Google to hold two special events for mobile Chrome on June 7 and June 13

Google will organise two “special events” that will have something to do with Chrome this month. The search giant has put up two live-stream videos counting down to the events on the Google Developers website.

The two pages give little indication of what Google has in store for us; they’re called Chrome Mobile Special Event and Mobile Chrome Special Event. They’ll obviously have something to do with the mobile Chrome browser and Chrome OS. 

The countdown timer for the special event

It’s quite surprising to see Google come up with such an event so soon after Google I/O. However, when you consider the fact that Apple’s own developer conference, WWDC, is set to be held from June 10-14, this development gets very interesting. 

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Google recently added a notification centre to the desktop version of Chrome. While Chrome and the Chrome OS already have some amount of basic Web notification features, the idea of getting detailed notifications for Chrome packaged apps and extensions is something that can definitely turn the game on its head.

The notification centre, according to Google, will hold all the current notifications and can be brought up at any time from the launcher on Chrome OS or the system tray on Windows. It will act as your command centre, allowing you to view and clear all of your notifications as well as control which apps, extensions and websites can interact with you.

The company also rolled out Google Cloud Messaging for both the Chrome browser and Chrome OS recently. The service more or less works as push notifications and is intended to wake up an app or extension, and/or alert a user. For example, calendar updates could be pushed to users even when their calendar app isn’t open.

Using Google Cloud Messaging, the developers’ servers send a message to Google’s GCM server, which in turn sends the message to Google Chrome, which pushes the notification by communicating with the developers’ Chrome extension or Chrome app.

The best thing about push notifications is that the software doesn’t have to keep a continuous connection with servers to get them. The roundabout approach lets the notification get to users without wasting power or network usage.