Used billions of times each day, the Chrome address bar (which we call the “omnibox”) is a powerful tool to make searching the web easier, whether you’re trying to quickly find your tabs or bookmarks, return to a web page you previously visited, or find information.With the latest release of Chrome (M124), we’re integrating machine learning models to power the Chrome omnibox on desktop, so that web page suggestions are more precise and relevant to you. In the future, these models will also help improve the relevance scoring of search suggestions. Here’s a closer look at some of the important insights that help our team build this integration and where we hope the new model takes us. How we got hereinflexible. A set of hand-built and hand-tuned formulas did the job well, but were difficult to improve or to adapt to new scenarios. As a result, the scoring system went largely untouched for a long time.For most of that time, an ML-trained scoring model was the obvious path forward. But it

Cookies – small files created by sites you visit – are fundamental to the modern web. They make your online experience easier by saving browsing information, so that sites can do things like keep you signed in and remember your site preferences. Due to their powerful utility, cookies are also a lucrative target for attackers.Many users across the web are victimized by cookie theft malware that gives attackers access to their web accounts. Operators of Malware-as-a-Service (MaaS) frequently use social engineering to spread cookie theft malware. These operators even convince users to bypass multiple warnings in order to land the malware on their device. The malware then typically exfiltrates all authentication cookies from browsers on the device to remote servers, enabling the attackers to curate and sell the compromised accounts. Cookie theft like this happens after login, so it bypasses two-factor authentication and any other login-time reputation checks. It’s also difficult to mitigat

Today’s The Fast and the Curious post covers the release of Speedometer 3.0 an upgraded browser benchmarking tool to optimize the performance of Web applications. In collaboration with major web browser engines, Blink/V8, Gecko/SpiderMonkey, and WebKit/JavaScriptCore, we’re excited to release Speedometer 3.0. Benchmarks, like Speedometer, are tools that can help browser vendors find opportunities to improve performance. Ideally, they simulate functionality that users encounter on typical websites, to ensure browsers can optimize areas that are beneficial to users.Let’s dig into the new changes in Speedometer 3.0. Applying a multi-stakeholder governance model2014 by the WebKit team, browser vendors have successfully used Speedometer to optimize their engines and improve user experiences on the web. Speedometer 2.0, a result of a collaboration between Apple and Chrome, followed in 2018, and it included an updated set of workloads that were more representative of the modern web at that ti

Balancing security and usability is always top of mind for us as we strive to stay on top of the constantly evolving threat landscape while building products that are delightful to use. To that end, we'd like to announce a few recent changes to how Chrome works with Google Safe Browsing to keep you safe online while optimizing for smooth and uninterrupted web browsing.Asynchronous checksToday, Safe Browsing checks are on the blocking path of page loads in Chrome, meaning that users cannot see pages until checks are completed. While this works fine for local-first checks such as those made using Safe Browsing API v4, it can add latency for checks made directly with the Safe Browsing server. Starting in Chrome 122, we will begin to introduce an asynchronous mechanism which will allow sites to load even while real-time checks with Safe Browsing servers are in progress. We expect this to reduce page load time and improve user experience as real-time server-side checks will no longer block

We are thrilled to share that Chromium issue tracking has migrated! Access the Issue Tracker, and supporting documentation. Why was this doneIssue tracking moved from Monorail to the Chromium Issue Tracker (powered by the Google Issue Tracker) to provide a feature-rich and well-supported issue tracker for Chromium’s ecosystem. Chromium joins other open source projects (Git, Gerrit) on this tooling. What happens moving forward Existing Monorail issue links will redirect to the migrated issues in the new issue tracker. We will prioritize feedback to continue to improve the issue tracker experience.Help & FeedbackYou can reach out at any time to [email protected] with questions or concerns.

As we shared last year, Chromium is moving to a different issue tracker to provide a well-supported user experience for the long term. Migration is beginning today (February 2, 2024) at 5pm PST. We expect migration will be completed by the end of day (PST) February 4, 2024.What’s happeningWe will migrate all Chromium issues, including issue history and stars, from Monorail to a different tool: Chromium Issue Tracker, powered by the Google Issue Tracker. This tooling change will provide a feature-rich and well-supported issue tracker for Chromium’s ecosystem. Chromium will join other open source projects (Git, Gerrit) on this tooling. Existing transparency levels to bugs will be maintained. Post-Migration We will publish another post once the migration is complete. Once the migration completes, existing Monorail issue links will redirect to the migrated issues in the new issue tracker. We will prioritize feedback to continue to improve the issue tracker experience. Documentation on new

