Good morning! Only one minute to go until Darin Fisher, VP of Chrome kick's off this year's keynote at Chrome Dev Summit 2016. Join us as we take a look at the latest web advancements with over 20 sessions presented by Chrome engineers. We're live streaming all sessions and posting videos throughout the next two days.
Posted by Adrienne Porter Felt and Emily Schechter, Chrome Security Team
Security has always been critical to the web, but challenges involved in site migration have inhibited HTTPS adoption for several years. In the interest of a safer web for all, at Google we've worked alongside many others across the online ecosystem to better understand and address these challenges, resulting in real change. A web with ubiquitous HTTPS is not the distant future. It's happening now, with secure browsing becoming standard for users of Chrome.
Today, we're adding a new section to the HTTPS Report Card in our Transparency Report that includes data on how HTTPS usage has been increasing over time. More than half of pages loaded and two-thirds of total time spent by Chrome desktop users occur via HTTPS, and we expect these metrics to continue their strong upward trajectory.
Percentage pages loaded over HTTPS in Chrome
As the remainder of the web transitions to HTTPS, we'll continue working to ensure that migrating to HTTPS is a no-brainer, providing business benefit beyond increased security. HTTPS currently enables the best performance the web offers and powerful features that benefit site conversions, including both new features such as service workers for offline support and web push notifications, and existing features such as credit card autofill and the HTML5 geolocation API that are too powerful to be used over non-secure HTTP.
As with all major site migrations, there are certain steps webmasters should take to ensure that search ranking transitions are smooth when moving to HTTPS. To help with this, we've posted two FAQs to help sites transition correctly, and will continue to improve our web fundamentals guidance.
We've seen many sites successfully transition with negligible effect on their search ranking and traffic. Brian Wood, Director of Marketing SEO at Wayfair, a large retail site, commented "we were able to migrate Wayfair.com to HTTPS with no meaningful impact to Google rankings or Google organic search traffic. We are very pleased to say that all Wayfair sites are now fully HTTPS." CNET, a large tech news site, had a similar experience. "We successfully completed our move of CNET.com to HTTPS last month," said John Sherwood, Vice President of Engineering & Technology at CNET. "Since then, there has been no change in our Google rankings or Google organic search traffic."
Webmasters that include ads on their sites also carefully monitor ad performance and revenue during large site migrations. The portion of Google ad traffic served over HTTPS has increased dramatically over the past 3 years. All ads that come from any Google source always support HTTPS, including AdWords, AdSense or DoubleClick Ad Exchange; ads sold directly, such as those through DoubleClick for Publishers, still need to be designed to be HTTPS-friendly. This means there will be no change to the Google-sourced ads that appear on a site after migrating to HTTPS. Many publishing partners have seen this in practice after a successful HTTPS transition. Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising for the Washington Post, "saw no material impact to AdX revenue with the transition to SSL."
As migrating to HTTPS becomes even easier, we'll continue working towards a web that's secure by default. Don't hesitate to start planning your HTTPS migration today!
Roy Glasberg, Global Lead, Launchpad and Launchpad Accelerator
Last month, the second cohort of Launchpad Accelerator, Google’s high-touch global program for late-stage startups, came and conquered their app challenges with the help of mentors at Google HQ.
What did they learn that they’d like to share with developers across the world? Check out the video below for solutions from 3 different startups, and an in-depth review of MagicPin’s mobile web challenge and solution.
Startup:
MagicPin from India is a social network app that curates a local user base around locations, allowing merchants to connect with these specific audiences.
Mobile web challenge:
In India, downloading an app requires a high commitment. On average a user would keep 5 or 6 apps on their phone. According to Anshoo Sharma, Co-Founder and CEO, MagicPin, “If you want to be the next app that they download, there is a high barrier.”
Jordan Adler, Google Developer Advocate: “Devices in markets like India have limited space--on average 128 MB of memory--and when you add in system features only 40 bytes of user space is left. And if a typical APK is a few megabytes, you can only have a few apps before you have to stop downloading.”
