App notifications send immediate alerts to users about important events as they happen. Chrome and Chrome OS already support basic web notifications, but rich notifications for Chrome packaged apps and extensions can enable users to act directly on these notifications and show rich content like lists and images. For those in beta channel, notifications now live in a center that is outside the browser, which allows them to receive notifications even when the browser is not open. Rich notifications are available in the latest beta channel builds on Windows, dev channel builds on ChromeOS, and will be coming to Mac OS X and Linux soon.

You can trigger a rich notification by calling the create method under the chrome.notifications module:

chrome.notifications.create(  ‘id1’,{         type: ‘basic’,      iconUrl: ‘image1.png’,      title: ‘Althe Frazon’,      message: ‘Hi, what's going on tonight?’,      buttons: [{ title: ‘Call’,                  iconUrl: ‘call.png’},                { title: ‘Send Email’,                  iconUrl: ‘email.png’}],      priority: 0},  function() { /* Error checking goes here */} );

Rich notifications include full-bleed icons and space to convey a headline and short message. Additionally, they enable you to create action buttons and respond to clicks right within your app, empowering your users to do anything they could do within the app’s UI itself.

Apart from the basic notification type shown above, you can use other formats like image to show a preview of an image within the notification or list to coalesce multiple notifications from your app into a single one. For example, a mail app could show multiple unread emails within a single notification using the list type. You can also specify different priorities for notifications that determine how long they stay on the screen before moving into the notification center where they continue to live until dismissed by the app or user.  The notification center holds all current notifications and can be pulled up at any time from the launcher on ChromeOS or the system tray on Windows. Users can view and clear all of their notifications in the center, and also access settings to control which apps, extensions and websites can send them notifications.  Notification Center on Windows   Notification Center on ChromeOS You can get started with rich notifications in your app or extension by trying out the Notify Test App and taking a look at the documentation on the Chrome developer site. We’d love your feedback so feel free to ask a question on Stack Overflow, start a discussion on our mailing list, or file a bug on our issue tracker. Posted by Justin DeWitt, Software Engineer and Notifications Knight

Today’s Beta channel release introduces several new developer features and a major under-the-hood performance improvement. Unless otherwise noted, changes apply to desktop versions of Chrome and Chrome for Android. We’ll be rolling out the update over the next few hours.

Fullscreen API on Chrome for Android

The Fullscreen API on Chrome for Android allows you to programmatically hide the browser UI and OS status bar. Just like on desktop, you can tell any piece of content to enter fullscreen mode by calling its webkitRequestFullScreen() function. The prefixed version will eventually be replaced by requestFullscreen(). Here you can see the Fullscreen API used in a zombie-inspired Chrome Experiment:

Faster page loads

Starting in today’s Beta, your apps get a free speed boost from Blink’s new threaded HTML parser. It has two under-the-hood performance benefits: (1) reduced jankiness by moving work off the main JavaScript thread, and (2) improved page loading speed through pipelining. Compared to the normal HTML parser, it loads DOM content about 10% faster and reduces the maximum stop time due to parsing by 40%.

Experimental new media features in Chrome for Android

In today's Beta, Web Audio joins WebGL and WebRTC as an option in about:flags in Chrome for Android. Used together or independently, these three features will allow you to create rich, powerful web experiences that work across device form factors. We’re still actively improving the implementations, but we invite you to start experimenting. To see them in action, watch the mobile web demo in the Google I/O 2013 keynote.

Deprecated features

The prefixed version of the Content Security Policy HTTP header is now deprecated, so please use Content-Security-Policy instead of X-WebKit-CSP. The prefixed version will still work for now, but future releases may not support it.

For Chrome Extensions, HTML-based notifications have been deprecated in favor of the new Rich Notifications Chrome API. Extensions developers who are using HTML notifications in their apps or extensions should migrate to the newer Rich Notifications API, as support for the existing createHTMLNotification() feature will stop working in a future release of Chrome.

Other developer features in this release

• You can now use CSS @supports conditional blocks to test whether Chromium supports certain property:value pairs.
• The :unresolved CSS pseudoclass lets you style a Custom Element that hasn’t been registered in the browser yet. Custom Elements are part of Web Components.
• As part of V8's continuing quest to make all JavaScript as fast as possible, recent optimizations have made the asm.js benchmarks more than twice as fast as prior versions of Chrome.
• Chrome Apps and Extensions developers can now use rich notifications to proactively engage with users.

Visit chromestatus.com for a complete overview of Chrome’s developer features, and circle +Google Chrome Developers for more frequent updates.

For general information about what’s going on in Chromium and Blink, watch the recordings of the fireside chats with the Blink team and the Chrome team at Google I/O 2013.

Posted by Alexandre Elias, Software Engineer and Screen Space Conservationist

AddressSanitizer (ASAN) is a tool for finding memory problems and has been used to find thousands of memory errors in Chromium over the last two years. These kinds of errors will typically lead to heap or data corruption and subsequent crashes in random, unrelated code, which make them quite challenging to find and fix without tools like ASAN. However, ASAN is built using LLVM/Clang and is limited to Mac and Linux builds of Chromium. To address the lack of coverage for Windows-only code, we built SyzyASAN.

