Google’s plan to kill cookies means remove third-party cookies from Chrome hasn’t gone smoothly scrapping Federated Learning of Cohorts FLoC
Google plans the kill cookies
Category: Google
News from Google: new projects, new features, new ideas. And also new about Android
Google Analytics illegal in Austria
Google Analytics illegal in Austria: Austria has ruled that Austrian website providers using Google Analytics are in violation of the GDPR.
The world’s second-most popular OS
For ages now, every annual report on desktop operating system market share has had the same top two contenders: Microsoft’s Windows in a commanding lead at number one and Apple’s macOS in distant second place. But in 2020, Chrome OS became the second-most popular OS, and Apple fell to third. Here is the year-over-year breakdown (IDC’s numbers include desktops, laptops, and workstations): Windows: Down 4.9 points, from 85.4% in 2019 to 80.5% in 2020 Chrome OS: Up 4.4 points, from 6.4% in 2019 to 10.8% in 2020 macOS: Up 0.8…
Now view Grogu in 3D
Grogu, Baby Yoda, the breakout star of the Disney+ Star Wars spin-off The Mandalorian, can be viewed in 3D on your phone
Apple has finally met its Fortnite match
Epic Games executed its most ambitious Fortnite live event yesterday, leading both Apple and Google to remove one of the world’s most popular games from their app stores. It was a well-choreographed sequence of events designed to highlight the power Apple and Google hold over app stores, especially Apple’s walled garden. Epic Games has now filed lawsuits against both Apple and Google in a battle that’s likely to last months. Epic Games is uniquely positioned to pull off a stunt like this, and now poses a serious threat to how Apple, in particular,…
Introducing Web Vitals: essential metrics for a healthy site
Optimizing for quality of user experience is key to the long-term success of any site on the web. Through our ongoing engagement and collaboration with millions of web developers and site owners, we’ve developed many helpful metrics and tools across Google to help business owners, marketers, and developers alike identify opportunities to improve user experiences. However, abundance of metrics and tools creates its own set of prioritization, clarity, and consistency challenges for many. Today we are introducing a new program, Web Vitals, an initiative by Google to provide unified guidance…
Google has been tracking nearly everything you buy online
Google has been quietly keeping track of nearly every single online purchase you’ve ever made, thanks to purchase receipts sent to your personal Gmail account
Google hints shutting down Google News over EU’s implementation of Article 11 or the “link tax”
Last week, The Guardian reported that Google may shut down Google News in Europe if the “link tax” is implemented in a way that the company has to pay news publishers. According to the “link tax” or Article 11, news publishers must receive a fair and proportionate remuneration for their publications by the information society service providers. The vice president of Google News, Richard Gingras expressed his concern regarding the proposal and told The Guardian that the discontinuation of the news service in Europe will depend on the final verdict,…
Microsoft Launcher review: A beautiful Android experience
After Microsoft gives up on Windows 10 Mobile, Microsoft Launcher is the upgraded version of the Microsoft Garage project Arrow Launcher, and we covered the key changes that came with that upgrade last week. It’s free and can be picked up from the Google Play Store. After some heavy usage over the last few days, we’re breaking down what works, what doesn’t, and where Microsoft should take their launcher from here. As Microsoft Launcher gains more publicity, there have been some rumblings about how it doesn’t look like Windows 10…
99.6 percent of new smartphones run Android or iOS
The latest smartphone figures from Gartner are out, and they paint an extremely familiar picture. Between them, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. This duopoly has been the norm for a while now (in the second quarter of 2015 this figure was 96.8 percent), but it’s always impressive — and slightly terrifying — to see how Google and Apple continue to wring the last decimal point drops of market share from global smartphone users. Of the 432 million smartphones…
AWS public cloud is twice as big as Microsoft, Google, IBM combined
Amazon Web Services is utterly dominating the competition, taking 45 percent of worldwide revenues for public cloud services, according to a new analysis. Microsoft and Google might be increasing public cloud revenues faster than AWS, but they’ve also got a long way to go to come close to catching up, a new analysis from Synergy Research Group shows. The combined revenues from Microsoft, Google, and IBM amount to less than 20 percent of worldwide infrastructure-as-a-service, or IaaS, revenues in Q3 2016, compared with AWS’s 45 percent, the research firm reports.
