Google News Archives

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.

JPEG-XL has been looked on rather favorably as a royalty-free, next-generation lossy/lossless image format with much better performance than JPEG. To much surprise, Google Chrome is already making preparations to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in their browser.

Google today promoted the Chrome 107 web browser to their stable channel across all supported platforms.

Google this week has announced the release of KataOS as their newest operating system effort focused on embedded devices running ambient machine learning workloads. KataOS is security-minded, exclusively uses the Rust programming language, and is built atop the seL4 microkernel as its foundation.

Last year Google announced the Lyra voice codec for low bit-rates that combined with the open AV1 codec could lead to voice chats on 56kbps connections. Lyra makes use of machine learning and other techniques for extremely low bit-rate speech compression that can function at 3kbps. Google last year open-sourced the Lyra code while today they announced the availability of Lyra V2.

Back in 2019 Google announced Stadia as their cloud gaming service using Linux, embracing Vulkan, and leveraging AMD graphics. While promising at first, it's been dwindling down and Google announced today they are in the process of shutting down this streaming service.

Google this afternoon promoted Chrome 106 to their stable channel for Linux, ChromeOS, macOS, and Windows users of this web browser.

The Framework Laptop has proven to be very popular with enthusiasts thanks to its focus on the ability for users to make repairs and upgrades to their laptop. Google has even taken notice and they in cooperation with Framework Computer Inc have launched a Chromebook Edition laptop.

Google for quite some time now has been working on "Ghost" as a means of controlling the Linux kernel scheduler from user-space and/or eBPF programs. Ghost provides an extensive API so developers can alter the kernel's scheduler behavior from user-space or eBPF and fine-tune the scheduling behavior based on system preferences.

Following this week's release of Chrome 105, Google has promoted Chrome 106 to their beta channel.

Google engineers today promoted Chrome 105 to their stable channel across Linux, macOS, Windows, and Android platforms.

Google announced today that the Android 13 sources have been published to the Android Open-Source Project as part of officially releasing this newest version of Android.

Over the past two years Google has been spearheading an effort to make silicon design more open-source and allowing more projects to get started in chip fabrication. That got started with a partnership with SkyWater Technology and Google covering the costs for open-source projects to see their initial chips fabricated on a 130nm process. Google's Open-Source Silicon Design Initiative recently announced SkyWater 90nm manufacturing will get underway for future manufacturing runs. Today the news out of Google's open-source group is that GlobalFoundries has joined this initiative and is providing 180nm manufacturing access.

Google has promoted Chrome 104 to stable today as their newest feature update to this leading, cross-platform web browser.

Google and SkyWater have teamed up the past few years with an open-source design kit for allowing projects to see their open-source silicon designs manufactured. This effort started off on a 130nm process node but announced today is the rolling out of 90nm manufacturing.

Ben Widawsky who had been at Intel for the past seventeen years, most of which were spent improving their open-source Linux graphics driver as well as other Linux kernel contributions, has joined Google.