs was created to let developers know which APIs and products are cutting edge labs "experiments" and which we are committed to supporting for the long term.

It is a very exciting time to be a developer...we are just starting to see what is possible with the web as the platform. It will be a lot of fun to see where all of us, together, can take the web in 2010!

Happy Holidays from the Google Developer Team!

By Mike Marchak, on behalf of the Google Developer Team

Google Chrome Extensions launched in beta!

Today, we launched Google Chrome's extensions system in the beta channel for Windows and Linux (Mac is in progress). We've also opened up our brand new gallery, which contains more than 300 extensions!

We aspired to create an extensions system that is easy to use, stable, more secure and that wouldn't slow down Google Chrome. We're really happy to release a beta that begins to deliver on our initial vision. If you want to learn more about Google Chrome extensions, you can start by reading our docs and joining our mailing list. You can also check out the videos below:



You can also meet us in person - let us know if you want to join us in a small get together tomorrow on our campus in Mountain View (or via VC in New York and Kirkland). Space is limited - we'd love to see many of you there so RSVP early and we'll email you more information if you are selected to attend. You can also meet the team at Add-on Con, where we will participate in a couple of panels.

Finally for those of you who are far away, we are planning some online developer tutorial sessions. If you are interested in attending, please fill in this form.

By Erik Kay and Aaron Boodman, Google Chrome Software Engineers

Additional functionality for Google Chrome's Developer Tools

The last few weeks, Google Chrome's developer tools have become much more useful. Besides benefiting from the work the WebKit team has done to improve Web Inspector (our developer tools are partially based on Web Inspector), we also recently released the heap profiler and the timeline tab in Google Chrome's Developer Channel.

With the heap profiler you can now take a snapshot of the JavaScript heap at any point in time. A heap snapshot helps you understand memory usage, and by comparing snapshots you can also follow memory usage over time. You will find the heap profiler in the profiles tab along with the sample-based CPU profiler.

The new timeline view gives you a complete overview of where time is spent when loading a web app. All events -- ranging from loading resources over parsing and executing JavaScript to calculating styles and repainting -- are plotted on a timeline.

Besides these product improvements, we've tried to make the Google Chrome Developer tools easier to find and understand by putting together mini site with tutorials and videos.



To take our newest release for a spin, get Google Chrome from the Developer Channel and you'll automatically be brought up to date. We welcome your feedback and your contributions to improve developer tools in WebKit and Google Chrome even more.

By Pavel Feldman, Software Engineer and Anders Sandholm, Product Manager

Google I/O: Now online, starting with all things Client

The Google Client Team had an exciting and inspiring two days last week at Google I/O. We had the opportunity to talk to developers and have insightful conversations on what we're doing in the realm of HTML 5, Chrome, V8, Native Client, and 3D graphics on the web.

Today we're excited to reflect on these conversations at I/O, and kick off a series of videos and presentations from Google I/O. Starting with the Client track today, session videos and presentations from I/O will be posted online over the course of the next seven days and free to the world, on the Google I/O website.

Chrome: Extensions, Internals, V8 and more

Aaron Boodman gave a great talk on creating extensions for Chrome, and built several extensions live during his talk. I think this reflects our commitment to make it easy to build extensions, and I hope that developers -- not only those in the room, but those around the world who watch the recorded video of Aaron's talk -- will be inspired to create great extensions.

Darin Fisher delved into Chrome internals, managing to cover large swaths of Chrome code, philosophy, and lore without breaking a sweat. Darin's talk is a great way for developers to see that Chrome is more than just a fast browser with a slick UI -- we believe that developers at I/O came away realizing that there is a lot going on behind the scenes that sets Chrome apart.

Mads Ager talked about V8, walking attendees through the reason Google decided to build a new JavaScript engine, how some of the internals of V8 work including hidden classes, inline caching and garbage collection, and recent improvements made to further speed up JavaScript execution in V8. We were glad to present a thought-provoking session for developers, as attendees left the session with impressed and contemplative looks on their faces.

HTML5, Native Client, O3D and moving the web forward

Matt Papakipos, in addition to making an appearance in Wednesday's keynote, gave a great talk on where Chrome is, with respect to HTML5 and the open web platform. He explored what the platform means for developers, how they can use it, as well as the vision going forward. Matt delivered this talk to a packed room - attendees were spilling out to the aisles and doorways in our largest session room at the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco. We're thrilled and humbled that developers are as excited as we are about the web platform and where we are taking it.

At the session on Native Client, Brad Chen got developers excited about the possibility of running native code as part of their web applications. Brad gave a comprehensive low-down on how Native Client works, and how it can be used to further strengthen the platform and move the web forward.

