Android phones:

Android tablets:

Kindle Fire:

iPhone:

iPad:

Windows Phone 7:

Web:

Lifted right from their post:

• Aardvark: Aardvark was a start-up we acquired in 2010. An experiment in a new kind of social search, it helped people answer each other’s questions. While Aardvark will be closing, we’ll continue to work on tools that enable people to connect and discover richer knowledge about the world.
• Desktop: In the last few years, there’s been a huge shift from local to cloud-based storage and computing, as well as the integration of search and gadget functionality into most modern operating systems. People now have instant access to their data, whether online or offline. As this was the goal of Google Desktop, the product will be discontinued on September 14, including all the associated APIs, services, plugins, gadgets and support.
• Fast Flip: Fast Flip was started to help pioneer news content browsing and reading experiences for the web and mobile devices. For the past two years, in collaboration with publishers, the Fast Flip experiment has fueled a new approach to faster, richer content display on the web. This approach will live on in our other display and delivery tools.
• Google Maps API for Flash: The Google Maps API for Flash was launched to provide ActionScript developers a way to integrate Google Maps into their applications. Although we’re deprecating the API, we’ll keep supporting existing Google Maps API Premier customers using the Google Maps API for Flash and we’ll focus our attention on the JavaScript Maps API v3 going forward.
• Google Pack: Due to the rapidly decreasing demand for downloadable software in favor of web apps, we will discontinue Google Pack today. People will still be able to access Google’s and our partners’ software quickly and easily through direct links on the Google Pack website.
• Google Web Security: Google Web Security came to Google as part of the Postini acquisition in 2007, and since then we’ve integrated much of the web security functionality directly into existing Google products, such as safe browsing in Chrome. Although our previous sales channel will be discontinued, we’ll continue to support our existing customers.
• Image Labeler: We began Google Image Labeler as a fun game to help people explore and label the images on the web. Although it will be discontinued, a wide variety of online games from Google are still available.
• Notebook: Google Notebook enabled people to combine clipped URLs from the web and free-form notes into documents they could share and publish. We’ll be shutting down Google Notebook in the coming months, but we’ll automatically export all notebook data to Google Docs.
• Sidewiki: Over the past few years, we’ve seen extraordinary innovation in terms of making the web collaborative. So we’ve decided to discontinue Sidewiki and focus instead on our broader social initiatives. Sidewiki authors will be given more details about this closure in the weeks ahead, and they’ll have a number of months to download their content.
• Subscribed Links: Subscribed Links enabled developers to create specialized search results that were added to the normal Google search results on relevant queries for subscribed users. Although we’ll be discontinuing Subscribed Links, developers will be able to access and download their data until September 15, at which point subscribed links will no longer appear in people’s search results.

Aardvark is the one I’ll miss the most, because it is the one I used the most. I asked a couple of questions, but I’ve mainly been answering other users’ questions since the very early days of the service. I don’t know, I kind of get a kick out of having random questions pop up in Google talk. Looking at my history I answered my first question on July 6, 2009 and my most recent, number 443, on August 22, 2011. Coincidentally they both involved TiVo. I could see something like this getting built into Google+, asking your circles for answers, etc.

Google Desktop I still have installed, but I haven’t really used it in ages. I installed it mainly out of habit. I have to agree with Google, with most of my work in the cloud I just don’t really need the features of Desktop.

Fast Flip… I never got this. Did anyone really use this?

Google Maps API for Flash – I’m not sure I’ve encountered a Flash app that used it, and I’m not a Flash developer, so I don’t care.

Google Pack is something else I still have installed. But I won’t miss it. I use Google Pack just because it makes installing a few apps on a new machine easier. I have Skype, RealPlayer, Adobe Reader, Google Picasa, Google Chrome, and Google Earth. I don’t use the Pack version of Google Apps because they’re actually the Gmail versions. Since I use the full, hosted Google Apps I use the special versions downloaded from there. Losing Pack just means a little more work when first installing these apps on a new box, no big deal.

Google Web Security has been spread around into other products, so it isn’t really a loss. Having the features transparently embedded elsewhere is better.

Image Labeler – I’d never even heard of this before now.

Notebook – I vaguely remember hearing of this, but I never used it.

Sidewiki – This I still have installed, but it is more force of habit. It was something that I thought was kind of curious when it launched, and I played with it for a bit, but it never caught on. It felt like a waste writing notes when it seemed like no one else was using it, and since no one else was using it there were rarely other notes to read. I expect to see more commenting hooks into Google+ that will probably catch on more than Sidewiki ever did.

Subscribed Links is something else I’d heard of, but never used myself, so I won’t miss it.

I can’t argue with Google phasing out these products and services and putting the resources into more important products, or into new ideas. I’m glad Google takes risks with projects like these, trying new things to see what sticks. If something is successful it gets beefed up into a more complete product. If it is partially successful then the pieces that work get recycled into other projects. And if it just doesn’t catch on enough to justify continued effort, then it is a learning experience. Google doesn’t need everything to be a smash hit, but they need to keep trying things because no one can say what the next smash hit product will be.

