That being said, developers are going to have questions, and Google welcomed those questions with open arms during a hangout yesterday with engineering leads Darin Fisher and Eric Seidel. Some of the issues addressed during the hangout include the relationship between WebKit’s and Blink’s codebase, Blink’s support of multiple programming languages, and when we can expect to see Blink hit Chrome.

For more on Blink, check out Google’s exhaustive FAQ.

Google announced that it’s developing Blink, a fork of WebKit that will become the rendering engine for Chrome and Chrome OS. Google is moving to its own rendering engine in the hopes that it can reduce the complexity found in both WebKit and Chromium projects.

There is bound to be some concern from Web developers over Google abandoning WebKit. Google anticipated that concern, and said that Blink won’t bring a lot of change to how developers currently code for the Web. In fact, the initial work on Blink will be strictly focused on “internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase.”

Of course, the greater implication here is that Google is introducing more competition to the Web. Web developers are already having to optimize Web sites for WebKit, Trident and Gecko. Google says that Blink is only a good thing, however, as it feels “multiple rendering engines… will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open Web ecosystem.”

The philosophy held by Google seems to be shared by Mozilla as the non-profit announced a new Web rendering engine called Servo yesterday. The engine, being co-developed with Samsung, is being built with the mobile Web in mind.

It will be interesting to see if Google’s prediction of increased competition comes true. The company says that it will work with other Web vendors to make sure Web standards are observed, and that interoperability is retained. Still, I’ve always been of the opinion that we already have too many rendering engines, but Google and Mozilla may just prove my fears unfounded as we move into this next wave of Web development.

If you want to follow Blink development, check out Google’s project page.

Developer François Beaufort points out rich templated notifications in a recent chromium build, sharing a screenshot. You can see the look of the notifications in the bottom right-hand corner of his image.

François Beaufort4 hours ago

Rich templated notifications are now available through the new Notification Center in the last Windows chromium build available at download-chromium.appspot.com/dl/Win.

To see them in action, you need to toggle "Enable Rich Notifications" flag in chrome://flags. 
Screenshot below shows you how to create a notification within a chrome extension but this also works with regular HTML5 notifications.

As you probably guessed, this Notification Center will be the perfect hub for Google Now cards.

Source: https://chromiumcodereview.appspot.com/11819048

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As TheNextWeb (which first pointed to Beaufort’s post) notes, it’s possible that the notifications could look different by the time they actually get to be a Chrome feature. That’s also assuming that this does become a Chrome feature, but it’s very likely that it will.

Google Now in Chrome would be a major step toward the convergence of Chrome and Android into one operating system – a path that Google co-founder Sergey Brin has implied in the past would likely happen eventually. For now, it seems both brands will live on for the foreseeable future, but the more Google is able to bring features from one to the other, the less reason Google may have, in time, to continue operating them separately.

We’ve already seen Chrome rapidly evolve into a much more advanced browser than it started as, and even into its own operating system. Chrome recently got speech recognition capabilities, and has gotten better at preserving battery life.

In what could be another hint of things to come, Google’s HQ has a new statue of a Chrome Android:

This may not be a hint at all, but rather a representation of two important Google products in one homage. However, considering those comments made by Brin in the past, and pending Google Now features in Chrome, it doesn’t seem like too much of a stretch.

It’s important to remember that Google is essentially on a quest to unify its products into one larger Google product. This is has been happening little by little, especially since the launch of Google+ – the social and identity layer that ties them all together. “Google+ is Google,” as the company likes to say. Well, perhaps Chrome is Google, and Android is Google too.

As far as Google Now itself goes, Google has been steadily adding more functionalities to that, and they’re only getting started. Adding Google Now to the desktop via Chrome should only serve to incubate new use cases and user demand for more (or perhaps for less for some of the more privacy-concerned users).

Chrome Android mage via DroidLife (who credits Paul Wilcox)

Google announced today that Chrome will be one of the browsers hackers can take on at the annual Pwn2Own Competition. This year’s competition is hosted by HP’s Zero Day Initiative alongside Google, the latter of which will be underwriting a portion of the winnings for all targets – including non-Chromium browsers. The event will last between March 6-8 in Vancouver, BC. You can register here.

