This morning, we announced a new stable channel update of Google Chrome. For developers, this update represents some significant advances in terms of extensibility and new HTML and JavaScript APIs. Extensions are now available to all Google Chrome users, which enables you to provide additional functionality not just on your site, but to also bring content and functionality from your site into the browser, regardless of what sites a user may have open at any given time.

Google Chrome also includes a number of new HTML and JavaScript APIs. For instance, we now support the Web SQL Database API, which allows you to store data in a structured manner on the user's computer. If you're looking for a simpler client-side storage mechanism for relatively small amounts of data, check out the localStorage portion of the Web Storage API. We're already working on making these new APIs more useful and you should see a couple of improvements on the developer channel soon. In particular, we're working on Application Cache which gives you the ability to serve HTML and JavaScript that references content in the Web SQL Database. SessionStorage, the little brother of localStorage, is coming soon as well.

Besides working on these four storage focused APIs, we have also implemented WebSockets. This is a new API for sending data over a persistent bi-directional communication channel, designed to be easier, more powerful, and less resource intensive than using XHR. Finally, today we are also making available -- in Windows only -- the new notification API that allows you to present information to users, such as event reminders or status updates, via a panel in the user's status-bar area. This panel allows you to provide more styling than window.alert(). It should also be much less irritating to your users - with this API notifications are still visible but do not get a user's attention by stealing cursor, tab or window focus.

If you have questions about the extensions APIs, the extensions discussion group continues to be the best place to get answers. For the new HTML and JavaScript APIs, we've just created a new Chromium HTML5 group. We're excited about these and the other capabilities we'll be adding soon but we're even more excited to see all of the amazing stuff you'll be creating with them!

Posted by Ian Fette, Product Manager