7 Google Features Only Available in Google Chrome

Google Chrome is at the forefront of the new technologies and Google services are the first to use them. Here are some examples of features only available in Google Chrome:

1. Native printing in Google Docs. You no longer have to download PDF files and use Adobe Reader or a similar PDF reader to print documents. Google implemented a W3C working draft from 2006.2. Uploading folders in Google Docs. While you can install a Java applet in other browsers to upload folders, Chrome is the only browser that supports this feature natively.

>7 Google Features Only Available in Google Chrome

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Google Chrome is at the forefront of the new technologies and Google services are the first to use them. Here are some examples of features only available in Google Chrome:


1. Native printing in Google Docs. You no longer have to download PDF files and use Adobe Reader or a similar PDF reader to print documents. Google implemented a W3C working draft from 2006.


2. Uploading folders in Google Docs. While you can install a Java applet in other browsers to upload folders, Chrome is the only browser that supports this feature natively.

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>New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels – Official Gmail Blog

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New in Gmail Labs: Smart Labels

Wednesday, March 09, 2011 | 10:00 AM

Posted by Stanley Chen, Software Engineer

People get a lot of email these days. On top of personal messages, there are group mailing lists, social network notifications, credit card statements, newsletters you might have signed up for, and promotional email from a shopping site you used once months ago. Gmail’s filters and labelswere invented to help manage the deluge, but while I have about 100 filters that triage and label my incoming mail, most of my friends and family have all their messages in a giant unfiltered inbox.

Last year, we launched Priority Inbox to automatically sort incoming email and help you focus on the messages that matter most. Today, we're launching a complementary feature in Gmail Labs called Smart Labels, which helps you classify and organize your email. Once you turn it on from theLabs tab in Settings, Smart Labels automatically categorizes incoming Bulk, Notification and Forum messages, and labels them as such. “Bulk” mail includes any kind of mass mailing (such as newsletters and promotional email) and gets filtered out of your inbox by default (where you can easily read it later), “Notifications” are messages sent to you directly (like account statements and receipts), and email from group mailing lists gets labeled as “Forums.”

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>Summarize your data with pivot tables – Docs Blog

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Summarize your data with pivot tables

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Labels: Google Apps Blog, googlenew, spreadsheets

Starting today, we're rolling out pivot tables in Google spreadsheets. Pivot tables make it easy to process and summarize large data sets in seconds. Check out the video below for a look at how pivot tables work in Google spreadsheets:

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>New in Labs: Background Send – Official Gmail Blog

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New in Labs: Background Send

Monday, April 25, 2011 | 3:22 PM

Posted by Patrick Doyle, Software Engineer

We’re always looking for ways to make Gmail faster. One of the most common delays happens after you hit that “Send” button, when you’re waiting patiently for a couple seconds for Gmail to send your message. If you send a lot of email, that can add up to a lot of lost time.

To help give you that time back, there’s a new feature in Gmail Labs called Background Send. Once you turn it on from the Labs tab in Settings, you can get on with what you’re doing while Gmail quietly sends off your mail in the background. You can keep reading your inbox, compose new messages, chat with people — all the things you’d usually do. You can even send more than one message in the background at the same time.

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>Store up to 25,000 contacts – Official Gmail Blog

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Store up to 25,000 contacts

Wednesday, May 04, 2011 | 9:29 AM

Posted by Mike Helmick, Software Engineer

Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts.

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>Official Google Blog: Call phones from Gmail

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Call phones from Gmail

Gmail voice and video chat makes it easy to stay in touch with friends and family using your computer’s microphone and speakers. But until now, this required both people to be at their computers, signed into Gmail at the same time. Given that most of us don’t spend all day in front of our computers, we thought, “wouldn’t it be nice if you could call people directly on their phones?”


Starting today, you can call any phone right from Gmail.





Calls to the U.S. and Canada will be free for at least the rest of the year and calls to other countries will be billed at our very low rates. We worked hard to make these rates really cheap (see comparison table) with calls to the U.K., France, Germany, China, Japan—and many more countries—for as little as $0.02 per minute.

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>How Google dominates the Web

>Google began strictly as a search company, and it’s still their bread and butter. However, as the company has grown, it’s spread its tentacles like a giant octopus out to most parts of the Web. A benevolent giant octopus, providing lots of highly useful services, but a giant nonetheless. Try surfing the Web without touching a single Google service. It’s impossible.

Google even shows up in places you’d never expect it to. For example, you know those “captchas” that websites and online forums use to verify that you’re human? Google bought reCAPTCHA in 2009 and is currently using the captcha input from hundreds of millions of users to improve its text recognition software.

But that’s just a tiny little service. Let’s see where Google has a more dominant presence, starting with, but not ending with, search.

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>Is Goo.gl really the fastest URL shortener? (chart)

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A few weeks ago, Google made its URL shortener, Goo.gl, open for everyone and gave it its own website, similar to Bit.ly’s. Previously, Goo.gl could only be used by Google’s own services.

When they announced this, Google made a pretty bold statement: “… we do want it to be the stablest, most secure, and fastest URL shortener on the web.”

That’s something that we should test, isn’t it?

So, for a couple of weeks after Goo.gl became open, we monitored its performance and reliability together with several other URL shortening services, including Bit.ly and TinyURL. We used, of course, our own monitoring service (i.e. Pingdom).

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