At the CanSecWest conference on March 7, Google will be hosting its own competition – the third annual Pwnium. Instead of hacking Chrome, however, Google will task hackers with breaking Chrome OS. The company will be offering rewards in the following categories with up to $3.14 million in prize money up for grabs:

Hackers attempting these challenges will have to use a base Wi-Fi model of the Samsung Series 5 550 Chromebook. You are allowed to use any installed software, including the kernel and drivers. You can also use a virtual machine if you do not have the required hardware.

Last year’s big winner was a teenage hacker who went by the alias of Pinkie Pie. It’s unknown if he will be bringing his skills back to Pwnium 3 to take on the much more difficult task of cracking Chrome OS. Either way, it’s going to be interesting to see if anybody can crack Chrome OS.

Google announced today that it is going to begin testing variations of Chrome’s New Tab Page in which the user’s default search provider will be able to add a search box or “otherwise customize” the page.

“While you can search straight from the omnibox in Chrome, we’ve found that many people still navigate to their search engine’s home page to initiate a search instead,” says software engineer David Holloway on the Chromium blog. “The goal is to save people time by helping them search and navigate the web faster.”

“We’ll also allow search engines to display the user’s search terms right in the omnibox, which avoids the need for a second search box on the results page,” adds Holloway. “This new capability, along with other ways to improve search suggestions, are exposed in a new Embedded Search API, an extension of the existing SearchBox API. Search engines can implement any part of the specification if they’d like their users to experience a customized variation of the NTP experience.”

A small set of users on the Dev channel on Windows and Chrome OS how have Google selected as their default search provider will start seeing test variations starting today. Halloway says Mac will be coming soon.

CNET, which points to the note (first spotted by Francois Beaufort), confirmed with Google that it is indeed working on this in an experimental capacity. Successful experiments, of course, go on to become features, and Google Now is surely a product Google wants to be successful.

The log message in the note says:

Creating a skeleton for Google Now for Chrome implementation. The CL creates the top-level structure for showing Google Now cards in Chrome via Chrome Notifications. The implementation lives behind -enable-google-now-integration flag.

This appears to be the latest sign that Google is indeed working hard to bring its robust roster of products closer together into a more unified experience. The most obvious example of this is Google’s integration into its Google+ social network into its other products.

Last week, Google SVP, engineering, Vic Gundotra said, “Google+ is the next version of Google, so, if you love YouTube, or Chrome, or Search, or Android, or Gmail, or Maps, we’re bringing it all together.”

“Bringing it all together,” just might start to be more apparent from Chrome to Android too. Google has even hinted in the past that Android and Chrome OS could one day converge.

Google appears to be blurring the lines among its products more and more as time goes on.

Google pushed out some new cards for Google Now last week, in an update to its Search App. New cards include Events Nearby, Suggestions to help with research, Boarding Passes from Gmail (United only, but more to come), Search by camera when at museums or shops, Weather at upcoming travel destinations, and the approximate monthly summary of walking and biking activity.

Google announced what they’re calling the “new Chromebook” today. It’s manufactured by Samsung and only costs $250. That’s ridiculously cheap no matter how you slice it. Google’s vision is to get a Chromebook into every home, but not as a main computer. They envision the Chromebook as the sidekick that’s always there when you need it.

To push that message, Google has a new ad campaign that simply says, “Chromebook: For Everyone.”

Now you may be curious about the specs. In all honesty, it’s not that important when it comes to the Chromebook. The real star is the Web with Google Drive integration being the most important factor. The new Chromebook comes with 100GB of free storage on Drive so owners can access all of their music, videos and photos from the cloud without having to use any local storage.

Aside from personal applications, Google also made their educational aspirations known. They cited a IDC sponsored white paper that said Chromebooks are optimal tools for the classroom as they require 69 percent less labor to install and 92 percent less labor to support. In short, schools will have to hire less IT staff to handle problems if they all just switched to Chromebooks.