Vangelis Kokkevis and Gregg Tavares gave a talk on bringing 3D graphics to the web via O3D. Vangelis started the presentation with an overview of the O3D project and its goals and highlighted some its most significant features. Gregg then took over and demonstrated how, in a few simple steps, one can go from a blank HTML page to the beginnings of an entertaining mini-game with only a handfull of calls to the O3D API.

In addition, Henry Bridge led a panel with developers from Large Animal and Crazy Pixel, sharing insights about developing 3D graphics applications using O3D and getting developers excited about 3D on the web. You can also view sandbox video interviews with these two developers (Large Animal, Crazy Pixel) in the Developer Sandbox section, along with many other developers.

Browsers and standards development

To give developers more insight into how standards development and implementation in browsers work, we put together a panel with Jonas Sicking from Mozilla, Charles McCathieNevile from Opera, and myself, moderated by Mike Schroepfer (formerly of Mozilla now at Facebook). At this session, we talked more about the vision advanced by various browsers, and deliberated questions on where the browsers and the web are going.

Beyond the sessions, I/O provided the Client team the opportunity to interact with developers through Fireside Chats, where developers freely asked a broad range of questions. We also staffed Chrome Office Hours, where I/O attendees could stop by with their burning questions about the browser and chat with the team. We got developers excited about Chrome extensions, HTML5, <video>, O3D and more at the the Client developer sandbox pod.

All in all, we're thrilled to have spent two days with developers in conversation about Chrome, the web platform, and a shared future that we are all working so hard to create. We're excited to now bring these conversations to a larger community of developers with our I/O session videos and presentations. If you like, drop us comments through the Google Friend Connect gadget we have enabled on the session web pages - we'd be delighted to hear from you.

By Ian Fette, Chrome Team

Chrome Experiments at Google I/O

Google I/O is well underway, and we're excited that we've been able to highlight some Chrome Experiments at the event. During the keynote on Wednesday, we opened with the following video. Matt Waddell from our Developer team composed the music playing in the background. We're posting a subtitled version of the video, so you can enjoy the song in all it's HTML5 glory.



We've loved the experiments we've received so far and encourage you to check out the ones listed below:

• Google Sphere
• Browser Ball
• Twitch
• Wavy Scrollbars
• Bomomo
• Monster
• World of Solitaire
• Canopy
• js touch
• HasCanvas

We're continually updating Chrome Experiments to feature new and crazy JavaScript experiments, so keep submitting!

By Aaron Koblin, Google Chrome Team

Calling all JavaScripters: submit your Chrome Experiments for Google I/O!

We launched Chrome Experiments last month to feature some of the crazy things that are now possible with JavaScript. Since then, a number of developers have submitted additional experiments, many of which have made us smile -- take a look at a few of them.

In May, we're going to feature Chrome Experiments during Google I/O, our largest developer event (May 27 - 28), as well as on the Google Code blog.

So if you haven't already started experimenting, here's your chance to create something cool, fun, or quirky with JavaScript. Please submit it by May 26th. We'll reveal the top ten experiments here on the Google Code Blog during Google I/O.

Happy experimenting!

By Aaron Koblin, Google Creative Lab

Monster Mesh - A Google Chrome Experiment

Over the past year or so, my contributions to Google Chrome have mostly been behind the scenes: improving our base libraries, security, stability, and performance. But recently, I made an addition to Chrome Experiments, a site we just launched today. With the Monster experiment I had a chance to step back from working deep within Google Chrome's C++ code, and give my right brain a little exercise.

Since web browsers don't currently support native 3D graphics, the basis for my experiment is a custom 3D rendering engine written in JavaScript. It uses some pretty intense numerical computations to project the 3D shapes into a 2D image, like your eye would. These are then drawn to the screen using the HTML5 canvas element. This process is a similar concept to early 3D game engines, before accelerating graphics cards handled the work.

JavaScript wasn't originally designed with intensive mathematical computation in mind; the real trick is not in writing the engine, but making it perform well in the high-level language running in your browser.

Compared to creating the 3D model beforehand and embedding the data in the application, Monster creates the mesh using software algorithms in real time while the demo runs. This has some nice advantages like decreasing download time, but it requires even more processing power to draw every frame.

Here's what it looks like in action:



The demo starts with a simple cube, but as it progresses, the cube is smoothed and pulled apart to become exponentially more complex. The values used in these operations are varied over time, creating an animation that brings the monster to life. Anytime during the demo you can hit 'p' to pause, and explore the scene with your mouse. With a bit of careful programming (ok, a lot) and the performance of V8, it's possible to do all this work and still generate smooth and consistent graphics.

So give it a try and take a look through the other Chrome Experiments on the Google Chrome Blog. If you've made something interesting with JavaScript please submit it, too. We'll be highlighting more experiments and holding sessions Google Chrome at Google I/O on May 27 - 28 in San Francisco.

By Dean McNamee, Google Chrome Team