Solution:
Jordan Adler: “One of the great things about Progressive Web Apps is you don’t have to request the commitment (to download an app) upfront. You can start to build a relationship with the user through the web interface, and over time the web app can become more like a native app, it can be housed on a device, cache content and work offline.”
Anshoo Sharma: “In the last 1.5 weeks we have been here we have already launched a micro version of our platform on Progressive Web Apps. And the experience is great! Without using the (mobile) app people can get as good an experience.”
About Launchpad Accelerator
Launchpad Accelerator is a six-month accelerator that enables late-stage app startups from emerging markets to successfully scale. Here's a two-minute video about the Accelerator.
Originally Posted on Chromium Blog
Originally posted on Google Chromium Blog
Posted by Alex Chen, Coder and Designer, Google Creative Lab
This year, for Music in Our Schools Month, we wanted to help make learning about music a bit more accessible to everyone by using technology that’s open to everyone: the web. We built a set of experiments that let anyone explore how music works. It’s called Chrome Music Lab, and you can check it out at g.co/musiclab.
The experiments all use the Web Audio API, an open web standard that lets you create and manipulate sound right in the browser. In Chrome Music Lab, we’re using Web Audio to create interactive drum machines, pianos, synthesizers, and more. A few experiments also let you use the microphone input in Chrome through WebRTC. This lets you use your own voice or real sounds around you as part of the experiment.
The web has always been a space for open collaboration. Many of these experiments use grassroots efforts such as Tone JS, a framework built on top of the Web Audio API that makes it even easier to build interactive music experiences in the browser.
We’re also providing open-source code. So if one of our experiments sparks an idea, check out our repository and start building your own.
Posted by Leon Nicholls, Developer Programs Engineer
Today we launched the Google Cast Remote Display plugin for Unity to make it easy to take your Unity games to TVs. The Google Cast Remote Display APIs use the powerful GPUs, CPUs and sensors of your Android or iOS mobile device to render a local display on your mobile device and a remote display on your TV.
Unity is a very popular cross-platform game development platform that supports mobile devices. By combining the Google Cast Remote Display technology with the amazing rendering engine of Unity, you can now develop high-end gaming experiences that users can play on an inexpensive Chromecast and other Google Cast devices.
We have exciting gaming apps from our partners that already use the Remote Display plugin for Unity, with many more coming shortly.
Monopoly Here & Now is the latest twist on the classic Monopoly game. Travel the world visiting some of the world’s most iconic cities and landmarks and race to be the first player to fill your passport with stamps to win! It's a fun new way to play for the whole family.
Risk brings the original game of strategic conquest to the big screen. Challenge your friends, build your army, and conquer the world! The game includes the classic world map as well as two additional themed maps.
These games show that you can create games that look beautiful, using the power of a phone or tablet and send that amazing world to the TV.
You can download the Remote Display plugin for Unity from either GitHub or the Unity Asset Store. If you have an existing Unity game, simply import the Remote Display package and add the CastRemoteDisplayManager prefab to your scene. Next, set up cameras for the local and remote displays and configure them with the CastRemoteDisplayManager.
To display a Cast button in the UI so the user can select a Google Cast device, add the CastDefaultUI prefab to your scene.
Now you are ready to build and run the app. Once you connect to a Cast device you will see the remote camera view on the TV.
You have to consider how you will adapt your game interactions to support a multi-screen user experience. You can use the mobile device sensors to create abstract controls which interact with actions on the screen via motion or touch. Or you can create virtual controls where the player touches something on the device to control something else on the screen.
For visual design it is important not to fatigue the player by making them constantly look up and down. The Google Cast UX team has developed the Google Cast Games UX Guidelines to explain how to make the user experience of cast-enabled games consistent and predictable.
Learn more about Google's official Unity plugins here. To see a more detailed description on how to use the Remote Display plugin for Unity, read our developer documentation and try our codelab. We have also published a sample Unity game on the Unity Asset Store and GitHub that is UX compliant. Join our G+ community to share your Google Cast developer experience.
With over 20 million Chromecast devices sold, the opportunity for developers is huge, and it’s simple to add Remote Display to an existing Unity game. Now you can take your game to the biggest screen in millions of user’s homes.
