Google News Archives

Earlier this year Google announced the Lyra voice codec that could work with AV1 video for video chats over 56kbps modems. Google is today shipping its newest Lyra version.

Google wants to see Rust programming language support within the Linux kernel so much so that they have contracted the lead developer working on "Rust for Linux" as the work aims to get mainlined.

For a number of years Google has developed Fibers (not to be confused with Google Fiber, their fiber Internet service) as a user-space scheduling framework. While it hasn't been open-source, the few public papers and talks on Google Fibers has been quite interesting for great performance and a novel design. Finally though Google is working towards open-sourcing Fibers and hoping to get the necessary Linux kernel modifications upstreamed.

Following last week's stable release of Chrome 91, Google has now promoted Chrome 92 to beta.

Chrome 91 released this week with WebAssembly SIMD by default, new JavaScript APIs, and other improvements. Plus there are also some performance improvements too, here are some benchmarks.

Google has released Chrome 91 as a rather exciting feature update to their open-source, cross-platform web browser.

Google used their Google I/O conference today to introduce the first beta of the upcoming Android 12 mobile operating system.

Google announced today the accepted projects/students for this year's Google Summer of Code. While for GSoC 2021 Google trimmed the length of this summer coding initiative and also cut the stipend amounts, there ended up being still a good turnout for this year with some interesting projects to be attempted.

Following last week's release of Chrome 90, Google on Thursday debuted their beta of next month's Chrome 91 web browser.

Google announced today that with Android 12.0 they will be deprecating their RenderScript APIs. Moving forward Android developers should primarily target the Vulkan API for high performance compute needs.

It should come as little surprise -- especially given the recent news of Google allowing Rust to be used for Android system-level code -- but engineers at the search giant are in support of Rust code being used within the mainline Linux kernel.

Google officially promoted Chrome 90 to its stable channel today as the latest feature update to their cross-platform web browser.

Not only is the Linux kernel moving to allow Rust code to be optionally used within the kernel, but Google is now allowing Rust code to be used for system programming work on Android's low-level operating system components too.

Google engineer Yu Zhao sent out patches proposing a "multigenerational LRU" implementation for the Linux kernel's least recently used (LRU) handling for memory page replacement.

Google has published their proof-of-concept code showing the practicality of Spectre exploits within modern web browsers' JavaScript engines. The code is out there and you can even try it for yourself on the leaky.page web-site.

Following last week's Chrome 89 release, Chrome 90 is now available in beta form.

Google has announced the 202 open-source projects that will be included as part of this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC) initiative for getting students involved in free software development.

Google has been delivering new Chrome milestone releases on a six week cycle for more than one decade while moving ahead they are shifting to a four-week cycle.

Chrome 89 is out today as the latest stable version of Google's web browser. With Chrome 89 various new APis are deemed stable including WebHID, WebNFC, and Web Serial.

Google's AI team has announced "Lyra" as a very low bit-rate codec for speech compression designed for use-cases like WebRTC and other video chats... With a bit rate so low that when combined with the likes of the AV1 video codec could potentially allow video chats over 56kbps Internet connections.

Google is announcing today in cooperation with The Linux Foundation that they are providing funding for two full-time developers to focus solely on security issues.

The first public developer preview is out today of Android 12.

While it's sign-up time for open-source organizations hoping to participate in this year's Google Summer of Code, GSoC 2021 changes in the name of the pandemic are leading some organizations to debate whether it's still being involved with this student coding effort.

Following last week's release of Google Chrome 88, the Chrome 89 beta is now available for testing.

Now that Chrome 88 released, attention is turning to Chrome 89 of which an interesting technical change is the enabling of AV1 encode support within the web browser.

Google has released Chrome 88 as the latest stable version of their cross-platform web browser.

Google as part of their involvement in the Open-Source Security Foundation (OpenSSF) has devised the "Criticality Score" as a means of judging crucial open-source projects.

Four years after Google began developing the "Fuchsia" operating system complete with its own kernel, Google is now becoming more open with Fuchsia development and also accepting community code contributions.

Google today is announcing the open-sourcing of Atheris, a Python fuzzer they developed internally for automatically finding bugs within Python code and native extensions.

In addition to the release of Firefox 83 today (along with word Servo is moving to the Linux Foundation), over in Google land they have shipped Chrome 87.

Google engineers are already working on WebP2 as the next-generation version of their still image file format.

Following last week's release of Chrome 86, Google has promoted its Chrome 87 web browser to beta.

WireGuard has long been available as an app on the Google Play store for those wishing to use this cross-platform, open-source secure VPN tunnel solution on Google's mobile operating system. But for Android 12 it appears there will be a form of official support.

Chrome 86 is out today as the latest feature release to Google's cross-platform web browser.

For a while now there have been references to "Vivaldi" as a new Chromebook keyboard firmware for future devices. References in Chromium OS repositories have pointed to expanded keyboard layouts and other new features with Vivaldi. Coming with the Linux 5.10 kernel is now a new HID driver for supporting some of the differences with Vivaldi.

Google engineers today celebrating pushing the Android 11 sources to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP) as part of the official Android 11 release.

While Chrome 86 entered beta with many features, Chrome 87 in development has re-enabled the Wayland+X11 Ozone support as another attempt at improving the Wayland support experience off the single binary.

Building off the recent release of Chrome 85, Google has now released the beta of Chrome 86 with a number of goodies introduced and promotions for some existing functionality.

The Android open-source project "AOSP" with its latest code is very close to being able to boot off the mainline Linux kernel when assuming the device drivers are all upstream.

While a Microsoft engineer was at Linux Plumbers Conference this week talking up their LTO and PGO optimization work for the Linux kernel, Google engineers have now one upped that work by also shipping kernels with AutoFDO optimizations.

As we frequently cover, making use of compiler PGO (Profile Guided Optimizations) can mean some sizable performance wins, assuming the generated usage profile is accurate. With the imminent Chrome 85 availability, Google is now making use of PGO with their default LLVM Clang compiler toolchain for squeezing out around 10% better performance.

Following the recent Chrome 84 stable release, Google has now promoted Chrome 85 to beta as their latest feature update to this cross-platform web browser.

Way back in 2013 there was a presentation at the Linux Plumbers Conference around Google's work on user-level threads and how they were working on new kernel functionality for using regular threads in a cooperative fashion and building various features off that. Fast forward to today, that functionality has been in use internally at Google for a range of services for latency-sensitive services and greater control over user-space scheduling while now finally in 2020 they are working towards open-sourcing that work.

WebAssembly has seen much greater industry interest and adoption than Google's former Native Client (NaCl) effort for sandboxed applications that can be run within web browsers. Native Client hasn't seen any real activity in years and continues fading away.

Open Usage Commons is a new organization announced today that is backed by Google for helping open-source projects in managing their trademarks.

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser is finally reaching the stage where having both the X11 support and Ozone abstraction layer for Wayland can be enabled concurrently in the same build.

Following the recent Chrome 83 release, Chrome 84 has now been promoted to beta.

Android Studio 4.0 is out today with this IDE bringing a number of improvements for developing Google Android apps.

Google this week announced accepted projects for Summer of Code 2020 as their virtual engagement for getting students involved in open-source development. As usual, there are a lot of interesting GSoC projects.

Android 11 Developer Previews have been available since February in bringing new 5G APIs, updated Neural Network APIs, privacy and security improvements, HDMI low-latency mode support, and many other additions. Google is now preparing the transition to Android 11 betas and ultimately to have this next mobile operating system release ready to roar by Q3.