Will the Chromebook succeed now where past iterations have not done so well? The new price is definitely attractive. Those who aren’t into hardcore gaming may find that a Chromebook fits their everyday computing needs quite well. It’s continuously supported by Google’s automatic security updates, and it’s quick and quiet to boot. Now it’s up to the consumer to decide if laptops are still relevant in today’s world of tablets and smartphones. Good thing Google is heavily invested in that area as well.

The new Chromebook will be available for pre-order today from Amazon, Best Buy, PC World and others. It will be available via online retailers and the Google Play store next week.

Google announced today the launch of Google+Open+Source+Blog%29″>ChromeDriver, a Chrome-centric version of WebDriver. It offers the same functionality and testing features of the WebDriver API. So what’s the difference? The Selenium/WebDriver application will still be developed by its current team, whereas ChromeDriver is being developed by the open source Chromium team.

If you were hoping for more of an announcement than that, sorry, that’s it. Google is just taking the development burden of WebDriver for Chrome under their own wing and slapping a new name on it. In their defense, Google has created an excellent resource page for those who develop web apps on Chrome that need testing.

I make it sound kind of inconsequential, but it’s a good move on Google’s part. The traditional WebDriver team can now narrow their focus having one less browser to worry about and Google can make sure Chrome gets the best version of WebDriver possible. It’s a win-win for everyone.

ChromeDriver is compatible with current stable, beta and dev versions of Chrome. Older versions are obviously not supported. There will be new versions of ChromeDriver released twice a month. You can download it at the ChromeDriver page. Happy testing!

Google has been on a roll lately with providing more tools for Chrome developers. There was the recent release of inline installation that makes access to apps easier than ever. They also released tools that make it easier for developers to port high-quality console games to Chrome as well as create high-quality graphics in-browser with WebGL.

In response, Koromoske created three videos about the Web platform to show his friend and the world what the Web is truly capable of. The theme of these videos is “Meet the Web platform agains for the first time.”

The first video is called “Building on foundations” and it tackles the building blocks of the Web that Chrome is making simpler for programmers and developers. It’s an interesting look at what Chrome can do and will be doing in the future that will change how you interact with the Web.

The second video “Learning from other platforms” looks at how Chrome implements some of the features from Android. This allows Chrome to provide the same features of Android that allows apps to communicate with each other without actually being connected.

The third video “On the cutting edge” is the most interesting video of the three. It shows the future of the Web platform and how it will handle advanced tools like webcam access, audio APIs and the use of WebGL for complex 3D rendering.

While Google is obviously pushing open Web standards like HTML5 and CSS, it’s important to note that the Web is made up of different platforms all powering the content we enjoy. The future of HTML5 isn’t exactly known yet, but these tools definitely make it seem more than capable of competing with Flash.

Game developers should especially take note of the native client Google has developed for Chrome. This allows game developers to easily port pre-existing code to the Chrome platform. GDC award winner Bastion was ported to Chrome last year using these tools and there are more being added all the time.

While I’m more of a Firefox man myself, I have to give it up to Google and their Chrome team for the advancements they’re making in this field. The Web ecosystem is all about borrowing from each other and making each respective Web browser better in the process.

As an aside, I would like to point out that all of these amazing demos were running on a Mac. As we mentioned previously, it seems that a lot of Googlers don’t seem to use their own company’s Chromebooks all that much.

And then they fixed the exploit. Less than 24 hours after Glazunov identified the exploit Google had begun rolling out an updated version of Chrome that patched it. In a post on the Google Chrome release blog last night, Google offered their congratulations to Glazunov and said that the exploit – which involved “UXSS and bad history navigation” – had been fixed. They also said, however, that the full details of the security flaw would be witheld until the update had been installed by the majority of Chrome users.

Google’s Chrome browser has consistently gotten very high marks for its security, and has consistently fared far better than Microsoft’s Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox at the Pwn2Own hacking contest at the annual CamSecWest conference. Google has made a habit of rewarding those who are able to find security flaws in the software.

Of course, it goes without saying that if you’re a Chrome user, you should make sure you have the latest update as soon as possible. The latest version is 17.0.963.78.