Microsoft warns iOS isn’t as secure as you think
Microsoft has warned customers that iOS is no more secure than Android, contradicting commonly held beliefs about the relative security of the two platforms. The company said that recent attacks targeting iOS prove it’s as vulnerable as Android. Brad Anderson, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for enterprise and client mobility, set out his views in a company blog post last week. He used the Pegasus iOS spyware, revealed last month, as an example of severe vulnerabilities present in iOS. Pegasus is capable of monitoring everything a user does on their device,…
Google opens Chromebooks to Android store
Google’s Chromebook update will allow the inexpensive laptops to run apps from the Android store opening them up to apps from Microsoft Word to Quicken.
275 million Android phones imperiled by new code-execution exploit
Almost 300 million phones running Google’s Android operating system are vulnerable to a newly developed drive-by attack that can install malware and take control of key operations, a security firm has warned. A proof-of-concept exploit dubbed Metaphor works against Android versions 2.2 through 4.0 and 5.0 and 5.1, which together are estimated to run 275 million phones, researchers from Israeli security firm NorthBit said. It attacks the same Stagefright media library that made an estimated 950 million Android phones susceptible to similar code-execution attacks last year. The following video demonstrates…
Davos: Smart machines set to transform society
Artificial intelligence will spur economic growth and create new wealth. Machines that “think” like humans will help solve huge problems, from curing cancer to climate change. Yet millions of human workers will need to retrain, as robots make their existing jobs redundant. These are the contrasting messages provided by the world’s leading technologists during the World Economic Forum in Davos this week, as political and business leaders ponder how best to respond to the rise of smart machines. Sebastian Thrun, the inventor of Google’s self-driving cars and an honorary professor…
Google Launches Android Studio 2.0 With Improved Android Emulator And New Instant Run Feature
Google today launched version 2.0 of its Android Studio integrated development environment (IDE) for writing apps for its mobile operating system. Android Studio, which is based on IntelliJ, launched back in 2013 and came out of beta a year ago. It includes everything a developer needs to build an app, including a code editor, code analysis tools, emulators for all of Google’s Android platforms, and more. The new version is now available as a preview in the Canary release channel of Android Studio. With version 2.0, as Google’s group product…
A free version of Google Play Music has launched just before Apple Music
The company is making a Pandora-like radio streaming service available to everyone in the US initially, consisting of curated playlists and automatically generated streams. However, users won’t be able to pick any song they want like Spotify’s free tier allows. “We think that by giving users a taste of Google Play Music, through the ad-supported tier, more users will ultimately become paying subscribers,” said Google Play’s vice president of partnerships Zahavah Levine. “Until now, this was a lost opportunity – to bring more people into Google Play Music.” Google is…
Office apps for Android phones are now available
There is no denying that Android is the world’s most popular mobile phone operating system with Google saying last year that on any given thirty-day rolling period there are more than a billion users of the OS. So when you are working to get your productivity software into the hands of a billion users, you can’t ignore the OS. Microsoft has already released and today they are taking it one step further with Office apps for the phone as well. If you want to try these apps out, you will…
Apple sides with Microsoft in closely watched patent dispute with Google
Lawyers for Microsoft and Google will appear Wednesday morning at the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco in a long-running dispute over patents that were originally owned by cell phone maker Motorola Mobility. But this is no ordinary patent showdown. Other tech companies are watching the case closely for its potential to set a precedent for negotiations over “standard-essential patents” or “SEPs” — technologies required to implement industry standards. The case has already created some unusual alliances. Apple (PDF) and T-Mobile (PDF) are among the companies siding with Microsoft in the case,…