Posted by Adrienne Porter Felt and Emily Schechter, Chrome Security Team
Security has always been critical to the web, but challenges involved in site migration have inhibited HTTPS adoption for several years. In the interest of a safer web for all, at Google we've worked alongside many others across the online ecosystem to better understand and address these challenges, resulting in real change. A web with ubiquitous HTTPS is not the distant future. It's happening now, with secure browsing becoming standard for users of Chrome.
Today, we're adding a new section to the HTTPS Report Card in our Transparency Report that includes data on how HTTPS usage has been increasing over time. More than half of pages loaded and two-thirds of total time spent by Chrome desktop users occur via HTTPS, and we expect these metrics to continue their strong upward trajectory.
Percentage pages loaded over HTTPS in Chrome
As the remainder of the web transitions to HTTPS, we'll continue working to ensure that migrating to HTTPS is a no-brainer, providing business benefit beyond increased security. HTTPS currently enables the best performance the web offers and powerful features that benefit site conversions, including both new features such as service workers for offline support and web push notifications, and existing features such as credit card autofill and the HTML5 geolocation API that are too powerful to be used over non-secure HTTP.
As with all major site migrations, there are certain steps webmasters should take to ensure that search ranking transitions are smooth when moving to HTTPS. To help with this, we've posted two FAQs to help sites transition correctly, and will continue to improve our web fundamentals guidance.
We've seen many sites successfully transition with negligible effect on their search ranking and traffic. Brian Wood, Director of Marketing SEO at Wayfair, a large retail site, commented "we were able to migrate Wayfair.com to HTTPS with no meaningful impact to Google rankings or Google organic search traffic. We are very pleased to say that all Wayfair sites are now fully HTTPS." CNET, a large tech news site, had a similar experience. "We successfully completed our move of CNET.com to HTTPS last month," said John Sherwood, Vice President of Engineering & Technology at CNET. "Since then, there has been no change in our Google rankings or Google organic search traffic."
Webmasters that include ads on their sites also carefully monitor ad performance and revenue during large site migrations. The portion of Google ad traffic served over HTTPS has increased dramatically over the past 3 years. All ads that come from any Google source always support HTTPS, including AdWords, AdSense or DoubleClick Ad Exchange; ads sold directly, such as those through DoubleClick for Publishers, still need to be designed to be HTTPS-friendly. This means there will be no change to the Google-sourced ads that appear on a site after migrating to HTTPS. Many publishing partners have seen this in practice after a successful HTTPS transition. Jason Tollestrup, Director of Programmatic Advertising for the Washington Post, "saw no material impact to AdX revenue with the transition to SSL."
As migrating to HTTPS becomes even easier, we'll continue working towards a web that's secure by default. Don't hesitate to start planning your HTTPS migration today!
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Posted by Vishal Kumar, Senior Product Manager, AdMob
Originally posted to the Inside AdMob blog
Recently we launched a new eBook called "The No-Nonsense Guide to Native Ads", the latest in our No-Nonsense series. This guide is designed to provide a comprehensive overview of native ads and share practical tips and best practices for implementing native ads in your app.
Over the last several years, app users have raised their expectations for a high quality app UX. To meet these expectations, ad formats have evolved accordingly. The most fitting new format that meets these higher expectations is native ads – ads that match the look and feel of the surrounding app content. And as spending on native ads is expected to grow to $21 billion in 2018, this presents a huge opportunity for publishers to enhance their user experience and tap into new revenues.
In the eBook, you’ll learn:
Download your copy here:
Posted by Taylor Savage, Product Manager, Polymer
Welcome to the Polymer Summit livestream 2016. Today, we’ll kick off with a keynote about how the core Polymer team is thinking about the project’s past, present, and future. We’ll follow with a full day of sessions covering every aspect of building great web applications using Polymer, including a unique new Polymer experience, and thoughts from our partners. Tune into the livestream below to follow along. We look forward to engaging in the conversation with you at #PolymerSummit.
Posted by Champika Fernando, Product Manager, Kids Coding
At Google I/O, we announced our ongoing investment in Blockly with the release of a native Android version. We also highlighted significant improvements to the performance of web Blockly, which enables better rendering performance on mobile devices. Now iOS developers will have access to an open-source developer preview of Blockly for iOS that supports building better experiences on mobile, including multi-touch and enhanced animations as new experimental features.
Today’s release supports our ongoing efforts to enable developers to create consistent, high-quality, beginner programming experiences - as block-based programming interfaces can make coding more accessible by removing syntax errors and supporting “tinkerability.” We believe that coding is more than just a set of technical skills; coding is a valuable tool for everyone, empowering users from around the globe to imagine, invent, and explore.
With Blockly for iOS, developers can add Blockly views and fragments directly into their iOS app. This will offer tighter integration and improved performance compared to using a WebView. In this developer preview, blocks are currently optimized for tablets, but ready to customize for any app.
In addition, if you already use Blockly we're releasing a major update to the tools for creating custom blocks and configuring Blockly for your app, check out the new Blockly Developer Tools. The new tools allow you to edit and maintain a library of custom blocks, quickly configure toolboxes, and export and import files to local storage.
Click here to learn more, and get started on Blockly for iOS today. And to share feedback and get news, we welcome you to join the Blockly mailing list. We look forward to seeing your future builds!
Posted by Josh Simmons, Open Source Programs Office
One of the goals of the Open Source Programs Office is to encourage more people to contribute to open source software. One way we achieve that goal is through our student programs, Google Summer of Code (for university students) and Google Code-in (for pre-university students).
Over 15,000 students from more than 100 countries have worked with 23,000 mentors and contributed to 560+ open source projects.
