Google News Archives

This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code "GSoC" 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD.

Google on Tuesday announced the Chrome 147 stable release to all Windows, macOS, and Linux users. There are a number of refinements in this latest routine Chrome stable update paired with various fixes and new developer capabilities.

Google's Android LLVM toolchain team shared publicly this week that they have begun making use of AutoFDO for automatic feedback directed optimizations of their Linux kernel build used by Android.

Google has shared exciting news with us today that they are bringing their Chrome web browser to ARM64 Linux devices.

Google announced today that beginning later this year they are moving the Chrome web browser from its four week release cycle down to a two week release cadence.

Following yesterday's Chrome 145 release with JPEG-XL support, Chrome 146 today was promoted to the beta channel to help facilitate broader testing of the next round of Chrome/Chromium browser improvements.

Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it's back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today's Chrome 145 stable debut.

To the frustration of many developers and end-users, back in 2022 Google deprecated JPEG-XL support in Chrome/Chromium and proceeded to remove the support. That decision was widely slammed and ultimately Google said they may end up reconsidering it. In November there was renewed activity and interest in restoring JPEG-XL within Google's image web browser and as of yesterday the code was merged.

For helping with thread placement on modern AMD Zen systems with multiple CPU core complexes, Google has been developing "BPF CCX" that leverages the Linux kernel's eBPF capabilities paired with a user-space agent for fine-grained thread control. Google has found very positive performance results out of their use of this alternative means of high performance scheduling for achieving even greater performance on AMD processors under Linux.

Google's Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for Linux printing via the XDG Portal. This is important to allow print support from within Flatpak or Snap sandboxed versions of Google's web browser.

Back in 2022 was the surprising decision by Google that they were going to deprecate JPEG-XL image support in Chrome. By the end of 2022 they went ahead and removed JPEG-XL support from Chrome/Chromium to the frustration of many web developers and end-users interested in this image format. Now though as we get ready to roll into 2026, Google engineers are looking at bringing back JPEG-XL support to the Chrome web browser.

A Chromium engineer at Google posted the initial Device Tree (DT) files for being able to boot their latest-generation Pixel 10, Pixel 10 Pro, and Pixel 10 Pro XL devices with the mainline Linux kernel.

Google is preparing a field trial with the Chrome web browser of accelerated video decoding under Wayland/Linux as a step toward rolling it out by default for a better video playback experience on the Linux desktop with Wayland-based environments.

Merged yesterday to the Chromium open-source codebase for the Google Chrome web browser is Wayland color management support! Linux users running on Wayland will now be able to enjoy high dynamic range (HDR) video playback within Google's web browser.

Google Chrome/Chromium is preparing to ship with "--ozone-platform-hint=auto" functionality by default so the web browser will play nicer out-of-the-box with Wayland.

The latest software with pending Wayland color management support for enabling HDR display support is the open-source Google Chromium code for the Chrome web browser.

As part of work going back to 2019, an engineer on Google's Chromium OS team submitted an updated proposal on Monday for seeking to standardize the haptic touchpad support within the Linux kernel.

Google yesterday lifted the lid on their work around Skia "Graphite" as a new rasterization back-end designed for modern graphics APIs like Vulkan and supporting multi-threading by default. Skia Graphite aims to deliver much better performance within the Chrome/Chromium web browser.

Back in March Google unveiled the Live Update Orchestrator "LUO" as a new means of live kernel updates for running production systems with a particular emphasis on servers running cloud workloads. A second iteration of the Live Update Orchestrator patches were posted for review today.

This week Google announced all of the accepted projects for this year's Google Summer of Code (GSoC). There are 1,272 accepted students/projects this year for student developers working on various interesting open-source efforts over the summer.

The Google Pixel 4a smartphones launched in mid-2020 and now in mid-2025 it looks like we might finally be close to seeing mainline kernel support for the Pixel 4a devices and other hardware making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon 730/730G/732G SoCs.

Engineers from Google are proposing that distributed ThinLTO build support be introduced for LLVM/Clang when compiling the Linux kernel. The distributed ThinLTO mode for link-time optimizations can lead to quicker build times than the current in-process ThinLTO mode while also being more convenient and work with kernel live-patching solutions.

