Time is quickly running out for the students to apply for this year's Google Summer of Code.

The Chromium project has been accepted as a mentoring organization for this awesome program. This means that over the summer, you have the opportunity to work on new and exciting features for Chromium (and supporting projects) and experience browser development first-hand with a mentor from the project and real deadlines.

Full guidelines and details on how to apply can be found on the official gsoc website. To participate, pick an idea off our handy list or suggest one of your own (it's best to discuss it with a mentor first), then write up a proposal on how you'd go about accomplishing the task in the allotted time frame (3 months).

You can find a list of suggested topics here. These are only recommendations though, feel free to stop by our mailing list or irc channel and suggest something new. If you do decide to write your own proposal, we're looking for familiarity with the codebase, and lots of intelligent detail. The more details you can provide, the better!

Student registration runs from the 23rd of March until the 3rd of April. We're looking forward to seeing the project submissions and expanding our community involvement.

Posted by Jeremy Moskovich, Software Engineer

Since we launched Google Chrome in September of 2008, we've tried to provide insight into the product and its development here on the Chromium blog. In that time, we've made a lot of changes to Google Chrome to provide a better experience, and now that change is coming to the Chromium Blog. This morning, we launched a new blog, called the Google Chrome Blog. 

The Google Chrome Blog is intended to highlight points of interest to general users, in a way that is accessible to as wide an audience as possible. It's where you will read about new features that have been released, find interesting tips on how to get the most out of Google Chrome, and stay plugged into the product in general. Many of the types of posts that previously would have surfaced here, such as announcements of our spell-checking improvements, will now appear on this new blog instead of the Chromium blog.

Have no fear, the Chromium blog will still exist, but now with a renewed focus on the original purpose of the Chromium blog. The blog will be dedicated to announcements of things that are happening within the Chromium project itself. We've always felt it important that, as an open source product, we do our work in the open (from general and technical discussion groups to code reviews to design docs) and stay in touch with the open source community. We're going to take this opportunity to try to be more communicative about project status, and news of note particularly to the developer community. We hope these changes make for a better experience for you, so please let us know what you think!

Posted by Ian Fette, Product Manager

We want Google Chrome to be as stable as possible. No matter what site you browse to or what you do, Chrome should never crash. A system we call "distributed reliability testing" is one of the main tools we use to help turn that goal into reality.

One of the advantages to being associated with Google is that we have access to a lot of information about the Web, and a lot of computers to test on. About once an hour, our distributed test infrastructure takes the very latest version of Google Chrome in development and uses it to automatically load a large number of the pages that Google has seen are most popular around the world. When it's done, it produces a report like this on the Buildbot waterfall that all our developers (and anyone else) can see:

Results for top 500 web sites:

success: 499; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 1

Results for top 500 web sites without sandbox:

success: 463; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 2

Results for extended list of web sites:

success: 99768; crashes: 3; crash dumps: 3; timeout: 463

Here the final test got through a bit over 100,000 pages before stopping to make way for the next build to be tested. And before each Dev, Beta, or Stable channel release, we run with a much larger number of URLs.

In addition, we "fuzz-test" the user interface, automatically performing arbitrary sequences of actions (opening a new tab, pressing the spacebar, opening various dialogs, etc. — a total of more than 30 possible actions). These are also run in our distributed testing architecture, so we can exercise thousands of combinations for each new version of Google Chrome in progress. The same report that shows the page-load results above collects these UI test results too:

Results for automated UI test:

success: 64643; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 0

This sort of large-scale testing is great for finding crashes that happen only rarely, or that only affect pages that developers wouldn't have visited as part of their haphazard manual testing. By catching a problem right away even if it's very rare, it's easier for developers to figure out what change caused the error and fix it before it ever gets close to showing up in Google Chrome itself.

Posted by Pamela Greene and Patrick Johnson, Software Engineers

If you're anything like us, you're spending more and more of your time working online. The spellchecker built into Chromium can be a big help in keeping your blog, email, documents, and forum postings spelled correctly and easy to read. Chromium integrates the popular open source library Hunspell with WebKit's built-in spellchecking infrastructure to check words and to provide suggestions in 27 different languages.

The Hunspell dictionary maintainers have done a great job creating high-quality dictionaries that anybody can use, but one of the problems with any dictionary is that there are inevitably omissions, especially as new words appear or proper nouns come into common use. We at Google are in a good position to use our knowledge of the internet to identify and fix some of these omissions. The Google translation team used their language models to generate a sorted list of the most popular words in each language. This was cross-checked with the Hunspell dictionaries to generate a list of the top 1000 words not present in each dictionary. This list includes many popular words, but also common misspellings. To remove these words, each list was reviewed by specialist in that language. Generally, we tried to keep proper nouns and even foreign words as long as they were in common usage.

We hope that by using the the existing GPL/LGPL/MPL tri-license for our addition, our work can be picked up by other users of Hunspell. We also hope to make more improvements in the future, both for additional languages like Turkish, and to refine the word lists we already have. If you're passionate about your language, you can help out by writing affix rules for the added words or reviewing more word lists.

