If you use Google Chrome, you may have noticed some changes that started rolling out last week. Yes, indeed, Chrome got a fresh look for its 10th birthday, and today we sat down with Alex Ainslie, Chrome’s lead designer, to go behind the scenes of the biggest redesign since Chrome launched 10 years ago.

So first, what changed in Chrome? Why and why now?

Alex: We’re introducing a major refresh on Chrome across all platforms, which aligns with Google’s new Material Theme. This update involved changing our approaches to shape, color, iconography, and typography. And why right now? You only turn 10 once, so we thought it would be the ideal moment.

For most people (who are non-designers), the modern browser is a simple window to the internet. Is it really that simple?

Alex: A major focus of our work is about finding ways to simplify web browsing. And we think about simplification not so much as a goal, but instead as a strategy for making Chrome more usable. The new, simplified tab strip, for example, makes it faster to find a specific tab when you have many open.

We’ve learned from user research around the world it can be hard to decipher URLs with too many words and characters. So we simplified the text you see in the address bar to make it easier to understand where a URL is taking you.

A simple user interface also makes it possible for us to create bold warnings when things aren’t safe: for example, when you visit a dangerous or deceptive site. This is an example of Chrome's values of simplicity and security reinforcing each other.

Your team spent the last year working on the new design. What challenges did you face?

Alex: One of our key design challenges is to be a good citizen of all platforms. That means we work hard to ensure Chrome both looks comfortable and behaves in familiar ways on Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, Daydream and iOS. For example, we respect platform conventions for window controls, button ordering, typography, and more. And we also take care to negotiate the relationship between these platform-specific elements and Google's new Material Theme because we want Chrome to feel at home on all of your devices and to feel recognizably Googley.

The design team is spread across several offices - Mountain View, San Francisco, Los Angeles, London, Munich, and Paris. So in addition to thinking about how to improve Chrome’s UI we also think about how to maintain a healthy design culture across offices and timezones.

Have your team’s design principles changed since Chrome launched 10 years ago?

Alex: We still rely on the early Chrome team mantra, “Content, not chrome,” which is based on the idea of designing the browser UI to make the web content stand out. And our core values remain the same, though they’ve expanded. For example, in the case of speed, we think both about performance improvements to make pages load faster and about how Chrome can help people get things done more quickly. The improved Omnibox—which merges the search and address bar into one—is a great illustration of this.

What’s your proudest moment from the 8 years you’ve been on the team?

Alex: I appreciate that the Chrome team takes on difficult, long-term projects. For example, helping to move the web to HTTPS has been a multi-year effort. From improving our connection security indicators to marking HTTP sites as “Not secure,” we have plenty of examples of how design can help keep people safe and contribute to change throughout the ecosystem. So it’s not any specific element in Chrome’s UI that I am most proud of, but instead the broader outcomes that impact people out in the world.

We’ve all been there: you’re trying to load a news article, urgent email, or video when you suddenly lose internet access, either from slow network performance or spotty Wi-Fi. A few years back, the Chrome team realized that downtime doesn’t have to be a downer. "There's nothing fun about getting kicked offline—unless you have a friendly T-Rex to keep you company, that is," explains Chrome UX engineer Edward Jung on the motivation behind Chrome’s offline Dino game. The hidden game shows itself on the new tab page when Chrome users find themselves offline—press the spacebar, and the dino turns into a runner game.

The running T-Rex made its debut on Chrome four years ago. On the occasion of Chrome’s 10th birthday this week, we sat down with its creators from the Chrome Design team—Edward, as well as Sebastien Gabriel and Alan Bettes—to learn more about the dinosaur’s journey from the Cretaceous period to the modern browser.

How did you come up with the idea of running T-Rex?

Sebastien: The idea of “an endless runner” as an easter egg within the “you-are-offline” page was born in early 2014. It’s a play on going back to the “prehistoric age” when you had no Wi‑Fi. The cacti and desert setting were part of the first iteration of the “you-are-offline” page, while the visual style is a nod to our tradition of pixel-art style in Chrome’s error illustrations.

Alan: The only restriction we placed on ourselves was to keep the motion rigid, reminiscent of vintage video games. At the beginning we thought, “What if it did a cute little kick in the beginning like our favorite 90’s hedgehog? What if it roared to signal to people that it was alive?” But in the end, we settled on the basics of any good runner game: run, duck and jump.

The new easter egg was submitted in September 2014, under the guise of a page redesign. How did the launch go?

Edward: It was the first time I'd written a game, so I had a lot to figure out—jump physics, collision detection, and cross-platform compatibility. The first iteration played terribly on older Android devices, so I ended up having to rewrite the whole thing. But by December 2014, the game had scaled to all platforms.

We can imagine that the Chrome Dino got quite popular.

