Still only for Android 4.0 and above, Chrome for Android now comes with password and autofill form sync.

Chrome on desktops has been able to sync personal data like passwords and online form fields for ages, but the features just landed in the Android version of the browser today.

Chrome 26 for Android (download) brings automatic form filling and password synchonrization to the mobile browser, as well as unnamed performance and stability fixes. The new version of the browser also repairs a problem where a blank page would be shown instead of loading the correct URL.

Some features that made it into the beta version of Chrome 26 for Android don't appear to be in today's stable release. These include server-accelerated browsing using a proxy, Google's SPDY technology, and rudimentary support for Web Real-Time Communication (WebRTC).

Unlike many other browsers for Android, including Firefox, Dolphin, and Opera, Chrome is limited to running on Android 4.0 and above. If you've got Ice Cream Sandwich or Jelly Bean, you can install it.

In other related Chrome news, Google has released a ... [Read more]

Today, Google launched Blink, its fork of the WebKit browser engine, and members of Google's Chrome team clearly are excited about their liberation.

With the fork, Google will concentrate its core browser development efforts on Blink, which will gradually diverge from the WebKit project on which it's based. You can read more about the context and history leading to Blink in CNET's coverage, or read the official Blink blog post and Blink FAQ for the party line.

But to get a feel for the emotion involved, check the commentary from the Chrome team members themselves. They're jubilant.

Some of the best writing on the subject comes from Chrome developer Alex Russell, who believes Blink will let Google move Chrome much faster.

How long does it take you to build a thing you can try out, poke at, improve, or demolish? We mere humans do better when we have directness of action...

To make a better platform faster, you must be able to iterate faster. Steps away from that are steps away from a better platform. Today's WebKit defeats that imperative in ways large and small. It's not anybody's fault, but it does need t... [Read more]

A years-long marriage of convenience that linked Google and Apple browser technologies is ending in divorce.

In a move that Google says will technologically liberate both Chrome and Safari, the company has begun its own offshoot of the WebKit browser engine project called Blink. Initially it uses the same software code base that all WebKit-based browsers share, but over time it will diverge into a totally separate project, Google announced today.

The move marks the end of years of direct WebKit programming cooperation between the two rivals. WebKit is an open-source project, meaning that anyone can use and modify the software, but previously Google and Apple were all contributing to the same code base. With Blink, each company will go its own way, working separately to add new features and to support new Web standards rather than being able to capitalize on the other's work.

Major "forks" in open-source projects can be divisive and bitter, though a certain collegiality among Web programmers seems likely to forestall that negative outcome in the case of Blink. The pains of forking WebKit into Blink are worth it, argued Linus Upson, the Google vice president of engineering for Chrome.

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Mozilla's goals seemed quixotic at best when its research arm decided last year to put its brain power behind a new programming language called Rust.

However, Rust and its Servo testbed on GitHub apparently are now far enough along that no less than Samsung has committed some engineering know-how to its success, the companies announced today. Rust also has reached version 0.6.

Rust is an attempt to create a programming language to replace C++ with one that can handle today's heterogeneous, multicore hardware better while also being more secure. According to Mozilla Research's FAQ on Rust and Servo -- on which it plans to build a new ARM-based Android Web browsing engine like the heavily used WebKit or Mozilla's own Gecko -- the new language will stop "entire classes of memory management errors" from causing crashes and security vulnerabilities.

The other major hallmark of Rust is that it has relatively easy-to-use ... [Read more]

Adobe Systems' Lightroom offers tools to catalog and edit photos, especially those taken using higher-end cameras' higher-quality raw photo formats.

Adobe Systems has released Lightroom 4.4 with support for two mainstream SLRs, Nikon's new D7100 and Canon's Rebel SL1, and with better image quality for a Fujifilm cameras with unusual sensors.

Lightroom is designed for editing and cataloging photos, especially those shot in cameras' proprietary raw image formats that offer higher quality but impose an image-processing burden on photographers. Adobe periodically updates the software to support new cameras -- and in the case of version 4.4 to fix problems with existing cameras such as the Fujifilm models.

Fujifilm's X-Trans and EXR sensors each vary from the standard image-sensor approach to capturing color information. Most sensors use a checkerboard pattern called a Bayer array to determine whether each pixel on the sensor captures red, blue, or green color data. Fujifilm uses different arrangements and processing in an attempt to o... [Read more]