The recent dev-channel release of Google Chrome (2.0.160.0) has the additional words we generated for 19 of the languages. Hopefully, you'll see fewer common words marked as misspelled. For example, the English dictionary now includes "antivirus," "anime," "screensaver," and "webcam," and commonly used names such as "BibTeX," "Mozilla," "Obama," and "Wikipedia." For our scientific users, we even have "gastroenterology," "oligonucleotide," and "Saccharomyces"! We'd like to give special thanks to the great help we got from the translation team who generated the words and the language search specialists who reviewed the lists.

Posted by Brett Wilson and Siddhartha Chattopadhyay, Software Engineers

One of the new features in the most recent dev-channel release of Google Chrome (2.0.160.0) is Irregexp, a completely new implementation of regular expressions (regexps) in the V8 JavaScript engine. Irregexp builds on V8's existing infrastructure for memory management and native code generation and is tailored to work well for the kinds of regexps used by JavaScript programs on the web. The result is a considerable improvement in V8's regexp performance.

While the V8 team has been working hard to improve JavaScript performance, one part of the language that we have so far not given much attention is regexps. Our previous implementation was based on the widely used PCRE library developed by Philip Hazel at the University of Cambridge. The version we used, known as JSCRE, was adapted and improved by the WebKit project for use with JavaScript. Using JSCRE gave us a regular expression implementation that was compatible with industry standards and has served us well. However, as we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library. The SquirrelFish team is following a similar approach with their JavaScript engine.

A fundamental decision we made early in the design of Irregexp was that we would be willing to spend extra time compiling a regular expression if that would make running it faster. During compilation Irregexp first converts a regexp into an intermediate automaton representation. This is in many ways the "natural" and most accessible representation and makes it much easier to analyze and optimize the regexp. For instance, when compiling /Sun|Mon/ the automaton representation lets us recognize that both alternatives have an 'n' as their third character. We can quickly scan the input until we find an 'n' and then start to match the regexp two characters earlier. Irregexp looks up to four characters ahead and matches up to four characters at a time.

After optimization we generate native machine code which uses backtracking to try different alternatives. Backtracking can be time-consuming so we use optimizations to avoid as much of it as we can. There are techniques to avoid backtracking altogether but the nature of regexps in JavaScript makes it difficult to apply them in our case, though it is something we may implement in the future.

During development we have tested Irregexp against one million of the most popular webpages to ensure that the new implementation stays compatible with our previous implementation and the web. We have also used this data to create a new benchmark which is included in version 3 of the V8 Benchmark Suite. We feel this is a good reflection of what is found on the web.

If you want to try this out, and help us test it in the process, you can subscribe to the dev-channel and if you see problems that might be related to Irregexp consider filing a bug.

And BTW, we'll have sessions on V8 and other Chrome-related topics in May at Google I/O, Google's largest developer conference.

Posted by Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen and Lasse Reichstein Holst Nielsen, Software Engineers

Although the term "ClickJacking" is new, the underlying issue has been known for years. ClickJacking attacks affect all Web browsers because the attacks rely on standard browser features to trick the user into clicking on a dangerous spot on another Web page. A few months ago, Jeremiah Grossman and Robert Hansen sparked renewed interest in ClickJacking by demonstrating a clever application of the technique against Flash Player. Unfortunately, there is no "silver bullet" solution to all ClickJacking attacks. To find the best long-term solution, we're collaborating with other browser vendors and the standards community. If you're interested in ClickJacking solutions, I'd recommend reading Mark Pilgrim's summary of recent ClickJacking discussion in the HTML 5 working group and joining in the discussion.

Posted by Adam Barth, Software Engineer

Why are the buttons where they are instead of where I want them to be? What's up with bookmarks? Why does the Google Chrome UI look and operate the way it does? These are probably questions that some, many or even all you have about Google Chrome. We explained how we came to some of those decisions in a previous post:

"To achieve the streamlined feel we were after … we had our own intuitions about what was and wasn't useful in current browsers, we had no idea how those ideas matched to reality. So in typical Google fashion, we turned to data; we ran long studies of the browsing habits of thousands of volunteers, compiled giant charts of what features people did and didn't use, argued over and incorporated that data into our designs and prototypes, ran experiments, watched how our test users reacted, listened to their feedback, and then repeated the cycle over and over and over again."

To provide some more insight into this process, I should explain what we mean by "data." The data we turn to is both quantitative and qualitative. Usage logs provide statistics such how many users have tried a feature and how frequently a feature gets used. These logs are collected only from people who have chosen to share usage statistics with us. This quantitative data tells us the "how" and the "when" but not the "why." For that, we use qualitative data gathered through research methods like surveys, interviews and contextual inquiry which involves observing people in their home or work environments. Often we bring people to one of our usability labs where we can observe their interactions and collect feedback on a new feature we are working on. Many times we employ an eye tracker where we can find out what exactly people are looking at on our user interface. By incorporating data from all these sources into our design process, we hope to provide a user experience that satisfies the needs of the many Google Chrome users out there.

In the future, we are planning on releasing some of our research on this blog and the on the UX Site to show how the data we are collecting is impacting the Chrome experience.

All of our research data comes from studying and observing people. But what kind of "people" do I mean? Probably someone just like you. So if you are interested in becoming a potential participant in a research study on Chrome or one of the many other Google products, I encourage you to sign up at google.com/usability.

Posted by David Choi, User Experience Researcher