Google News Archives

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for linux_drm_syncobj_v1 as the modern Wayland protocol for explicit buffer synchronization.

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser merged two notable features yesterday for Linux users.

Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP).

While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images.

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage.

Google has promoted Chrome 128 to its stable channel across macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Google engineer Rong Xu has proposed adding AutoFDO and Propeller support to the mainline Linux kernel for its Clang-based build as it can help the system performance improve in the up to 5~10% range.

The Chrome platform changes for Linux 6.11 as code predominantly for enabling Chromebooks with the mainline Linux kernel is set to introduce two new drivers.

The Google Chrome/Chromium 127 web browser release should finally provide support for PipeWire camera capturing support!

Similar to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure spinning their own Arm-based processors for their data centers, Google Cloud today announced the Google Axion Processors that will be available in the future.

The Google Open-Source Blog today announced Jpegli, a JPEG coding library for encode/decode that maintains backwards compatibility with JPEG while offering around a 35% compression ratio improvement for high quality JPEG compression.

Google is announcing today they are contributing $1M USD to the Rust Foundation to focus on enhancing interoperability between the C++ and Rust programming languages.

In addition to Firefox 122 making it to stable today, Google has also promoted their Chrome 121 web browser to its stable channel.

The Google Tensor GS101 SoC launched in 2021 with the Google Pixel 6 smartphone. More than two years later the mainline Linux kernel is finally to see upstream support with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

Google on Wednesday released Chrome 120 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial "request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C.

The Xiph.Org-developed Theora lossy video compression format was once popular for open-source video compression but in an era of VP9 and AV1 its usage has waned. Google engineers are now working to remove Theora support from their Chrome/Chromium web browser.

Google engineers on Friday promoted Chrome 119 to its beta stage with some interesting features in tow.

Google formally unveiled Android 14 today in New York City at its Made By Google event. With that, Google has also published the Android 14 Open-Source Project (AOSP).

Moving forward Google engineers are working to roll-out new Chrome stable releases even faster.

Google is using their NEXT'23 conference today to announce that C3A instances are debuting in private preview form for these new AArch64 VMs powered by AmpereOne processors.

For those that happen to have a Google Stadia gaming controller from the days of Google's cloud gaming service, the Linux 6.6 kernel is adding a new driver to enable force feedback (rumble) support with these controllers.

Chrome 116 is out today as the newest stable version of Google's web browser.

An update on the Go programming language roadmap was shared today that highlights some recent improvements for backward compatibility to Go and why the developers now no longer expect to ever have a "Go 2" release that would break compatibility with existing Go 1.x programs.

Last year Google decided to deprecate JPEG-XL image support within their Chrome/Chromium web browser. They expressed not enough interest and other factors for so quickly removing JPEG-XL support from their browser. They went ahead and removed the support for this next-gen JPEG standard while now a half-year later they may be having second thoughts.

Google's open-source BBR TCP congestion control algorithm is widely used within Google and its v3 iteration is already proving a success within the company and they are working toward upstreaming BBRv3 into the mainline Linux kernel.

For those on Linux running a multi-monitor setup with a mix of resolutions or screen sizes between the different displays, Google Chrome (and Chromium) will soon be able to better cope with this arrangement by allowing per-display scaling factors.

While Google shutdown their Stadia game streaming service, with updated firmware there is Bluetooth (BLE) support for the controller as well as USB wired connectivity for those wishing to continue using this gaming controller. Google engineers have also been working on a new Linux driver for enabling force feedback "rumble" support with this controller.

While IO_uring has been one of the greatest Linux kernel innovations in recent years for helping to deliver more performant and efficient I/O, it's also been home to various security vulnerabilities. Due to ongoing security issues, this interface for asynchronous I/O is being restricted or outright disabled across Google products.

With Chrome 114 is the start of Google beginning to roll-out Maglev as their new mid-tier compiler for further enhancing the JavaScript browser performance.

Following yesterday's release of Chrome 114, Google today promoted the Chrome 115 series to beta.

Google has promoted Chrome 114 to stable across Linux, Windows, and macOS.

Google engineers this month have begun posting new patches for the Linux memory management subsystem and related components for a feature dubbed Working Set Reporting.

Following this week's release of the Chrome 113 web browser with faster AV1 encoding, Google engineers have promoted Chrome 114 to their beta channel.

Google has rolled out Chrome 113 to its stable channel that includes faster AV1 video encoding for video conference calls, WebGPU is finally rolling out to everyone, and other enhancements.

Google engineers continue working on enhancing the Linux infrastructure around supporting High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) for Chrome OS.

While Chrome 112 just shipped this week and Chrome 113 only in beta, there is already a big reason to look forward to that next Chrome web browser release: Google is finally ready to ship WebGPU support! WebGPU provides the next-generation high performance 3D graphics API for the web.

Google today promoted the Chrome 112 web browser to their stable channel on all supported platforms.

On top of today seeing the KDE XWaylandVideoBridge announcement, the debut of GNOME 44 with its many Wayland improvements, and XWayland 23.1 being released with multiple new features/improvements, there is more good news for Wayland fans. Google has merged to the Chrome/Chromium Ozone code support for Wayland fractional scaling via the fractional-scale-v1 protocol.

Chrome 112 beta is now available for testing as the next step forward for Google's web browser.

Google has published a list of the participating open-source organizations for this year's Google Summer of Code.

Google engineers last week released libvpx 1.13 as the newest feature release to this library that serves as the reference software implementation for the VP8 and VP9 codecs. While Google engineers have already spent years tuning libvpx for maximum performance with Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), the game is not over and v1.13 has yet more tuning there -- along with continued Arm Neon optimizations too.

Google announced today that moving forward they will be allowing Rust code into the Chromium code-base, the open-source project that ultimately served as the basis for their Chrome web browser.

Google on Tuesday released their first post-holidays update to the cross-platform Chrome web browser.

Set to be merged in the Linux 6.2 is a new driver for the ChromeOS Human Presence Sensor "HPS" used for detecting when one or more humans are in front of the Chromebook.

Back in October was the surprising move of Google deprecating JPEG-XL support in their Chrome/Chromium web browser. Google engineers argued there wasn't enough interest in JPEG-XL and not sufficient enough benefits over existing formats. Their plan was to remove the JPEG-XL support in Chrome 110 and indeed that has now happened.

Google released Chrome 108 on Tuesday that is the last major feature update for 2022 with this cross-platform web browser.

Google announced funding for silicon manufacturing for participating open-source projects using the process design kit with GlobalFoundries.

In early 2021 Google announced Lyra as a very low bitrate codec intended for speech with aims of getting Lyra and AV1 possible for video chats on 56 kbps connections.

Following yesterday's article about Google Chrome preparing to deprecate the JPEG-XL image format, a Google engineer has now provided their reasons for dropping this next-generation image format.