Taking Chrome to Lite speeds

When we created Chrome, we focused on speed, simplicity, and security as its hallmark traits. Today, we’re proud to announce a new extension for Chrome, called ChromeLite, which is a giant, sprightly leap ahead on all three fronts.

In our never-ending quest for speed, our team members recently gathered to race the latest and greatest browser versions against each other. Much to our surprise, the winning browser was neither the latest version of Chrome nor another modern browser, but was instead an early text-based browser called Lynx.

Inspired by Lynx’s approach, we decided to experiment with stripping out all the extraneous details of a web page to accelerate page load time by removing a web page’s formatting, colors, images, audio, and video. The end result? ChromeLite — the extension which brings you the web as it was originally conceived: nothing but pure text, presented in an aesthetically pleasing monochrome palette.

ChromeLite dramatically simplifies the user experience of web browsing by rendering the entire web in plain text. Users won’t have to worry about various media codecs and browser plug-ins to view much of the content on the web today. Preliminary analysis by our top-notch security team also suggests that running ChromeLite reduces your susceptibility to targeted exploits on the web by removing a popular attack surface: color.

In short, we hope ChromeLite gives all users on the web yet another option to safely and speedily enjoy the web in all its pure, unadulterated simplicity. If you’re looking to get your fingers accustomed to these new blazing speeds once you’ve installed ChromeLite, check out our newly developed Chromercise regimen.

A Chrome Extension for YouTube Activity Feeds

Slave Jovanovski, an engineer at YouTube, has put together a Google Chrome extension that should be of interest to the YouTube API community. It’s called YouTube Feed, and after installing and authenticating with your YouTube account, it automatically will fetch your YouTube social activity stream (both subscriptions and friends’ actions) while you use Google Chrome. When a new event, like a YouTube friend uploading or commenting on a video, takes place, the extension will notify you and provide details on the activity, as well as links to view the actual video. You have control over which types of activities you’d like to be notified about, as well as how frequently you’d like the extension to check for updates.

While you’ll hopefully find the extension useful on its own merits, the fact that the source code has been released as part of an open source project means that the extension’s code can serve as inspiration (or a jumping off point) for writing your own JavaScript code that interacts with the YouTube API. Curious as to how to use OAuth to authenticate YouTube accounts from a Chrome Extension? Or request JSON data with a JavaScript callback? The answers await you in the source code!