ALL COUNTRIES:
September 5, 2018 @ 10:26 AM By Ellie Powers
Every time you open your browser, you have a mission to accomplish: trips to plan, emails to send, stories to read, skills to learn. We built Chrome to help you do all of those things as quickly and safely as possible. Today we celebrate Chrome’s 10th birthday, and just like a kid on the cusp of double digits, we’re constantly growing and changing. In the case of Chrome, those changes happen every six weeks to bring you new features and security updates, but our 10th birthday update is bigger than normal. Before we blow out our birthday candles, here’s a rundown of the updates coming your way today:
First up, Chrome has a new look. You can see it across all platforms—desktop, Android, and iOS—where you’ll notice more rounded shapes, new icons and a new color palette. These updates have a simpler look and will (hopefully) boost your productivity. Take tabs, for instance. Are you a secret tab-hoarder? No judgment. We changed the shape of our tabs so that the website icons are easier to see, which makes it easier to navigate across lots of tabs. On mobile, we’ve made a number of changes to help you browse faster, including moving the toolbar to the bottom on iOS, so it’s easy to reach. And across Chrome, we simplified the prompts, menus, and even the URLs in your address bar.
Introducing the new Chrome.
You get a lot done online these days—booking travel and appointments, shopping and working through your to-do lists across multiple sites at once. And we want to make sure that you can do all of those things easily and safely. Now, Chrome can more accurately fill in your passwords, addresses, and credit card numbers, so that you can breeze through online checkout forms. All this information is saved to your Google account, and can also now be accessed directly from the Chrome toolbar.
We’ve also significantly improved the way Chrome handles passwords. Staying secure on the web means using strong and unique passwords for every different site. When it’s time to create a new password, Chrome will now generate one for you (so you’re not using your puppy’s name for all of your passwords anymore). Chrome will save it, and next time you sign in, it’ll be there, on both your laptop and phone.
Chrome’s updated password manager generates and stores unique, strong passwords for you.
You know the box at the top of Chrome that combines the search bar and address bar into one? We call it the Omnibox, and we built it so that you can get to your search results as fast as possible. Today, we’re making it even more convenient to use. It will now show you answers directly in the address bar without having to open a new tab—from rich results on public figures or sporting events, to instant answers like the local weather via weather.com or a translation of a forei word.
Get all your answers without leaving your current tab.
Plus, a bonus if you find yourself with two dozen tabs open across three browser windows: Search for a website in your Omnibox and Chrome will tell you if it’s already open and let you jump straight to it with “Switch to tab.” Soon, you’ll be able to search files from your Google Drive directly in your Omnibox too.
Everyone uses Chrome their own way, so we made it easier to personalize. You can now create and manage shortcuts to your favorite websites directly from the new tab page—simply open a new tab and “Add shortcut.” And as if you needed an excuse to look at more pictures of your dog, you can now customize the background of a newly-opened tab with a photo of Fido.
While today brings changes to the part of Chrome you can see, we’re always working on “behind the scenes” improvements to Chrome, and we’ve made a lot of those in 2018. We launched an ad blocker to keep you safe from malicious and annoying ads, helped move the web to HTTPS to keep you secure online, launched site isolation which provides deeper defense against many types of attacks including Spectre, and brought VR and ARbrowsing to Chrome. And we’re now rolling out a set of new experiments to improve Chrome’s startup time, latency, usage of memory, and usability.
Chrome wouldn’t be where it is without the developer community, our partners in The Chromium Projects. So we’re also rolling out some updates just for them, from new CSS features to improved performance tracking ability.
We’ll be back with deep dives on our beloved Chrome Dino, the new password manager and the thinking beyond today’s redesign throughout the next couple weeks. Now, time to eat some cake!