Umair's Blog

A polyglot Google Chrome beta, with new privacy features

Whether you're catching up on your favorite Arabic gameshow, getting up to speed on the latest Korean mobile gadgetry, or researching the local perspective for a dream trip to Machu Picchu, we're all constantly reminded that the internet is an amazingly multilingual place. The Google Chrome team is excited to introduce a new beta feature to help our users navigate the multilingual web: instant machine translation of webpages, without the need for any browser extensions or plug-ins.

How does it work? When the language of the webpage you're viewing is different from your preferred language setting, Chrome will display a prompt asking if you'd like the page to be translated for you using Google Translate.

Here's a demo of the translation feature by Jay Civelli, one of the engineers who developed it:

For more on how automatic translation in Chrome works, read on in our Help Center article. We hope that the development of online translation tools like this one will help make all the world's information universally accessible in an easy, frictionless way – imagine reading a diversity of foreign language news sources in your mother tongue, or easily conducting online commerce across borders and languages.

With today's beta release, we're also excited to introduce new features that will give you even greater choice and control over your privacy as you browse the web. We realize that many users have questions about privacy in browsers, so we've produced a short video to help users better understand privacy in the browser:

In addition to Chrome's existing incognito mode – a handy way to browse the web without leaving traces of website visits on your computer or downloads in your browser history – you can now manage your privacy settings in the new "Privacy" section of Chrome's Options dialog. From these settings, you can control how browser cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-ups are handled on a site-by-site basis. For example, you can set up cookie rules to allow cookies specifically only for sites that you trust, and block cookies from untrusted sites.

You can read more about these features, or watch videos explaining how your privacy is handled in Chrome's various features including search and suggestions, browser cookies, Safe Browsing technology, and automatic security updates.

Try out all these new features for yourself in today's beta release. For those of you already on the beta channel, you'll soon be updated automatically. And for those of you on the stable channel, we'll be making Chrome's new translation and privacy features available to you in the coming weeks. Till our next update, auf Wiedersehen!

Posted by Wieland Holfelder, Engineering Director, Google Munich

Hosting a viewing party for the OSCARS®

Last year, I planned an OSCARS® viewing party with my friends. To add some friendly competition and figure out who was coming, I collected people's predictions for the winners and their RSVP information with a Google form ahead of time. I found the process really easy, so this year I created a Google form for the 2010 OSCARS® and made it a template that anyone can use to plan their own viewing parties:

If you're getting together with friends for OSCAR NIGHT® tomorrow, check out this template in the Google Docs Template Gallery. Happy viewing!

Posted by: Natalie Schwartz, Google Creative Lab

“OSCAR®,” “OSCARS®,” “ACADEMY AWARD®,” “ACADEMY AWARDS®,” “OSCAR NIGHT®,” “A.M.P.A.S.®” and the “Oscar” design mark are trademarks of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Science.

Google Voice, Explained

Google Voice is about giving you more control over your communications, through dozens of features — ranging from call screening to voicemail transcription to the ability to send and receive SMS by email.

While we've heard from users that they love our growing list of features, we're conscious of the fact that Google Voice can seem overwhelming to people trying it for the first time.

So we've created a short video that gives an overview of what Google Voice can do:

In addition, we've created a set of short videos that dive into more detail about ten features of Google Voice:

The videos show why you might want to use each feature and basic instructions for getting started. And each video focuses on just one topic so you can learn about the features that matter to you.

Finally, we just launched our own YouTube channel at youtube.com/googlevoice. You can view all of the videos mentioned above in a custom video gadget we built for this channel, which will help you keep track of which videos you've already watched.

We hope these videos help you get the most out of Google Voice.

Posted by Jason Toff, Associate Product Marketing Manager

A new way to edit places on Google Maps

Back in 2008, we started opening Google Maps up to user edits. With the launch of Place Pages in September, we decided it'd be a lot easier if editing had its own page too. Today, we're pleased to announce a new, easier way to edit places on Google Maps.

If you find something incorrect or missing on the Place Page for a business -- maybe they have a new website or moved to a bigger location down the block -- just click "Edit this place":

You'll then access a single, dedicated page where you can edit the business listing details about that place.

If you happen to stumble across a problem that you don't know how to fix, no worries. You can always report a problem directly to Google instead of attempting to edit it yourself. Just look for the Report a problem link in the "more" menu and tell us what's wrong, then we'll take on the job of tracking down the right information. Also, if you're the owner of the business, you can click the "Business owner?" link to supply additional information and see your dashboard.

We realize that you know your own neighborhood best, so we hope this makes it simpler and more streamlined for you to pass that local knowledge along to all your fellow Google Maps searchers.

Posted by Steve Kirkham, Associate Product Manager

Federal Support for Federated Login

Posted by Eric Sachs, Senior Product Manager, Google Security

Last November, we discussed the progress that account login systems operating via standards-based identity technologies like OpenID have achieved across the web. As more websites seek to interact with one another to provide a richer experience for users, we're seeing even more interest in finding a secure way to enable that kind of information sharing while avoiding the hassle for users of creating new accounts and passwords.

Excitement for technology like OpenID is not limited to the private sector. President Obama's open government memorandum last year spurred the creation of a pilot initiative in September to enable U.S. citizens to more easily sign in to government-run websites. Google joined a number of other companies to explore ways to answer that call.

Now, several months later, some interesting things are taking shape. The Open Identity Exchange (OIX), a new organization and certification body focused on online identity management, today named Google among the first identity providers to be approved by the U.S. Government as meeting federal standards for identity assurance. This means that Google's identity, security, and privacy specifications have been certified so that a user can register and log in at U.S. government websites using their Google account login credentials. The National Institute of Health (NIH) is the first government website ready to accept such credentials, and we look forward to seeing other websites open up to certified identity providers so that users will have an easier and more secure time interacting with these resources.

Our hope is that the work of the OIX and other groups will continue to grow and help facilitate more open government participation, as well as improve security on the Internet by reducing password use across websites.