Whether you’re browsing the web on your PC at home or on the go with your phone, we designed Chrome to be simple to use and work great on all platforms. For example, tools like Chrome sync have made it possible for you to access your bookmarks and passwords when switching between all your devices. In the coming weeks we’re making changes to Chrome on iOS to help you get to your most important stuff right away. Instead of having to set up Chrome sync on your device, you can now simply sign in to Chrome to save new things in your Google Account and access what's already there. This may feel familiar to you, as it’s how many Google apps on iOS already work today. Once you’re signed in to Chrome, you’ll be able to save your important stuff to your account, including bookmarks, reading lists, passwords, payment info, addresses and settings. And, you can separately opt in to synchronizing your tabs and browsing history from Chrome on iOS to your Google Account, which can help you pick up bro

Today’s The Fast and the Curious post explores how Core Web Vitals saved Chrome users more than 10,000 Years of waiting for web pages to load in 2023 (across Chrome desktop and Android) by quantifying the experience of sites and identifying opportunities to make improvements.In 2020, we introduced Web Vitals - essential quality signals for webpages to ensure a better user experience. Since then, there has been a massive leap in web performance made possible by our work on Core Web Vitals (CWV) and its broader impact on the web. Today, over 40% of sites pass all of the CWV metrics, leading to pages that load and respond to interactions more quickly. Here’s a closer look at the journey to help improve the performance for sites and some specific work done in the browser and the ecosystem to enable this achievement. Chrome's Quest for SpeedThe very essence of the web lies in its ability to provide information and services efficiently and rapidly. This principle is at the heart of Google's

Update: Migration is on track for early February 2024 instead of January 2024.Chromium is moving to a different issue tracker to provide a well-supported user experience for the long term. The Google team is targeting January 2024 for migration—this post explains the details. What’s happeningWe will migrate all Chromium issues, including issue history and stars, from Monorail to a different tool: Chromium Issue Tracker, powered by the Google Issue Tracker. This tooling change will provide a feature-rich and well-supported issue tracker for Chromium’s ecosystem. Chromium will join other open source projects (Git, Gerrit) on this tooling. Existing transparency levels to bugs will be maintained. TimingWe are targeting January 2024 for Chromium’s migration, and will share milestones and timing updates throughout the coming months.Migration ReadinessIn due course, we will share additional resources, including a walkthrough of the new issue tracker, highlighting key features.Post-Migration W

TL;DR: Automated certificate issuance and management strengthens the underlying security assurances provided by Transport Layer Security (TLS) by increasing agility and resilience. This post describes the benefits of automation and upcoming changes to the Chrome Root Program policy that represent Chrome Security’s ongoing commitment to improving web security. IntroductionOne of the most common tools for enhancing user security on the Internet is “Transport Layer Security” (TLS), formerly known as “Secure Socket Layer” (SSL). At its most basic level, TLS is a security protocol that encrypts data such that only the intended recipient can read it. Encryption makes the Internet more secure, but only if consistently and reliably deployed. The adoption of modern practices, like automated TLS certificate issuance and management, helps achieve this goal. Background: TLS - The Foundation for Encrypted Communications on the InternetYou’re probably more familiar with TLS than you think, as it’s t

In celebration of Chrome’s 15th birthday, we’re thrilled to introduce the redesigned Chrome Web Store. With a user-centric focus, we’ve made it easier for you to search and find fun themes and helpful extensions to stay productive at home or at work. Let's go behind the scenes and learn more about this redesign from Chrome Product Manager Hafsah Ismail and UX Designer Crystal Wang.What influenced your decision to redesign the Chrome Web Store?Hafsah: Chrome and the Web have evolved in remarkable ways. We now have extensions that unlock uncharted levels of productivity for developers or harness the power of generative AI to reshape work as we know it. It only felt natural to evolve the store to continue to meet the dynamic needs of users and developers in our ecosystem. Extensions and themes lie at the heart of a personalized Chrome experience, so it was a natural progression to give the store a fresh, contemporary look to align with this transformation. Can you share more details about

For the past several years, more than 90% of Chrome users' navigations have been to HTTPS sites, across all major platforms. Thankfully, that means that most traffic is encrypted and authenticated, and thus safe from network attackers. However, a stubborn 5-10% of traffic has remained on HTTP, allowing attackers to eavesdrop on or change that data. Chrome shows a warning in the address bar when a connection to a site is not secure, but we believe this is insufficient: not only do many people not notice that warning, but by the time someone notices the warning, the damage may already have been done.We believe that the web should be secure by default. HTTPS-First Mode lets Chrome deliver on exactly that promise, by getting explicit permission from you before connecting to a site insecurely. Our goal is to eventually enable this mode for everyone by default. While the web isn't quite ready to universally enable HTTPS-First Mode today, we're announcing several important stepping stones tow

