Google continues to polish Chrome

Stephen Withers
Thursday, 18 March 2010 08:18

Business IT - Technology

The latest stable release of Google Chrome includes automatic translation and improved privacy controls.

The privacy improvements and automatic translation feature that appeared in the Google Chrome beta released earlier this month have now graduated to the stable version.

The translation feature works by having the browser detect the language used on the page. This is achieved by using Google's open-source compact language detection library.

The code divides the page into sequences of up to four characters, then uses a lookup method to determine the most likely language. The probabilities used in the process were derived from an analysis of billions of web pages.

Language detection is performed in a few milliseconds, according to Google Chrome software engineer Jay Civelli.

If there is a sufficient likelihood that the page is in a language other than that set in Chrome's preferences, the browser offers to translate. If the offer is accepted, the page text is sent to Google Translate and the result displayed.

The whole process can be performed in less than a second, network speeds permitting.

The privacy changes are detailed on page 2.