Google showed off its new lightweight operating system designed for Netbooks and cloud computing on Thursday. As anticipated, it will rely on many of the same security features and concepts used by the Chrome browser.

"The browser is the operating system. We've expanded the browser to...

Support for extensions to customize Chrome, the top-requested feature for Google's browser, has begun arriving for adventurous users.

Previously, extensions worked only for those who enabled the feature with a command line switch. Now the feature is enabled by default in the developer preview version of Chrome on Windows, Aaron Boodman, the Google engineer who oversees the extensions work, said in a blog post Wednesday.

"We're ready for a few more people to start using extensions--the kind ...

Gmail was down from about 12:30 p.m. PDT Tuesday to about 2:30 p.m. PDT, affecting millions of Gmail customers who depend on the service for everything from fantasy football roster updates to business-critical information. The problem was caused by a classic cascade in which servers became overwhelmed with traffic in rapid succession.

According ...

Google continues to move language translation into more and more of its products. On Thursday, it became a feature of Google Docs, letting anyone do an on-the-spot translation into one of 42 languages.

The new feature, tucked away in a settings menu, has the smarts to automatically detect in which language the original document is written. It then opens the translated version in a new window, allowing you to compare and contrast the two side by side, more easily checking whether the translati...

Linux users are known for being a somewhat finicky lot. Despite broader application support for Windows and a better user experience in Mac OS X, Linux "desktop" users swear by the open-source operating system (and sometimes swear at its competitors).

It's therefore somewhat telling that Linux users overwhelmingly choose Google as their preferred search engine, according to data released today by Chitika, an online advertising network. Chitika analyzed data from 163 million searches across it...

Google has begun work on a 64-bit version of Chrome for Linux, a move likely to whip Linux loyalists into a lather of excitement.

V8 is Chrome's engine for running programs written in the JavaScript language common on the Web. Chr...

That's the sense I got reading through Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's billet-doux to Chromium, the open-source project behind the Google Chrome browser. O'Grady has long been friendly to Mozilla and a dedicated user of Firefox. When his head is turned by another browser, it's time for concern.

Yes, Firefox...

Google ditched its browser sync plug-in for Firefox a year ago, but the idea is resurfacing in Chrome in a way that makes me think of possibilities the technology could hold for Chrome OS.

The company is preparing to build a system to synchronize bookmarks across different versions of Chrome, Google's Tim Steele said in a mailing list posting on Friday. Google envisions extending the feature to other data types, including passwords, Steele and fellow programmer Idan Avraham said in a follow...

The sharp eyes over at the Google Operating System blog noticed that Google quietly changed some wording in Google Docs from "PDFs" to "files." While small, this could signal that Google Docs may soon support the viewing and editing of other file types, and possibly double as an online storage service--like the fabled GDrive.

Google has long-allowed users to upload PDFs to Docs. These could be viewed in Google's online viewer, but not edited. However, the service would not allow other items ...

That Google operating system rumor is coming true--and it's based on Google's browser, Chrome.

The company announced Google Chrome OS on its blog Tuesday night, saying lower-end PCs called Netbooks from unnamed manufacturers will include it in the second half of 2010. Linux will run under the covers of the open-source project, but the applications will run on the Web itself.

In other words, Google's cloud-computing ambitions just got a lot bigger.

"Google Chrome OS is being created for peo...

Last week, PBWorks founder David Weekly found out from some customers that his hosted collaboration site had been blacklisted by Symantec for hosting malware and, thus, visitors to any of the 10 million pages on PBWorks were being warned that the site wasn't safe.

"(Damn) you, Norton Safe Web. Whenever one file on one PBWorks space has a virus, all of PBworks is marked unsafe?!" a frustrated Weekly wrote on Twitter and Facebook on Thursday. In a follow-up interview, he said: "That's tarnishi...