Went to Goolge’s London office last night for their big chrome announcements. Man their office is pretty

We sat in St James’s Park (all their meeting rooms appear to be named after tube stations. They also have a printer named Dangermouse <3) and the presentation began. 

Chrome

Some facts and figures around Chrome uptake: 120m users of Chrome who use it as their main browser, a 300% increase this year (which is pretty major). We were told Chrome was always meant to be fast, and shown a demo of a couple of bits of fast tech.

Chrome Instant: works like Google instant, instantly loading pages you’ve visited before as you type their name. A bit gimmicky, but vaguely useful I think for anyone capable of touch typing...

We were shown a graph of V8 (the Javascript engine powering Chrome) performance, showing it getting steadily faster every year. It’s now 4x faster than it was when Chrome was launched, and when Chrome was launched it was the fastest JS engine ever, 16x faster than the engine in IE. They announced V8 crankshaft — an addon to the V8 engine that in real world situations adds up to a 50% performance boost by using a technique known as Adaptive Compilation to aggressively optimise the code.

Next we moved on to WebGL. We were shown a 3d WebGL aquarium — probably poking fun at Microsoft’s fishtank demo for IE9 (which they seem to have hacked about a bit to make perform worse in Chrome) - realtime 3d rendering in the browser of 3d fish swimming around a bowl. Processing offloaded to the GPU for the 3d, it looks pretty amazing if you have WebGL and GPU acceleration enabled. Go to about:flags in Chrome to turn on some of these features.

Then we saw a 3d earthquake visualiser and a human body visualiser. Pretty cool stuff.

There was a bit of conversation around Chrome’s simplicity and security model. Chrome sync allows you to have the same Chrome experience anywhere - enable it and everything, right down to your theme and browsing history is kept in the cloud.

Chrome’s security model is one of continuously and seamlessly updating the browser and sandboxing it. Each tab runs in its own process, each instance is sandboxed and cannot access the underlying OS. They are working on sandboxing of plugins, they demoed a super fast PDF viewing plugin. This is built into Chrome, renders PDFs in less than a second and is fully sandboxed. Flash is now built into Chrome, automatically and transparently updated and partially sandboxed. Google are working with Adobe to sandbox it fully in the browser.

Then we moved onto the web store.

Google wanted to create an app store for the web. Giving you a way to seamlessly download and install apps that you use to all copies of your browser (be it work or home). Talked of how there are billions of web apps out there but finding them is difficult. The Web store gives you reviews, ratings, the ability to sell web apps. They demonstrated buying and installing the game Dreams 22 from the store, showing how it took around as much time to buy a web store app as you’d typically spend buying an app on your handset. We were then shown a subscription example: cloud canvascanvas the full version costing $4.99 per month.

Marc Frons, CTO of the New York Times showed off the NYT rich app, 10 skins, rich interface, built in sync for offline reading