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Cross-posted from the Chromium Blog

WebKit is a lightweight yet powerful rendering engine that emerged out of KHTML in 2001. Its flexibility, performance and thoughtful design made it the obvious choice for Chromium’s rendering engine back when we started. Thanks to the hard work by all in the community, WebKit has thrived and kept pace with the web platform’s growing capabilities since then.

However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.

This was not an easy decision. We know that the introduction of a new rendering engine can have significant implications for the web. Nevertheless, we believe that having multiple rendering engines—similar to having multiple browsers—will spur innovation and over time improve the health of the entire open web ecosystem.

In the short term, Blink will bring little change for web developers. The bulk of the initial work will focus on internal architectural improvements and a simplification of the codebase. For example, we anticipate that we’ll be able to remove 7 build systems and delete more than 7,000 files—comprising more than 4.5 million lines—right off the bat. Over the long term a healthier codebase leads to more stability and fewer bugs.

Throughout this transition, we’ll collaborate closely with other browser vendors to move the web forward and preserve the compatibility that made it a successful ecosystem. In that spirit, we’ve set strong guidelines for new features that emphasize standards, interoperability, conformance testing and transparency.

To learn more about Blink visit our project page.

By Adam Barth, Software Engineer

For those of you who can never seem to remember that one password, or dread typing your full mailing address into those small form fields on your phone and tablet, today’s Chrome for Android stable update is for you. You can now access your saved passwords and autofill entries on your phone and tablet when you’ve signed in to Chrome, just like you have been able to do on your desktop and laptop computers.

To try it out, make sure you’re signed in to Chrome on both your desktop and mobile device, and let sync take care of the rest. In case you don’t see this right away after upgrading, give it a few days as we complete rolling out the feature to all of you on the latest version of Chrome.

Posted by Chris Hopman, Eidetic Engineer

Recently, based largely on your feedback, we announced the launch of new ValueTrack features to help advertisers using keyword level URLs achieve specific conversion and ROI goals. These features are now live and ready for you to apply to your campaign…

On Wednesday, 13 March 2013, Sumana Harihareswara of The Wikimedia Foundation, Daniel Packer (2011 alumnus), and Robert O’Connor (three time alumnus and mentor for the past 2 years) ran an information session at CUNY Hunter College to provide prospective students with information about the Google Summer of Code program.

Students received a fun and informative presentation on Google Summer of Code basics including mentoring organizations, application and program timeline, project structure, and all the awesome benefits of Google Summer of Code. We fielded questions from the 30 students in attendance, all of whom showed strong interest in the program. The interests of those in attendance was broad and ranged from bioinformatics to computer vision and just about anything and everything in between.

A trail of links was followed from the Google Summer of Code site to the mentoring organization site, and then to mentors themselves, with a discussion on how to approach particular mentors and projects. Students also enjoyed sending a greeting to the #gsoc IRC channel and receiving replies and cheers from others in the channel. All in all it was a fantastic meeting which promised to result in some excited Google Summer of Code applicants.

By Robert O’Connor and Daniel Packer 

Stay tuned for another Google Summer of Code meetup post next week. Currently the Google Open Source Programs Office is busy reviewing hundreds of mentoring organization applications and deciding which organizations will be accepted into this year’s program. Participating organizations will be announced on the program site on April 8th.

Posted by Rob Mahini, Policy Counsel

Every month, the Federal Trade Commission receives over 200,000 consumer complaints about robocalls. These phone calls can not only be annoying, they also can be a vehicle for cheating consumers and stealing their identities. While law enforcement agencies work to crack down on these fraudsters, unscrupulous robocallers continue to find ways to swindle consumers.

Two weeks ago we announced our plans to evolve DoubleClick Ad Exchange with a series of robust, publisher-centric features derived from our acquisition of Admeld. Today we’re pleased to go in-depth on the first group of these enhancements: those that give you deeper insights into how buyers are buying and more control over how you sell. For a guided tour of everything in this post, register for our live webinar this Thursday, April 4. Watch a video of the April 4 webinar.

Greater Transparency
Maximizing your revenue starts with a deep understanding of how advertisers, DSPs, and trading desks are bidding on and buying your inventory. To give you quick access to these insights, we’re adding a handful of new reports to AdX including Bid Landscapes which helps you track the activity of specific buyers over time.

The Bid Landscapes Interface

In Thursday’s webinar, we’ll talk about Bid Landcapes and and other new reports such as Pixel Analysis–a feature that enables you to monitor the pixels firing on your site (and see who’s firing them).

Increased Control
A great ad operations team can protect your users and your brand by ensuring the right ads are running and the unwanted ones aren’t. To make this as easy as possible, we overhauled the Google Publisher Toolbar and integrated Google Image Search technology into AdX’s Ad Review Center (ARC). Now you and your ops team can find visually similar ads in ARC by uploading a screenshot or logo, searching for text in images, and more. You’ll get the full demo on Thursday, but here’s a sneak preview:

Two weeks after Thursday’s webinar, we’ll cover the next group of features (about higher yield) in another webinar on April 18 (register here watch the video). In the meantime, if you have questions or you want to learn more about these features, contact your DoubleClick account representative or our sales team.