So what do you think about the cuts? Leave a comment!

When I didn’t expect was a nearly all-new browser which takes a clean sheet approach to browser design and changes some of the fundamental elements that have been common to browsers for a while now. But then again, this is Google, I probably shouldn’t be surprised that that is exactly what they’ve done with Google Chrome. It has been outed on the Official Google Blog, and interestingly via a 38-page comic book Google commissioned. I have to say, the comic format really worked for me. It made it somewhat entertaining, yet all of the elements were clear and understandable. Of course, I’m a geek and I’ve been doing web development since 1991. The first browser I used was Cern’s command line browser. (I won’t go into old-man mode and say ‘and we liked it that way’ – because, frankly, it sucked. I’m much happier with today’s browsers, believe me.)

Word got out prematurely when hard copies of the comic were received by bloggers early, and it was scanned and posted to Google Blogoscoped, which also followed up with some more information. The official launch is planned for later today (September 2nd). I’m looking forward to checking it out, it sounds like an interesting project. (I’m amused, but not surprised, that it already has a Wikipedia page.)

Of course, it is entering a market full of competitors. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still dominates the Windows market, and I have to admit IE8 looks to be shaping up to be a fairly decent browser so far, based on the beta releases. Safari has a strong hold on Mac users. Firefox is the number two browser overall, a popular choice on Windows and giving Safari a run on Mac. Opera is still chugging along, though it is really not a strong player on desktops overall. Opera seems to have found more success on embedded and mobile devices.

Interestingly, Google Chrome’s rendering engine is based on Apple’s Webkit. That’s the engine at the core of Safari on the Mac, Windows, and, of course, the iPhone/iPod Touch. (And it evolved from the KHTML engine from the KDE project’s Konqueror browser.) Webkit is also used as the core of the browser in Google’s Android mobile platform, as well as in the browser included on Nokia’s Symbian Series60 mobile devices. It has also been used in a number of other products.

However, Google Chrome appears to only using the WebCore layout and rendering component from WebKit, and not the JavaScriptCore scripting engine. Instead Google has selected a new JavaScript engine from V8 in Denmark. They’ve taken a new approach to JavaScript engines which is designed to offer improved performance, especially when running increasingly complex web applications. Under the covers it offers better memory management and garbage collection, which should help make things more stable and reduce memory bloat.

Those seem to be three of the major goals of Google Chrome, better performance, better stability, and reduced memory leaks/bloat, along with a fourth goal, improved security. They’ve changed the way browser processes are handled, offering better sandboxing to protect the system from malicious web apps. Google’s anti-phishing and anti-malware filters are also built into Chrome. (These are also offered in Firefox.) Google Gears is also included with Chrome, which will help performance with websites and web applications that use the Gears API. (For example, WordPress supports Gears on the admin interface to improve performance.)

And the best part is that Google is releasing Chome as open source. So all of the work they’ve done, and will do, is available to other developers and vendors to borrow and learn from. It sounds like they’ve done some very interesting things, so there are probably a few things others could learn from this.

Getting users to adopt Chrome is going to be the hard part. Firefox has been out for years and still has a small minority of the market. IE is still hovering around 70% of browser traffic in the Internet. People tend to use what is in front of them, for better or for worse. And with the current IE, that’s for worse. While IE7 is light years ahead of IE6, that’s not saying much as IE6 was utter crap. IE8 does look like it will help, but until it is out of beta most users won’t run it. Even once it is out of beta, unless MS pushes it as an automatic update, most users never upgrade.

For me I’ll have to see how Chrome performs, what the new UI is like, and what features it offers. I’ve never been a fan of Opera because I couldn’t stand the UI choices they made. It just didn’t suit me. I’ve played with Safari, and it wasn’t bad, but it wasn’t that appealing. Certainly not enough to sway me from Firefox. I like the Firefox UI, I’m sure in large part because it has evolved steadily from the old Netscape UI. I started using Netscape when it was still around .9, up through 4.79. Then I switched to Mozilla Suite. And finally to Firefox after it hit 1.0. But also because of the extensions that allow me to customize it to my tastes and needs, as I recently covered.

As intrigued as I am by the new design direction Google has taken, it will come down to usability and functionality. I think Google probably has better odds of winning me over than any other player to date, especially if they can deliver on the performance and security. It will be interesting to see if they offer any synchronization between Google Chrome and the browser on Android. Being able to transparently store my browser preferences, bookmarks, etc, ‘in the cloud’ and access them from any Google browser would be a big appeal for me.

You know, with all of Google’s web-based applications (Gmail, Google Docs, Google Calendar, Google Reader, etc), they’re really close to being able to release a Google PC. From what I’ve seen Android could make a decent OS for a ‘netbook’ style computer, and Chrome could provide the main application environment.