Amazon begins rolling out redesigned software for Fire TV

Amazon has begun to roll out a redesigned software interface for its line of Fire TV devices. Referred to as the new “Fire TV experience,” the update includes more personalized recommendations and watch lists, plus the addition of multi-user support (up to six users).

The home screen has been updated with a new navigation menu that sits more centrally on the screen. The menu features access to your library, live content, and your favorite apps. The top half of the screen will display big, bold media, while the bottom half will show a traditional tile layout for movies and TV shows.

One of the newest additions to the menu bar is a “Find” tab, which features movies, TV shows, free ad-supported content, and sports from various services. The new Find tab on Fire TV is meant to provide users with recommendations when they’re unsure what to watch. Instead of endlessly scrolling a service, you can navigate to the Find tab and pick something from there.

As you’d expect, Alexa also gets top billing with improved integration with the new dashboard. When you setup a voice profile, Alexa can recognize your voice. The voice assistant will also be able to switch to the correct profile after recognizing a user’s voice, so users can easily access their recommended content. Users can also navigate the UI with voice commands or execute routines.

Speaking of Alexa, when you ask for things like the weather, responses will be less intrusive. Alexa’s answers will appear at the bottom of the screen, rather than taking over the entire UI. Finally, the new Fire TV experience now supports picture-in-picture, so you can enjoy multiple programs at once.

The updated experience is rolling out now to the most recent Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite. Other Amazon devices, including the Fire TV Stick 4K and Fire TV Cube, should receive the revamped interface early next year.

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OnePlus’s User Festival has daily discounts and more to celebrate their anniversary!

Today would normally be OnePlus Day, the company’s weekly sales day featuring flash deals, all-day coupons, and more. But instead, today is the start of the OnePlus User Festival! Starting today and running until the 19th, the User Festival is OnePlus’s way to celebrate its seventh anniversary. Sure, it’s not new information on the OnePlus 9 line of products, but you’ll be sure to enjoy the festival regardless! This celebration will save you big with daily codes, prize drawings, and other sales active throughout the event.

First, the codes! Each day, OnePlus will reveal a new code related to the food items they chose for the OnePlus User Festival. For the first day, the code is BACONEU, and using it gets you 17% off cases. I’m not sure how bacon relates to today’s spotlight phone, the OnePlus One, but hey, savings are savings!

There’s also a drawing going on! From now until the 18th, you can use any referral points to sign up for the festival drawing. 50 referral points net you one ticket for the drawing! If you don’t have referral points, you’re still in luck, though. The rules state that you can still get one entry by sharing the OnePlus User Festival page on Facebook or Twitter. One is better than none, after all.

Finally, there are also other sales happening during the User Festival that aren’t one-day only. For example, if you buy the OnePlus 8T or the OnePlus Buds Z, you can get a second one for 50% off! Perfect for holiday shopping. You don’t need a special coupon code or anything, either. Simply add both to the cart, and you’ll get the discount.

Whatever you may be looking for from OnePlus, you’ll certainly find something to enjoy in the OnePlus User Festival!

OnePlus User Festival

OnePlus is celebrating their seventh anniversary by giving their loyal consumers big savings! Starting today and running until the 19th, save on all sorts of items, enter a drawing for prizes, and celebrate everything OnePlus.

Save at OnePlus

This event runs until the 19th, but new deals will happen every day. Keep checking back for more savings!

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Google releases new Health Studies app, first study to focus on respiratory illnesses

Google has announced the launch of a new research app for Android phones, which the company says will make it easier for research institutions to connect with potential study participants. The first study will focus on respiratory illnesses, including influenza and COVID-19.

Before we go any further, Google makes it clear that the data of participants will be protected.

“In building the app we focused on three principles: keeping information safe, treating it responsibly, and putting participants in control,” Google said in a blog post. “When participants use the Google Health Studies app, their data is protected with Google’s advanced security. All information is encrypted and research data is stored securely.”

Google said participants will have control over their personal information. When data is shared, participants will know when and why. None of the information that’s collected will be sold, shared with advertisers, or be used to show participants ads. Once research findings become available, participants will be able to access the results.

Google partnered with researchers from Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital for the first study, which will be open to adults in the U.S. “The study will focus on identifying how these types of illnesses evolve in communities and differ across risk factors such as age, and activities such as travel,” Google said.

Participants will use the Google Health Studies app to report how they feel, what symptoms they may be experiencing, and more.

“With COVID-19 emerging alongside season respiratory pathogens, research is now needed more than ever to develop more effective treatments and mitigation strategies,” said Dr. John Brownstein, professor at Harvard Medical School.