Edward: Yes! There are currently 270 million games played every month, both on laptop and mobile. Not surprisingly, most users come from markets with unreliable or expensive mobile data, like India, Brazil, Mexico, or Indonesia.

It also got to the point where we had to give enterprise admins a way to disable the game because school kids—and even adults who were supposed to be working—really got into it.

Sebastien: We also created the chrome://dino URL, where folks can play the game without going offline. The page offers an “arcade mode” so players can train for the best results in a full-window experience.  

You currently have a special edition of the game out. Can you tell us more about that?

Alan: Over the years, the game got a few upgrades, like pterodactyls and night mode. The latest one rolled out this week: a special “anniversary edition” for Chrome’s 10th birthday. Look out for cake, balloons, and a fancy birthday hat.

What flavor is the cake?

Alan: Edward is actually an amateur baker, so he decided on a classic vanilla birthday cake. If our dino is going to be eating this millions of times over, it should taste good!

How long does it take to beat the game?

Edward: We built it to max out at approximately 17 million years, the same amount of time that the T-rex was alive on Earth… but we feel like your spacebar may not be the same afterwards.

In a time when most people don’t remember more than a handful of phone numbers (hi, mom!), can you really be expected to remember a strong, unique password for every online service? It’s no wonder most of us end up using an easy-to-remember password over and over again. But if it gets stolen—as were 3.3 billion credentials last year alone—you’re exposed to a much greater risk, because now the thieves have a key that works across several sites. So what are you supposed to do? Write them all down? Do the forget/reset shuffle every few weeks? There has to be a better way. And now there is.

As part of this week’s update, we’re rolling out significant improvements to Chrome's password manager.

Across desktop platforms—and coming to mobile apps soon—we’re rolling out unique password generation. Chrome will now recognize a sign-up field, offer you a unique and secure password for that site, and save it. Every password follows these guidelines: at least one lowercase character, at least one uppercase character, and at least one number. If a site requires symbols, we’ll include those, too. We’ll also avoid certain characters for readability issues (like a lowercase “l” or uppercase “I”).  

You can view all your passwords, credit cards, addresses, and other stored information from the main desktop Chrome toolbar. You can also export all your saved passwords into a .csv file at any time.

We've also made password autofill even more reliable. Now, Chrome can be used to save or fill in the appropriate password on any site you need. This update would not be possible without significant improvements to the underlying autofill capabilities. When Chrome fills in your passwords, credit cards, addresses, emails, and other types of information, it’s backed up by Chrome’s multiple security layers and web standards. And if you’re signed into Chrome across your devices, syncing your credentials to your Google Account will allow you to access them wherever you have Chrome installed (laptop or mobile). And if you are using the Android app of your favorite site, your passwords and other information will be there too!

We launched Google Chrome 10 years ago to give people a fast, simple and secure browser that they could count on. At the time, the web was becoming more capable, moving beyond displaying mostly static web pages to running interactive online experiences. However, the browsers at the time could be clunky and slow, and if one tab went down then the whole browser went down with it.

With Chrome, people were able to tap into the potential of the web. They could run complex web applications quickly, open multiple tabs without risking a crash and easily search for what they were looking for with a simple, unobtrusive interface. Many of these core attributes we described in our launch comic from 2008 still hold true today.

Ten years later, the internet is woven into the fabric of our daily lives. People form relationships, plan their futures, create art, earn a living, play games and explore new worlds—all through their browsers. This explosion of possibility on the web comes with a slew of new challenges. We want Chrome to keep pace with these changes—to make sure the web experience is seamless and secure on multiple form factors and supports new experiences that weren't possible 10 years ago.

For example, when we launched Chrome, smartphones were in their infancy, but their presence in our lives grew rapidly. So in 2012, we launched Chrome for Android, bringing the same fast, simple and secure experience to mobile devices. And our commitment to the user experience has continued too, as we work on making the web more secure for everyone and filter out disruptive ad experiences.

Today, in honor of Chrome’s 10th birthday, we’re launching several new features. Our newest update includes a refreshed design that lets you navigate the web faster, and a completely revamped password manager and updated autofill so you can get things done more easily and securely. And Chrome's search box (the "Omnibox") gives you more information directly as you type, saving you even more time.

As we look to the next 10 years of Chrome, we see an even better and more immersive browsing experience on the horizon. Already, we're working on integrating augmented reality (AR) into Chrome to bring information that you interact with across the web and put directly into your physical environment. Say you’re shopping for a couch online and want to see how it would look in your living room. With the power of AR and Chrome, you’d be able to place a virtual rendition of a couch in your living room, right from your smartphone. This is just one example of how more immersive experiences on Chrome could help you get things done faster.