Teams across Google are working hard to prepare the web for the migration to quantum-resistant cryptography. Continuing with our strategy for handling this major transition, we are updating technical standards, testing and deploying new quantum-resistant algorithms, and working with the broader ecosystem to help ensure this effort is a success.As a step down this path, Chrome will begin supporting X25519Kyber768 for establishing symmetric secrets in TLS, starting in Chrome 116, and available behind a flag in Chrome 115. This hybrid mechanism combines the output of two cryptographic algorithms to create the session key used to encrypt the bulk of the TLS connection:X25519 – an elliptic curve algorithm widely used for key agreement in TLS todayKyber-768 – a quantum-resistant Key Encapsulation Method, and NIST’s PQC winner for general encryptionIn order to identify ecosystem incompatibilities with this change, we are rolling this out to Chrome and to Google servers, over both TCP and QUIC

Big performance wins can be found by taking a step back and tweaking what you already have. Today’s The Fast and the Curious post explores how we improved the scrolling experience of Chrome on Android, ultimately reducing slow scrolling jank by 2x. Read on to see how we discovered and evaluated the problem, and how that has helped us design a better browser experience going forward.When measuring the performance of a browser, one might typically think of page load speed or Web Vitals. On mobile where touch interactions are common we also prioritize your interaction with Chrome to ensure it is always smooth and responsive including on new form factors like foldables. A significant focus of late has been on reducing jank while you scroll.We recently improved the scrolling experience of Chrome on Android by 2x by filtering noise and reducing visual jumps in the content presented on screen. To get this result, we had to take a step back and figure out the problem of why Chrome on Android w

With the latest release of Chrome for desktop we are introducing a redesign of the Chrome downloads experience to make it easier for you to interact with your recent downloads. Let's go behind the scenes and learn more about this redesign from Chrome Senior Product Manager Jasika Bawa.What influenced your decision to redesign Chrome downloads?Downloads are a core part of day to day web browsing, from getting the perfect cat themed background for your PC to saving a copy of your tax return. Over the years, we have listened to your feedback about the legacy Chrome downloads experience. We learned that while there was a lot about it that worked well for you, like strong support for core download journeys and built-in protection from potentially harmful files, it had its problems too. For example, it – Occupied precious pixels at the bottom of the screen which squeezed the web content area, and was limited by screen width in how many files it could show at onceDidn't go away automatically,

Since the beginning of Chrome, benchmarks have been a key way by which we drive performance optimizations that benefit users. The most relevant web benchmarks today are Speedometer, MotionMark, and Jetstream. Over the last year Chrome has invested in optimizing against these specific benchmarks and has just achieved our highest scores across all three. These gains were achieved through a combination of large projects and small improvements. In today’s The Fast and the Curious post, we want to share just some of the ways we drove these improvements in Chrome. Announcing our brand new mid-tier compiler: Maglev We’re bringing a new mid-tier compiler to Chrome. Maglev is a just-in-time compiler that can quickly generate performant machine code for all relevant functions within the first one-hundredth of a second. It reduces overall CPU time to compile code while also saving battery life. Our measurements show Maglev has provided a 7.5 percent improvement on Jetstream and a 5 percent improv

Editor’s note: based on industry research (from Chrome and others), and the ubiquity of HTTPS, we will be replacing the lock icon in Chrome’s address bar with a new “tune” icon – both to emphasize that security should be the default state, and to make site settings more accessible. Read on to learn about this multi-year journey.Browsers have shown a lock icon when a site loads over HTTPS since the early versions of Netscape in the 1990s. For the last decade, Chrome participated in a major initiative to increase HTTPS adoption on the web, and to help make the web secure by default. As late as 2013, only 14% of the Alexa Top 1M sites supported HTTPS. Today, however, HTTPS has become the norm and over 95% of page loads in Chrome on Windows are over a secure channel using HTTPS. This is great news for the ecosystem; it also creates an opportunity to re-evaluate how we signal security protections in the browser. In particular, the lock icon.The lock icon is meant to indicate that the networ

From the beginning of Chrome, one of our 4 founding principles has been speed, and it remains a core principle that guides our work. Today’s The Fast and the Curious post shares how recent technical improvements to Chrome have helped us reach a new performance milestone on the Speedometer browser benchmark across platforms. Speed is a critical factor in determining your experience while browsing the Web. The faster the browser, the more enjoyable your browsing experience will be. With the latest release of Chrome, we went deep under the hood of Chrome’s engine to look for every opportunity to increase the speed and efficiency, from improved caching to better memory management.Improved HTML Parsing & optimizing specific features We discovered some targeted optimizations for the highly used JS `Object.prototype.toString` and `Array.prototype.join`functions. We also implemented targeted improvements in CSS’s InterpolableColor. `innerHTML` is a very common way of updating the DOM via JavaS

