Category: Open Source

Last October, we introduced a new identity model on iOS (Chrome 118) and are excited to bring it to Android devices and Desktop soon. This model aligns closely with how you already use other Google apps and services.

When we first launched Chrome sync back in 2009, powered by the Google Account, our goal then, as it is today, was simple: help users access their bookmarks, passwords, tabs and more, across devices. At the time, this was best achieved by a sync model: synchronizing device data with your account and therefore requiring both sign-in and enabling sync.

Over the years, the digital world has changed and user expectations have evolved significantly. Cloud services emerged in 2010, and over the past 15 years, the concept of having a digital identity became more prevalent, especially through smartphones and mobile apps. Today, users increasingly expect to just sign in to get access to their stuff and sign out to keep it safe.

Given this evolution of technology and user norms, we’re continuing to make progress on transforming our legacy sync model into one that more seamlessly meets the expectation users have today. From the point of signing in to Chrome you’ll get access to your saved passwords, addresses, and other data from your Google Account. Where relevant, we’ll offer you the choice to sign into Chrome for a customized browsing experience on any device. For example, you can sign in and start to plan a trip on your phone during your commute, and then seamlessly finish it up on any device. Send tabs between your devices, find your bookmarks and use autogenerated passwords with ease.

As always, you have control – we strive to provide an excellent browser experience regardless of whether you choose to sign in or not. Additionally, saving your history and open tabs to your account remains a separate opt-in after signing into Chrome.

Stay tuned for updates on this change – already on iOS and coming to Android and Desktop soon.

Posted by Claire Charron, Chrome Product Manager

The FreeBSD project has published its latest quarterly status report, and there’s a lot in there. The most prominent effort listed in the report is a close collaboration between FreeBSD and AMD on an IOMMU driver for AMD’s server processors. Work continued on a joint project between Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) and The FreeBSD Foundation to develop a complete FreeBSD AMD IOMMU driver. This work will allow FreeBSD to fully support greater than 256 cores with features such as CPU mapping and will also include bhyve integration. Konstantin Belousov has been working on various parts of the project, including driver attachment, register definitions, an ACPI table parser, and utility functions. Two key components that need to be completed are context handling, which is mostly a generalization of Intel DMAR code, and page table creation. After this, the AMD driver’s enable bit can be turned on for testing. ↫ FreeBSD status report page It’s great to see AMD and FreeBSD working together like this, and it highlights that FreeBSD is a serious player in the server space. Other things mentioned in the status report are continued work in improving the audio experience, wireless networking, RISC-V support, OpenZFS, and more. Through the work of Tom Jones, FreeBSD is also getting the Vector Packet Processor, a userspace networking stack that delivers fast packet processing suitable for software-defined networking and network function virtualization applications. Of course, this is just a selection, and there’s way more listed in the report. I would also like to highlight the ongoing, neverending work of improving the experience of using KDE on FreeBSD. The FreeBSD KDE team notes that due to the massive release of KDE 6, and the associated flurry of follow-up releases, requiring a lot of work and testing, KDE on FreeBSD still hasn’t fully caught up with the latest releases. KDE Frameworks is currently at 6.3.0 (6.5.0 is current), KDE Plasma Desktop is currently 6.0.3 (6.1.4 is current), and KDE Gear 6 hasn’t been ported at all yet. In other words, while progress is being made, it’s clear the team could use a hand, too.