Posted by Jarid Maged & Ari Feldman, Ad Exchange Product Management

In the last hangout in our series “Programmatic in the Future,” Mediabrands Audience Platform’s VP of Strategic Solutions, Michael Brunick, Media6Degrees’ Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Pancer and Digiday’s Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey debated whet…

In the last hangout in our series “Programmatic in the Future”, Mediabrands Audience Platform’s VP of Strategic Solutions, Michael Brunick, Media6Degrees’ Chief Operating Officer, Andrew Pancer and Digiday’s Editor-in-Chief Brian Morrissey debated whet…

Posted by Steve Johnston, Second City Communications

Editor’s note: Our guest blogger is Steve Johnston, president of Second City Communications, the business solutions division of the legendary improv theater company, The Second City, and our partner in yesterday’s April Fools’ joke. See what other organizations that have gone Google have to say.

The Second City, the venerable Chicago comedy theatre known for its creative method and improvisation, is a far cry from a Silicon Valley start-up. Nonetheless, in a very real sense we’ve been in the “interactive” and “social collaboration” space for five decades. We believe in providing a great experience for our audience and are hardwired to innovate and attack convention whenever possible.

The Second City has been called the “Harvard of Comedy,” and our alumni list includes stars such as Alan Arkin, John Belushi, Gilda Radner, Mike Myers, Steve Carell and Tina Fey. Our business division, Second City Communications, brings the same audience-empowered approach to the boardroom, creating content marketing, entertainment and training programs for some of America’s best-known companies. You can see some of our handiwork on this blog.

Second City Communications has been using Google Apps for over a year. Apps provides the interactive collaboration with our clients that’s necessary to co-create compelling, engaging videos that enhance companies’ training communications. We begin by using Google Docs to get multiple companies brainstorming ideas around hot corporate topics such as ethics and compliance, as well as sales effectiveness. From there, we bring our special brand of humor into the mix. We then share scripts in Google Drive to get real-time feedback from clients, helping us make sure the videos resonate with employees and reflect real challenges in the workplace.

Because you can’t really get the full effect of a script without hearing it, we meet with clients over Google+ Hangouts. Our actors do fun “table read” sessions so clients can listen and react while we observe it all. Our clients make sure we talk the talk of their audiences and bring a whole new level of authenticity to the creative development process. We continue to create these videos, called RealBiz Shorts, with more than 250 Fortune 1000 clients, who use them to change behavior and transform company culture through smart comedy.

When you look at these training videos, you see something that’s not only humorous, but also anchored in reality. RealBiz Shorts get employees more engaged with existing programs. It’s like marketing for training! See for yourself.

It’s 2013, folks. New approaches for a new time. Google Apps plays a key part of our creative development process to build big ideas with our clients. It gives us vital tools to bring improv agility and nimbleness to enterprise collaboration, and a helps us bridge the gap between comedy and the corporate world.

Funny thing is, it’s working. Beautifully.

Introduction: Earlier this month we launched the application for the Computer Science Summer Institute (CSSI), a three-week summer program for graduating high school seniors who are interested in studying computer science. Today through the My Summer @ Google series, we’re bringing you another story from former CSSI participant, Alice. Alice is a CSSI alum and freshman at the University of California at Berkeley studying computer science. If you’d like to learn more about CSSI, visit our website and apply by April 7th.

I have always been inspired by how computer scientists such as Larry Page and Sergey Brin have changed the world through technology, and I thought it would be cool to spend my summer at Google. Although I was quite interested in computer science, I was actually uncertain whether or not I could pursue it. I had never programmed before CSSI, and I had this misconception of computer scientists being expert hackers (which I wasn’t) who played video games for most of their time (which I didn’t). Therefore, attending CSSI seemed like the perfect way for me to not only experience what it is like at Google, but also learn more about computer science and find out if it is right for me.

On the very first day of CSSI, the instructors told us we would learn how to program in two weeks and build a web application by the end of the program. I could not believe my ears. For someone who had never even typed a single word in any programming language before, building a web application in one week was unimaginable. For the first two weeks we learned a new topic each day. First it was App Inventor, then it was HTML, Javascript, CSS, Python, and AppEngine—basically everything we needed to build a web application.

At the end of two very intense weeks of training, we were ready to take on the big challenge of creating our first web applications. We were divided into groups, and immediately began working together. What I really liked about the projects was that we could do anything we wanted. This made the process extremely enjoyable because everyone was so excited about what the group was creating that we all worked tirelessly together to make our web applications the best they could be. We also received lots of support from interns and other Googlers who not only helped us debug our programs but also showed us the master ways of doing things. Finally, after a week of frantic programming, we finished our web applications and presented them to Googlers around the world (thanks to Hangouts!). It was truly an amazing feeling to realize what everyone achieved in three weeks and to have our web applications tried out by other people.

CSSI was life changing for me because it helped me discover my love for computer science and convinced me to pursue the field. It really opened up the door to a whole world that I had never dared to enter, and showed me how beautiful computer science is. Learning how to make web applications has given me the power to create anything I want, and since the program ended I have built several web applications myself to solve some of my problems. The Googlers and fellow CSSIers I met have taught me how to tackle problems in different ways and have inspired me to be the programmer I am today.

Interested in CSSI? Apply here!

Posted by Alice Jia Qi Liu, CSSI Participant

With our launch of bulk editing back in November, large-scale changes across your entire AdWords account became much easier.  Today, we are launching keyword bulk uploads to help you add, edit and remove keywords at scale. Have you ever downloaded…