WebAssembly is fundamentally changing how new developer capabilities and functionality can be created on the web. In order to maintain browser interoperability, new web capabilities need to go through a rigorous standardization process and cross browser implementations. Decades of major investment has pushed the browser functionality to astonishing heights, but this process can take time and the web doesn’t need to have every capability built in. After years of investing in lower level capabilities that act as building blocks for higher level functionality, we are seeing a new dawn of expanded functionality at a dramatically expanded pace.WebAssembly WebAssembly is a portable bytecode format compiled from other languages to offer maximized performance. By leveraging WebAssembly, developers can take libraries and functionality from other platforms and performantly bring them to the web, without requiring any reimplementation. WebAssembly also offers advanced computation primitives like

From the beginning, we designed Chrome to be efficient. Being efficient is not just about loading pages as fast as possible, it’s also about doing it with the least amount of resources possible. Today’s The Fast and the Curious post explores how we improved Chrome to maximize battery life on Mac, so you can enjoy browsing and watching videos longer than ever before. With the latest release of Chrome, we’ve made it possible to do more on your MacBook on a single charge thanks to a ton of optimizations under the hood. In our testing, we found that you can browse for 17 hours or watch YouTube for 18 hours on a MacBook Pro (13", M2, 2022). And with Chrome’s Energy Saver mode enabled, you can browse an additional 30 minutes on battery(1). Of course, we care deeply about all our users, not just those with the latest hardware. That’s why you’ll also see performance gains on older models as well. Here’s a closer look at some of the changes we made: Fine tuning iframesWe realized that many ifra

We announced in October that passkey support was available in Chrome Canary. Today, we are pleased to announce that passkey support is now available in Chrome Stable M108. What are passkeys?Passwords are typically the first line of defense in our digital lives. However, they are at risk of being phished, leaked in data breaches, and even suffering poor password hygiene. Google has long recognized these issues, which is why we have created defenses like 2-Step Verification and Google Password Manager.To address these security threats in a simpler and more convenient way, we need to move towards passwordless authentication. This is where passkeys come in. Passkeys are a significantly safer replacement for passwords and other phishable authentication factors. They cannot be reused, don't leak in server breaches, and protect users from phishing attacks. Passkeys are built on industry standards, can work across different operating systems and browser ecosystems, and can be used with both we

The Chrome beta post will now be posted to the Chrome Developers site. Find the release notes for Chrome Beta 107 here.

In 2020, we announced we were in the early phases of establishing the Chrome Root Program and launching the Chrome Root Store. The Chrome Root Program ultimately determines which website certificates are trusted by default in Chrome, and enables more consistent and reliable website certificate validation across platforms. This post shares an update on our progress and how these changes help us better protect Chrome’s users.What’s a root store or root program, anyway?Chrome uses digital certificates (often referred to as “certificates,” “HTTPS certificates,” or “server authentication certificates”) to ensure the connections it makes on behalf of its users are secure and private. Certificates are responsible for binding a domain name to a public key, which Chrome uses to encrypt data sent to and from the corresponding website. As part of establishing a secure connection to a website, Chrome verifies that a recognized entity known as a “Certification Authority” (CA) issued its certificate

We believe that "good enough" is never enough when it comes to pushing the performance of Chrome. Today’s The Fast and the Curious post explores how we sped up the startup times of Chrome on Android by more than 20% by providing an interactive freeze-dried preview of a tab on startup. Read on to see how the screenshot falls short, and freeze-drying your tabs makes for a better browser.Background and MotivationRendering web content can be computationally intensive and can feel slow at times compared to a native application. A lot of work needs to be done to dynamically load resources over the network, run JavaScript, render CSS, fonts, etc. On mobile devices this is particularly challenging and Chrome can often only keep a handful of web pages loaded at a time due to the memory constraints of the device.This leads to the question of whether there is a lighter-weight way to represent web content when the situation calls for it—for example, in transitional UI like the tab switcher or duri

Unless otherwise noted, changes described below apply to the newest Chrome beta channel release for Android, ChromeOS, Linux, macOS, and Windows. Learn more about the features listed here through the provided links or from the list on ChromeStatus.com. Chrome 106 is beta as of September 1, 2022. You can download the latest on Google.com for desktop or on Google Play Store on Android. Origin TrialsChrome Origin Trials dashboard. To learn more about origin trials in Chrome, visit the Origin Trials Guide for Web Developers. Microsoft Edge runs its own origin trials separate from Chrome. To learn more, see the Microsoft Edge Origin Trials Developer Console. Anonymous iframesits sign up page.Pop-Up APIPop-Up API lets developers build transient user interface elements to display on top of other web app interface elements. This API is useful for creating interactive elements such as action menus, form element suggestions, content pickers, and teaching user interfaces. This API uses a new popu