The study will utilize something known as federated learning and analytics, which will aggregate insights from multiple devices, rather than analyzing every individual who participates. “This means researchers in this study can examine trends to understand the link between mobility (such as the number of daily trips a person makes outside the home) and the spread of COVID-19,” Google said.

If you want to take part in the first study, you can download the Google Health Studies app below.

Google Health Studies (Free, Google Play) →

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Google announces new dev tools and recaps improvements to Chrome at Chrome Dev Summit 2020

Google is hosting the Chrome Dev Summit 2020, detailing the changes coming to the internet browser of choice for the vast majority of users on the planet. Google’s vision for Chrome is to make it a secure, powerful, and fast vehicle for accessing the internet. This article brings together some of the bits and pieces involved in this vision for the next year for the most popular web browser.

Privacy

Back in 2019, Google announced Privacy Sandbox, an initiative to develop a set of open standards that aims to improve privacy on the web. The work continues, as Google marches towards building new privacy-preserving alternatives to third-party cookies and other cross-site tracking mechanisms. To this end, the Client Hints API was the first step to reduce User-Agent string granularity, and there’s more to come.

Two new solutions coming to Chrome stable releases are the Click Conversion Measurement API and the Trust Token APIs. The former measures ad conversions without using cross-site identifiers, while Trust Token helps convey trust from one context to another without passive tracking.

Manifest V3 is also making its way to Chrome, first in Beta and then in Stable branches, with updated submissions being allowed on the Chrome Web Store from January 19, 2021.

Features

A browser needs to empower the web, and Chrome plans to do just that with new capabilities coming to the web browser. Chrome 86 gave developers the ability to list their Progressive Web Apps (PWA) on the Play Store using Trusted Web Activity. And now, developers can start accepting payments using the new standardized Digital Goods API in Chrome 88.

Chrome and Performance

Google Chrome has been at the receiving end of several memes, often poking fun at the resource-heavy nature of the web browser. On this end, Google has made some key improvements to speed with Profile Guided Optimization & Tab throttling, revealed earlier this year.

Now, Google is announcing the reduction of the memory footprint with V8. V8 pointer compression helps with memory savings, and it also allows Google to completely eliminate parsing pauses by loading a web page’s JavaScript files in parallel, so scripts can be parsed and compiled and ready to be executed as soon as they are needed by the page.

Moving on, Google announced the Web Vitals initiative earlier this year, presenting metrics that represent an ideal user experience. Google Search also announced that new signals to search ranking will include Core Web Vitals starting from May 2021. Clearly, Web Vitals are now an important facet of web page performance metrics.

Now, Google is announcing the Web Vitals Report, an open-source website, and tool that lets you query and visualizes Web Vitals metrics data in Google Analytics, letting web developers easily compare performance data across segments.

For the future, Gooogle will be looking to focus some more to remedy the struggle of building web interfaces. The company teased Houdini.how, a set of APIs that will make it easier to extend CSS.

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This wraps up the overview of all the major announcements from Google Chrome Dev Summit 2020, held online this year. You can sign up for the wed.dev newsletter, and watch the sessions on the YouTube channel to get into more detail.

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Manifest V3 changes for browser extensions will go live in Google Chrome 88

One of the bigger changes to internet browsing this year is coming in the form of the much-discussed Manifest V3. A new manifest version allows the browser, Chrome, to restrict certain older APIs from working, changing the way the web and accompanying extensions work, and eventually changing the way the internet is experienced by users at large. After months of active discussion and feedback, Manifest V3 for Chrome extensions is now rolling out on Chrome 88 Beta, with more changes coming in the following months.

Changes in Manifest V3

Security

With Manifest V3, Google is disallowing remotely hosted code. The company claims that this mechanism gets used as an attack vector to circumvent Google’s malware detection tools. In the interest of user privacy and security, this is being removed. The removal of remotely hosted code will also allow Google to review submissions to the Chrome Web Store more thoroughly and quickly.

Performance

With this new version, Google is introducing service workers as a replacement for background pages. Background pages remain active in the background and consume system resources irrespective of whether an extension is making use of it. Service workers are “ephemeral”, in the sense that they are run separate from a web page, opening the door to features that don’t need a web page or user interaction (like push notifications and background sync). The browser will be able to start up and close service workers as needed, allowing it to lower overall system resource utilization.

Extension APIs are also moving towards a more declarative model. Google says that the end result is better overall performance and improved privacy guarantees for a majority of extension users.