Google's Ozone Wayland support continues to improve for benefiting the Chrome/Chromium web browser. The newest addition merged this past week is support for the xdg-session-management protocol.

While there is Kpatch, Ksplice, and other live patching solutions already in use for patching a running Linux kernel for deploying security updates without downtime, Google engineers are developing the Live Update Orchestrator as a new means of transitioning to a new updated kernel with minimal downtime.

The Google Chrome web browser is moving away from the FreeType font rendering library and instead pursuing their Skrifa project that is written in Rust for better memory safety around handling fonts on the web.

Google engineers themselves haven't been energetically pursuing Wayland support within the Ozone abstraction layer for the Chrome/Chromium web browser but thankfully the consulting firm Igalia continues pushing this native Wayland support along. Nick Yamane with Igalia has out a new blog post covering the remaining items being addressed.

Google and the Linux Foundation today announced the creation of the "Supporters of Chromium-Based Browsers" fund to help provide funding to open-source developers working on Chromium-based open-source projects.

With the upcoming Linux 6.14 cycle Google is poised to have its ChromeOS UCSI driver upstreamed.

A patch-set working on faster page installations for Google's Binder that is used by Android is on the way for Linux 6.14.

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser code has merged support for linux_drm_syncobj_v1 as the modern Wayland protocol for explicit buffer synchronization.

The Google Chrome/Chromium web browser merged two notable features yesterday for Linux users.

Google announced today that the Android 15 source code has been released to the Android Open-Source Project (AOSP).

While two years ago Google notably axed support for JPEG-XL within the Chrome web browser, they remain bullish on WebP and AVIF for imaging needs. This past week they finally announced Google Search is now supporting AVIF images.

Google Android engineers have shared a status update on bringing support for 16KB page size handling to Android. In moving from a 4KB to 16KB page size, Google has found a 5~10% performance boost but at the cost of around ~9% additional RAM usage.

Google has promoted Chrome 128 to its stable channel across macOS, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Google engineer Rong Xu has proposed adding AutoFDO and Propeller support to the mainline Linux kernel for its Clang-based build as it can help the system performance improve in the up to 5~10% range.

The Chrome platform changes for Linux 6.11 as code predominantly for enabling Chromebooks with the mainline Linux kernel is set to introduce two new drivers.

The Google Chrome/Chromium 127 web browser release should finally provide support for PipeWire camera capturing support!

Similar to Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure spinning their own Arm-based processors for their data centers, Google Cloud today announced the Google Axion Processors that will be available in the future.

The Google Open-Source Blog today announced Jpegli, a JPEG coding library for encode/decode that maintains backwards compatibility with JPEG while offering around a 35% compression ratio improvement for high quality JPEG compression.

Google is announcing today they are contributing $1M USD to the Rust Foundation to focus on enhancing interoperability between the C++ and Rust programming languages.

In addition to Firefox 122 making it to stable today, Google has also promoted their Chrome 121 web browser to its stable channel.

The Google Tensor GS101 SoC launched in 2021 with the Google Pixel 6 smartphone. More than two years later the mainline Linux kernel is finally to see upstream support with the forthcoming Linux 6.8 kernel cycle.

Google on Wednesday released Chrome 120 as the newest version of their cross-platform web browser.

Google engineers on Wednesday posted an initial "request for comments" set of patches that re-implement Android's Binder code within the Linux kernel in the Rust programming language rather than C.

The Xiph.Org-developed Theora lossy video compression format was once popular for open-source video compression but in an era of VP9 and AV1 its usage has waned. Google engineers are now working to remove Theora support from their Chrome/Chromium web browser.

Google engineers on Friday promoted Chrome 119 to its beta stage with some interesting features in tow.

Google formally unveiled Android 14 today in New York City at its Made By Google event. With that, Google has also published the Android 14 Open-Source Project (AOSP).

Moving forward Google engineers are working to roll-out new Chrome stable releases even faster.

Google is using their NEXT'23 conference today to announce that C3A instances are debuting in private preview form for these new AArch64 VMs powered by AmpereOne processors.