SyzyASAN is built on top of the Syzygy toolchain and is an instrumentation-based clone of ASAN for detecting heap errors. It consists of three parts:

• An instrumenter that injects instrumentation into binaries produced by the Microsoft Visual Studio toolchain.
• A run-time library that replaces malloc, free, et al.
• An RPC-based logging server that receives information about detected errors. This lets us get information safely out of sandboxed processes, like Chromium’s renderer.

SyzyASAN operates nearly identically to ASAN, finding errors in the same manner and producing similar reports. SyzyASAN finds some of the hardest-to-locate memory bugs like use-after-free, buffer overruns, and underruns. Focusing on very common memory errors allows SyzyASAN to be relatively efficient.

Although Chrome with SyzyASAN is very usable, the penalties in speed - 4.7x on CPU intensive operations - and memory - a 25% increase plus a fixed 256MB increase in each process - are noticeable so we’ll confine these releases to our Canary channel for now. We’ve been releasing SyzyASAN-instrumented builds to the Windows Canary channel one day each week recently. One day with a little slowdown on the Canary channel gives us plenty of great data. In the last three weeks, we’ve found 150 new bugs in Chromium, several of which could lead to security vulnerabilities.

We’ve put together some instructions for instrumenting your local build and debugging issues. Try it out and help us squash more memory bugs. The Syzygy source code and binaries can be downloaded from our code site, and instructions for how to use it are on our wiki. If you have any questions, suggestions or contributions, feel free to contact syzygy-team@chromium.org. If you’re using Syzygy or SyzyASAN with your project we’d love to hear about it!

Posted by Chris Hamilton, Sanitation Engineer

Event pages keep apps and extensions efficient by allowing them to respond to a variety of events such as timers or navigation to a particular site, without having to remain running persistently. But what if you need to respond to something that occurs outside of Chrome, such as a news alert, a message sent to a user or a stock hitting a price threshold? Until now, you had to do this by repeatedly polling a server. This process consumed bandwidth and reduced the battery life of your users’ machines. For a more efficient solution, starting today you can use Google Cloud Messaging for Chrome (GCM) - across all channels of Chrome.

GCM will be familiar to developers who have used Google Cloud Messaging for Android. To send a message, all you need to do is:

1. Request a token (channel ID) via chrome.pushMessaging.getChannelId(). 
2. Pass the returned token to your server. 
3. Whenever you need to send a message to your app or extension, post the message along with the token to the GCM server-side API. 

Your message is then delivered in near real time to Chrome. This makes your event page wake up (if it’s not already running), and the message is delivered to your chrome.pushMessaging.onMessage listener.



To use GCM, your users must be signed into Chrome, as the service relies on an efficient push channel that’s only established for signed-in users. Messages are automatically delivered to all the devices where the user has signed in and installed your app/extension.

To add GCM to your app/extension, take a look at the overview of the service or start with some of the sample apps—and start pushing!

Posted by Mark Scott, Product Manager

As an iOS app developer, when your users want to access web content, you currently have two options: create your own in-app web browser frame, or send users away from your app to a browser.

With Chrome’s OpenInChromeController class with x-callback, users can open a web page in Chrome and then return to your app with just one tap.

In the example below, a YouTube user has opened a link in Chrome. “YouTube” is prominently displayed in Chrome’s back button. Touching “YouTube” returns the user to the YouTube app.

After you've downloaded the OpenInChromeController class and added it to your project, you’ll be able to check if Chrome is installed, and if so, send links to Chrome with or without x-callback enabled. Additionally, you can specify whether or not to open a new tab when sending a link to Chrome. For a deeper dive and to download the code, check out our developer docs.

Posted by Michele Aiello, Software Engineer and Callback Captain

A few months ago, we announced the developer preview of Chrome packaged apps and the Chrome App Launcher. That preview enabled you to to upload your Chrome packaged apps to the Chrome Web Store and test the app install flow. However, a Chrome packaged app was discoverable only if you had a direct link to it, not via searching and browsing the store.

Starting today Chrome packaged apps will be available in the Chrome Web Store for anyone on Chrome's developer channel on Windows and Chrome OS. You will notice that the “App” category now contains only the new Chrome packaged apps. A new category, called “Websites”, contains all existing hosted apps and legacy packaged apps.

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Many of these apps are works in progress, which is why we’re only making them easily available on Chrome’s dev channel. If you’ve written a packaged app, or are working on one, now is a great time to get some early feedback and polish your app before Chrome packaged apps become more broadly available.

A number of developers have taken advantage of the early preview to publish apps that demonstrate the new powerful capabilities of the packaged apps platform. If you're looking for inspiration, we've highlighted a few of them for you to try out in the Web Store’s Apps category. If you’re not sure whether a Chrome packaged app is right for you, you can learn more at our developer site: developer.chrome.com/apps. As always, we welcome your feedback on our G+ Developers page or our developer forum.

Posted by Amanda Bishop, Product manager and (web) store keeper