This is why we’re excited to announce the next round of both of our student programs!
Google Code-in begins for students November 28, 2016
For the seventh consecutive year, Google Code-in will give students (ages 13-17) a chance to explore open source. Students will find opportunities to learn and get hands on experience with tasks from a range of categories. This structure allows students to stretch themselves as they take on increasingly more challenging tasks.
Getting started is easy: once the contest begins, simply choose an interesting task from our participating organizations’ lists and complete it. Mentors from the organizations are available to help online.
Google Code-in is for students asking questions like:
With tasks in five different categories, there’s something to fit almost any student’s skills:
Google Summer of Code student applications open on March 20, 2017
Google Summer of Code (GSoC) provides university students from around the world with an opportunity to take their skills and hone them by contributing to open source projects during their summer break from university.
Students gain invaluable experience working with mentors on these open source software projects, earning a stipend upon successful completion of their project.
We’re proud to keep this tradition going: we’ll be opening student applications for Google Summer of Code 2017 on March 20, 2017. Applications for interested open source organizations open on January 19, 2017.
Students, it’s never too early to start preparing or thinking about your proposal. You can learn about the organizations that participated in Google Summer of Code 2016 and the projects students worked on. We also encourage you to explore other resources like the student and mentor manuals and frequently asked questions.
You can learn more on the program website.
Share the news with your friends and stay tuned, more details are coming soon!
Posted by Taylor Savage
The Polymer Summit is almost here! We’ll kick off live from Tobacco Dock, London at 10:00AM GMT this coming Monday, October 17th. To get the most out of the event, make sure to check out the speaker list and talk schedule on our site.
Can’t join us in person? Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered! You can tune into the summit live on www.polymer-project.org/summit. We will stream the keynote and all sessions over the course of the event. If you want us to send you a reminder to tune into the livestream, sign up here.
Subscribe to the Chrome Developers YouTube Channel to stay up to date as we’ll be publishing all of the talks from the event here.
We’re looking forward to seeing you in person or remotely on Tuesday. Don’t forget to join the social conversations at #PolymerSummit.
Posted by Xiangye Xiao and Bob Jung, Internationalization
A big challenge in sharing digital information around the world is “tofu”—the blank boxes that appear when a computer or website isn’t able to display text: ⯐. Tofu can create confusion, a breakdown in communication, and a poor user experience.
Five years ago we set out to address this problem via the Noto—aka “No more tofu”—font project. Today, Google’s open-source Noto font family provides a beautiful and consistent digital type for every symbol in the Unicode standard, covering more than 800 languages and 110,000 characters.
The Noto project started as a necessity for Google’s Android and Chrome OS operating systems. When we began, we did not realize the enormity of the challenge. It required design and technical testing in hundreds of languages, and expertise from specialists in specific scripts. In Arabic, for example, each character has four glyphs (i.e., shapes a character can take) that change depending on the text that comes after it. In Indic languages, glyphs may be reordered or even split into two depending on the surrounding text.
The key to achieving this milestone has been partnering with experts in the field of type and font design, including Monotype, Adobe, and an amazing network of volunteer reviewers. Beyond “no more tofu” in the common languages used every day, Noto will be used to preserve the history and culture of rare languages through digitization. As new characters are introduced into the Unicode standard, Google will add these into the Noto font family.
Google has a deep commitment to openness and the accessibility and innovation that come with it. The full Noto font family, design source files, and the font building pipeline are available for free at the links below. In the spirit of sharing and communication across borders and cultures, please use and enjoy!
Posted by Matias Duarte, VP, Material Design at Google
As a child I was surrounded by the commercial design and pop-cultural art of Japan. I played with Transformer robot toys, pumped quarters into Pac-Man and Donkey Kong, watched Star Blazers (Yamato) and Robotech (Macross) cartoons after school, and listened to mix-tapes on my Sony Walkman.
In art school, I became fascinated by the creative dialog of the late 1800s, where western artists drew inspiration from their peers in Asia. The flattening of perspective and embrace of the two-dimensional graphic qualities of the image were revolutionary at the time, and would lay the foundation for the great modernist movements of painting and design in the West.
These influences can be found in Material Design, our comprehensive system for visual, motion, and interaction design across all platforms and all devices. Material Design continues to evolve but, at its core, it relies on the foundations of good graphic and print design – clear typography, systematic layout, thoughtful application of scale, intentional use of color and white space, and foreground imagery. Working together these elements do far more than please the eye. They create hierarchy, meaning, and focus attention on content.
Yesterday, I was in Tokyo to host SPAN, our annual design event that engages the many ways design and technology shape our everyday lives. SPAN Tokyo provides us with an opportunity to honor the influence of Japanese art and culture on Material Design, as we highlight the most inspiring local designers and broader creative community. In anticipation of the event, we have translated our Material Design Guidelines into Japanese which we are please to announce are available for download starting today (material.google.com/jp). This document is a first step towards making Material Design a conversation that includes our Japanese friends. Furthermore, it is a symbol of our commitment to continuing this dialog of design throughout Asia.
With that in mind, we’ve organized SPAN Tokyo to feature a broad range of practitioners contributing to the contemporary visual cultural happening in Japan today—from art generated through machine learning and neural networks, to start-up culture, ikebana, type design, and much more. We’re honored to have been joined by this esteemed group of speakers, including London Design Museum director Deyan Sudjic, illustrator Mariya Suzuki, artist Keiichi Tanaami, and many more.
To recap yesterday's conference and stay up to date on future events, follow us on Twitter, Google+, Facebook, and sign up for the Google Design Newsletter.
