Unveiling the Chrome Web Store’s Redesign

September 8, 2023 by Michael G

In celebration of Chrome’s 15th birthday, we’re thrilled to introduce the redesigned Chrome Web Store. With a user-centric focus, we’ve made it easier for you to search and find fun themes and helpful extensions to stay productive at home or at work. Let’s go behind the scenes and learn more about this redesign from Chrome Product Manager Hafsah Ismail and UX Designer Crystal Wang.

What influenced your decision to redesign the Chrome Web Store?

Hafsah: Chrome and the Web have evolved in remarkable ways. We now have extensions that unlock uncharted levels of productivity for developers or harness the power of generative AI to reshape work as we know it. It only felt natural to evolve the store to continue to meet the dynamic needs of users and developers in our ecosystem. Extensions and themes lie at the heart of a personalized Chrome experience, so it was a natural progression to give the store a fresh, contemporary look to align with this transformation.

Can you share more details about the design?

Crystal: This project was an amazing opportunity to redesign everything from the ground up, and was a collaborative team effort with product, research, writing, and more. Our main goals were to modernize the UI and create a well-lit path for users to find high quality extensions and themes to make the web work better for them. Two key areas of the design I’m particularly proud of are the refreshed look and feel and global navigation and search.

Seamless, global navigation and search

We updated the navigation and search experience to be seamless, universal and easily accessible, no matter where the user is in their extension discovery journey.

Image of search menu in Chrome Web Store with the text "shopp" with a suggested extension

New categories based on user needs and lifestyle

Extension and theme categories were revamped to be more expansive, relevant, and focused on usefulness and purpose.

Image of Chrome Web Store in Chrome browser that shows the list of extensions in the "Developer Tools" category.

Modern and expressive look & feel

The redesign was an exciting opportunity to modernize the UI with Google’s latest design system, Material 3, allowing for a more modern, consistent and intuitive user experience. We also created brand new illustrations to help users connect with extensions on a more meaningful level; differentiating us from any other extension store on the market.

Image of different options available to customize the look of Chrome browser.

What’s new in the Chrome Web Store for developers?

Hafsah: Amplifying our developers is a critical part of our storefront’s redesign. We’re introducing a self-nomination form for developers to showcase their extensions for a spot in our Editor’s Picks collection. We’re eager to highlight extensions that:

Have a high-quality listing including visually appealing assets
Provide clear value to the user, and add to their Chrome experience
Are from a range of developers, big and small!

Please feel free to check out our developer post for more information and as a place for feedback from the community.

What are some of your favorite recent additions to store?

Hafsah:

Instapaper: I’m passionate about tech and cooking, always eager to discover the newest innovations and curate articles and recipes. Instapaper has become an essential extension for me; its power lies in letting me save anything I want to revisit later, a tool you don’t realize you need until you do.
Noisli: As a product manager who finds herself in energizing meetings, I really value creating the perfect work environment for deep work and reflection. Extensions like Noisli are game-changers, enabling the perfect environment for focused work. With Noisli, I can curate the soundtrack to my productivity

Crystal:

Todoist for Chrome: I’m someone who loves being organized, and I’ve always been super big on writing physical checklists. Recently, I’ve been very into Todoist to make to-do lists in my Chrome browser, and this productivity extension has become a personal favorite.
Asian & Pacific Islander Artist Theme Series: Being an Asian American, I’m also a huge fan and extra proud of the Asian & Pacific Islander Artist Themes series created by our team. I currently have Crested Ibis installed on my browser and I love it!

Posted by Joshua Cruz, Communications Manager

The Approved Open Source Licenses never looked better

September 8, 2023 by Michael G

The Open Source community needs a resource to confidently and easily identify licenses that have gained OSI approval, and now they have it. This Approval Registry offers a comprehensive and authoritative listing of all licenses so organizations know that the license they choose for their project allows their software to be freely used, modified, shared and monetized in compliance with the Open Source Definition.

The post <span class=’p-name’>The Approved Open Source Licenses never looked better</span> appeared first on Voices of Open Source.

UK has not backed down in tech encryption row, minister says

September 8, 2023 by Michael G

Over the past few days, there have been a lot of reports in the media that the UK government was backing down from its requirement that every end-to-end encrypted messenger application inside the country had to give the government backdoor access to these messenger applications. However, after reading the actual words from the UK’s junior minister Stephen Parkinson, it seemed like all she did was give a “pinky promise!” not to enforce this requirement. The law itself did not change, is not changing, and will not change, and the requirement is still in there. Today, the UK’s technology minister Michelle Donelan made that even clearer than it already was. Donelan, however, denied on Thursday that the bill had been watered down in the final stages before it becomes law. “We haven’t changed the bill at all,” she told Times Radio. “If there was a situation where the mitigations that the social media providers are taking are not enough, and if after further work with the regulator they still can’t demonstrate that they can meet the requirements within the bill, then the conversation about technology around encryption takes place,” she said. This raises an interesting question – why was everyone so keen on pushing the narrative yesterday that the “technology sector” had won, and that the UK government had backed down? Well, Facebook and Apple have kind of talked themselves into a corner in response to the UK’s requirement for backdoor access to WhatsApp and iMessage. The two companies threatened they would pull these services out of the UK if the government didn’t remove this requirement. When it became clear that the UK government wasn’t going to back down, Facebook and Apple were going to lose a lot of face if they didn’t actually pull WhatsApp and iMessage out of the UK in response. They needed something to get them out of this. This vague pinky promise is all they needed. Now they can shit all over their supposed morals and values once again, completely abandon their grandstanding and promises about protecting end-to-end encryption in messaging, and continue to operate in the UK as if nothing has changed, despite them legally being obligated to break end-to-end encryption if the UK government asks them to – which they can now do whenever it pleases them. And entirely unsurprisingly, the general tech media, ever looking to please the corporations they are supposed to do the journalism stuff about, fell for it, hook, line, and sinker. The narrative that the UK backed down and Facebook and Google won is out there now, and that’s all the tech sector needed.