NASA's historic first flight of a helicopter on Mars was celebrated this week by Google's search engine. If you head to Google now and type in "Ingenuity" or "Ingenuity NASA", you'll find yourself on the business end of a fun little animation of sorts. Make sure you're using a Chrome web browser to do it, and it'll most likely work best if you're on a desktop computer.
This week Microsoft's bringing Xbox Cloud Gaming to a variety of machines in a limited Beta. Information comes from Catherine Gluckstein, VP and Head of Product, Cloud Gaming at Microsoft, who announced this new limited beta release. According to Gluckstein, there'll be a limited beta in Chrome and Edge browsers, to start - so it'll roll with as wide a variety of devices as possible right from the get-go.
A lot of people these days live in their web browsers. In addition to the usual culprits of social media, news, and cat videos (which never go out of fashion), browsers today enable a treasure trove of apps, from online office suites to advanced note-taking apps to, well, even games. Web browsers have pretty much become operating systems and, just like operating systems, keeping productive in those environments can sometimes be a challenge, which is why Chrome is introducing new features to keep the browser in check when you need to be in the zone.
The Web has definitely become a very different place compared to just a few years ago. Security has always been a consideration but never has it been more critical than these days when more people work at home with less than secure Internet connections. That same change in work situations has bumped up the need for WebRTC, a technology that already existed long before video conferencing was hip. Addressing both those concerns, Google is releasing Chrome 90 in an attempt to make working for home more secure and less stressful.
Whatever goodwill Google earned in the past few years that it has been fighting off advertising and user tracking abuses may have gone down the train in an instant thanks to its proposed solution. The Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC is promoted to be a better strategy that protects people's privacy while still giving advertisers something they can profit from. Privacy advocates, however, are raising alarms over what they deem to be an even worse technology and Chromium-based browser makers like Brave and Vivaldi are committing to fighting off FLoC in all its forms.
Whispers of a new Chromebook with what could be a detachable OLED touchscreen and a significant uptick in connectivity and multimedia have emerged, promising a potential rival to Apple's iPad Pro. The new Chrome OS detachable, codenamed Homestar, is expected to use Qualcomm's Snapdragon 7c rather than an Intel processor.
Google has quietly confirmed which Chromebooks will be getting a Chrome OS update to Android 11, bringing up to date one of the most useful features of the platform. While Chrome OS is its own platform - and is now used in everything from cheap education notebooks to high-end ultraportables - it also includes support for running the same Android apps as on your phone.
Google recently made the almost-shocking announcement that not only would it be phasing out support for third-party cookies in Chrome, it would also not build something to replace those cookies. That's a rather big promise considering how these cookies are used for advertising purposes, Google's biggest business. Naturally, Google does have a solution to that predicament that it is calling Federated Learning of Cohorts or FLoC, now available for a few Chrome users to test and verify if it really works as advertised.
The tug of war between native apps and the so-called web apps never really ended but just took on different forms. The latest version of that battle revolves around Progressive Web Apps that are supposed to look and behave like native apps on each platform. Of course, these PWAs are still mostly installed from their web pages but Chrome for Android will be gaining a new trick that will make it look like you're installing a native Android app instead.
Chrome OS started out pretty much as a glorified Chrome web browser turned operating system but it has shed that identity a long time ago. It has almost become the one OS that runs them all, supporting Android and Linux apps and, indirectly, Windows as well. One thing that hasn't changed is that Chrome comes built into Chrome OS and is its default browser. That might soon be changing and Chrome OS will soon use LaCros as its default browser which is really just a different version of the Chrome browser anyway.
There has been a surge in content available on the Internet especially in the past months as people created more posts, music, and videos while navigating through the COVID-19 pandemic. Unfortunately, these pieces of content aren't exactly designed to be accessible to all peoples. Videos, in particular, tend to leave out a lot of users that either have hearing disabilities or vision problems. The latter can be served at least by the audio of the video but the former will have to rely on captions. Fortunately, Google is now rolling out its Live Caption to Chrome on the desktop for that exact purpose.
Google has long been accused of violating users' privacy due to the way it harvests and uses information through its myriad Web services and products. Lately, Google has been singing a different tune, strengthening its privacy features and waging war against abuses made by browser cookies, specifically the third-party tracking kind. Ironically, that is now being used as evidence against the company, alleging that its upcoming "Chrome Privacy Sandbox" is hiding an advertising monopoly behind a pretext of protecting users' privacy.