In addition to making your browsing experience richer, we also want to make it smarter using AI. We’ve seen how AI can make other Google products more useful—from email that’s spam-free to a digital assistant you can speak to naturally. Chrome is no different. AI is already working for you in features like Google Translate in Chrome, which uses a state-of-the-art AI-based translation engine to bring all the world’s information to you in a language you can understand, right in your browser. We've also integrated machine learning to detect phishing and malware sites, and most recently began applying it to detect malicious extensions.

With a smarter Chrome, you will be able to do more than just look at a webpage. Imagine searching on Chrome for a singer you just heard, and having Chrome show you not just their bio, but also their upcoming concert near you and where to purchase tickets. With AI, Chrome will also better understand what you’re trying to get done, and help you do so faster. Vacation planning typically requires juggling multiple tabs and open documents. But as Chrome evolves to better understand what tasks you’re trying to get done, it can help manage all this complexity for you as you switch back and forth between hotel research and booking flights.

When we first launched Chrome, Sundar said: “We think of the browser as the window to the web.” A decade later, it’s still the tool people use to access all of the websites and applications that help them do what they want to do. As Chrome heads into the next 10 years, we want to expand that window—so you can see more and do more.

Every time you open your browser, you have a mission to accomplish: trips to plan, emails to send, stories to read, skills to learn. We built Chrome to help you do all of those things as quickly and safely as possible. Today we celebrate Chrome’s 10th birthday, and just like a kid on the cusp of double digits, we’re constantly growing and changing. In the case of Chrome, those changes happen every six weeks to bring you new features and security updates, but our 10th birthday update is bigger than normal. Before we blow out our birthday candles, here’s a rundown of the updates coming your way today:

Jazzing up our look

First up, Chrome has a new look. You can see it across all platforms—desktop, Android, and iOS—where you’ll notice more rounded shapes, new icons and a new color palette. These updates have a simpler look and will (hopefully) boost your productivity. Take tabs, for instance. Are you a secret tab-hoarder? No judgment. We changed the shape of our tabs so that the website icons are easier to see, which makes it easier to navigate across lots of tabs. On mobile, we've made a number of changes to help you browse faster, including moving the toolbar to the bottom on iOS, so it's easy to reach. And across Chrome, we simplified the prompts, menus, and even the URLs in your address bar.

Get things done faster

You get a lot done online these days—booking travel and appointments, shopping and working through your to-do lists across multiple sites at once. And we want to make sure that you can do all of those things easily and safely. Now, Chrome can more accurately fill in your passwords, addresses, and credit card numbers, so that you can breeze through online checkout forms. All this information is saved to your Google account, and can also now be accessed directly from the Chrome toolbar.

We’ve also significantly improved the way Chrome handles passwords. Staying secure on the web means using strong and unique passwords for every different site. When it’s time to create a new password, Chrome will now generate one for you (so you’re not using your puppy’s name for all of your passwords anymore). Chrome will save it, and next time you sign in, it’ll be there, on both your laptop and phone.

Smart answers directly in your search bar

You know the box at the top of Chrome that combines the search bar and address bar into one? We call it the Omnibox, and we built it so that you can get to your search results as fast as possible. Today, we’re making it even more convenient to use. It will now show you answers directly in the address bar without having to open a new tab—from rich results on public figures or sporting events, to instant answers like the local weather via weather.com or a translation of a foreign word.

Plus, a bonus if you find yourself with two dozen tabs open across three browser windows: Search for a website in your Omnibox and Chrome will tell you if it’s already open and let you jump straight to it with “Switch to tab.” Soon, you’ll be able to search files from your Google Drive directly in your Omnibox too.

Things just got personal

Everyone uses Chrome their own way, so we made it easier to personalize. You can now create and manage shortcuts to your favorite websites directly from the new tab page—simply open a new tab and “Add shortcut.” And as if you needed an excuse to look at more pictures of your dog, you can now customize the background of a newly-opened tab with a photo of Fido.

What’s happening under the hood

While today brings changes to the part of Chrome you can see, we're always working on "behind the scenes” improvements to Chrome, and we've made a lot of those in 2018. We launched an ad filter to keep you safe from malicious and annoying ads, helped move the web to HTTPS to keep you secure online, launched site isolation which provides deeper defense against many types of attacks including Spectre, and brought VR and AR browsing to Chrome. And we’re now rolling out a set of new experiments to improve Chrome’s startup time, latency, usage of memory, and usability.

Chrome wouldn’t be where it is without the developer community, our partners in The Chromium Projects. So we’re also rolling out some updates just for them, from new CSS features to improved performance tracking ability.

We'll be back with deep dives on our beloved Chrome Dino, the new password manager and the thinking beyond today’s redesign throughout the next couple weeks. Now, time to eat some cake!