Privacy

Another big change comes in the new extensions model that makes many more permissions optional. Users will now be able to withhold sensitive permissions at install time, giving them greater visibility and control over how extensions use and share their data. Extension developers should consequently expect users to opt-in and out of permissions at any time.

Then there are changes to extensions that require passive access to web activity, like the Web Request API and the newer Declarative Net Request API. The Declarative Net Request API, in particular, has seen changes since its first announcement, and the current rollout takes into account extensive feedback from the developer community, such as support for multiple static rulesets, regular expressions within rules, declarative header modification, and more.

“We’ve been very pleased with the close collaboration established between Google’s Chrome Extensions Team and our own engineering team to ensure that ad-blocking extensions will still be available after Manifest V3 takes effect.”

Sofia Lindberg, Tech Lead, eyeo (Adblock Plus)

Availability and Rollout for Manifest V3

As stated, Manifest V3 is now available to experiment with on Chrome 88 Beta, with additional features expected to follow in upcoming releases. The Chrome Web Store will start accepting Manifest V3 extensions from mid-January when Chrome 88 reaches the stable branch.

Google is not committing to an exact date for removing support for Manifest V2 extensions, a rough timeline for the migration period can be estimated to be a year from when Manifest V3 lands in the stable branch. Google will provide more details on the timeline in the coming months.

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YouTube launches HDR for live streams

YouTube has announced that creators can now live stream their content in HDR. Although Google began rolling out HDR support for recorded videos (very, very slowly) back in 2017, this is the first time that live streams have been able to show off those vivid blacks and increased color gamut.

For anyone who has been living under a rock for the past few years, HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range (imaging). At its simplest, it creates deeper blacks that show off the rest of the spectrum better, but in reality, it runs far deeper, offering a more complete range of luminescence for a more natural, vivid looking picture. Streaming services such as Netflix and Disney+ have used it as part of their unique sales offering, as linear broadcasters are not currently able to present their shows this way.

Now for the first time, content creators will be able to stream in full-HDR, providing they have the right equipment to do so. It won’t make a lot of difference for a head and shoulders shot in a studio, but as we can see from these sample pictures taken by Google, it can make a huge difference to landscape shots particularly.

From today, any creator using a supported encoder that renders HLG or PQ 10-bit color standards in an HLS output format can stream HDR to YouTube, in an HEVC codec, to be watched by anyone with an HDR supported device to view it on. That includes phones, tablets, televisions and streaming sticks (of course they’ll need to be plugged into a display with HDR too). YouTube says that this is just the beginning and it will continue to revise the offer to add different encoders to the compatibility list in due course.

We’ve noted that, of the Google device range, only the Chromecast Ultra is listed as compatible, despite the newer Chromecast with Google TV supporting HDR natively. We’re looking into this, but we have a hunch that it may be added along with Stadia support, early in 2021.

 

 

 

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Google will make it easier to choose what websites a Chrome extension can access

In an attempt to bolster extension security, Google recently made some changes to the data collection policies for Chrome extensions. Thanks to the new policies, the Chrome Web Store will soon limit what extension developers can do with the data they collect. Google will also require developers to certify their data use practices and display that information on the Chrome Web Store. Building upon these new policies, Google has now announced that it will make it easier for users to choose what websites an extension can access.

Extensions are currently a bit of a privacy nightmare, as they get to choose which websites they can access upon installation. For instance, if you use the Grammarly extension, you’d know that it runs on all websites by default. And if you don’t want it to work on a particular website, you have to click on the three-dot menu in the extension list and then click on the “this can read and change site data” to restrict Grammarly’s access to the current domain or a list of whitelisted domains. While you can also set website access by going to the extension’s details page at chrome://extensions, you can only make such changes to it after it’s installed.

However, as per today’s announcement, the Chrome Web Store will soon present with you a new option when you’re installing an extension that will let you set website access. This option is expected to make it easier for users to set website access for each extension. On top of that, the option will also alert users who currently don’t even know that they can limit website access for Chrome extensions.

While the announcement doesn’t specifically mention when this new option will be available in the Chrome Web Store, we expect it to go live alongside the new “Privacy practices” declarations next month. Speaking of which, Google has also shared a more detailed screenshot of the declaration, showcasing exactly what information will be displayed to users.

As you can see in the attached screenshot, the sample extension collects personally identifying information, including name, address, email address, age or identification number. It also collects authentication information and data about the user’s activity. The declaration also includes a section highlighting that the data collected is not sold to third parties, isn’t used or transferred for purposes that are unrelated to the item’s core functionality, and isn’t used or transferred to determine creditworthiness or for lending purposes.

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