Webware

Performance improvements over the last year mean Web pages measured by the Google Analytics service load significantly faster for people using mobile devices.

The pages load 30 percent faster for mobile browsers now than they did a year ago, Steve Souders, Google's head performance engineer, said in a presentation earlier. And for desktop browser users, the pages load 3.5 percent faster.

Mobile Web performance -- often impaired by big Web pages, slower networks, and limited processors -- can be irritating. The slower a Web page responds, the less people use it, and that's a problem for a … Read more

In a step to help browser-based apps catch up with the abilities of other software, Google has made it possible for programmers to push notifications to Web apps running in Chrome.

On Thursday, Google enabled a service called Google Cloud Messaging for Chrome (GCM) that brings push notifications to its browser and to Chrome OS, its browser-based operating system. Mark Scott, a Google product manager, announced the service in a blog post.

The technology means that servers can send a message -- a stock price alert or news item, for example -- that triggers an action in the browser. To … Read more

The World Wide Web Consortium has decided to go ahead with a technology that will let companies like Netflix stream encrypted video using Web sites -- against the wishes of the Free Software Foundation, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and 25,600 petition signatories.

The Web standards group announced the move Thursday, to nobody's surprise. Entertainment-industry players had approached the group three years ago to discuss the technology, Microsoft has been helping develop it, and Google already has built the specification, called Encrypted Media Extensions (EME) into Chrome.

The standard doesn't actually handle encryption and digital rights management (DRM) to … Read more

Facebook's engineers like Google's WebP and want Mozilla to build support for the image format into the Firefox browser.

Google hopes to speed Web performance with the image format, which can do the job of both of today's major graphics formats, JPEG and PNG. Facebook began testing WebP support in April.

And now it looks like the powerful company has become Google's biggest ally in the effort to promote WebP. Mozilla is deciding whether to reverse its earlier opposition to WebP, and Facebook programmer Bryan Alger on Wednesday encouraged Firefox developers to do so in a … Read more

A developer published a Chrome extension called Downloadify designed to let people download MP3 copies of the songs they stream over Spotify's Web-based player, but it quickly disappeared from the Chrome Web Store.

"Simple Chrome Extension to Download all Spotify Songs," reads the Downloadify description on GitHub. "Spotify made a great html5 player for their service...But they forgot their encription [sic]...Hey, I don't like encription but love spotify, just pay them for their magnificent content and I am sure they fix it soon."

The extension presents a dialog box that lets a … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- First-person shooter games don't appeal to Brendan Eich, Mozilla's chief technology guru and the guy who created JavaScript nearly two decades ago. He doesn't let his kids play them, either, he says. But he was so excited on Friday about showing off the potential of a new browser codec called ORBX.js at Autodesk's One Market Street offices here that he began playing Epic's Unreal Tournament 3 "Sanctuary" level in a room of 20 or so witnesses.

As Eich maneuvered somewhat awkwardly through the onslaught of opponents, Jules Urbach, CEO … Read more

A new codec from Mozilla and OTOY will let browsers run high-performance rendering apps like Autodesk and high-definition video without plug-ins, the companies unveiled Friday.

The new, open-source digital stream encoder and decoder, called ORBX.js, obviates the need for a plug-in like Flash, Sliverlight, or QuickTime to run HD video in the browser. Mozilla and OTOY expect live TV, watermarked video, and cloud gaming to all get a boost in HTML5-enabled browsers that support it. Currently, that list includes all five major browsers: IE 10, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera.

"Thanks to our ongoing efforts in making the … Read more

Google is working on software that will improve Chrome (Windows, Mac) during moments when people lose their network connection by letting the browser load its own stored copy of previously visited Web pages.

Google programmer Randy Smith said yesterday he's added support for "offline cache mode" to Chrome. It's only on the developer version of the browser so far, and it's disabled by default, but the flag to enable it says the feature will let Chrome load Web pages from the browser's local cache if the online version isn't available. That could help … Read more

Through a deal with font specialist Monotype, Google's free fonts for Web publishing are spreading beyond the Web.

Monotype now lets designers use Google's 624 freely available fonts through its SkyFonts software for managing fonts on Windows and Mac machines. Although Google offers fonts for use on Web site, designers often need local versions on their computers for use in design software.

SkyFonts can be used to rent fonts from Monotype's library for short-term use. Tapping into the Google library of fonts, though, is free. Using the software will ensure people get the latest versions of the … Read more