Google Earth gives users a new look at a changing planet, Facebook tests new business discovery features and Autodesk acquires Upchain. This is your Daily Crunch for April 15, 2021.
The big story: Google Earth gets an update
Google is describing this as Google Earth’s biggest update since 2017, though there’s really just one major addition: A time-lapse mode bringing together satellite photos from the past 37 years, in 3D.
Google updated its logo earlier this month. You’ve surely seen it by now, but let’s take a closer look: It retains the primary colors and playfully tilted “e” but introduces a new typeface. Called Product Sans, the update disposes of serifs, those flicks on the ends of letters, and uses fatter strokes reminiscent of kindergarten lesson books. The spaces within the two “g”s and two “o”s are near-perfect circles. “We think we’ve taken the best of Google (simple, uncluttered, colorful, friendly) and recast it not just for the Google of today, but for the Google of the future,” brand executives wrote in a launch announcement.
Regardless of how you feel about it, Google Maps (and its cousin Google Earth) remain powerful and versatile tools—and most of us are only scratching at the surface of what they have to offer. (And we’re just talking about the Web version, the mobile incarnations are a whole other bag of magic.) Here, we present 18 cool things you didn’t know Google Maps could do. Click on through and experience just a little bit of the power of the everyday.
Starting in January 2015, Google’s Chrome browser will block all old-school Netscape Plug-In API NPAPI plugins. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given that Google started its efforts to remove NPAPI plugins more than a year ago.
Over the last year, Google went from recommending that developers move away from this old architecture to actively blocking almost all NPAPI plugins. There was, however, always a whitelist that allowed some of the most popular NPAPI plugins like Microsoft’s Silverlight, Unity and Google’s own Google Earth plugin to continue to run in the browser. Starting in January, even that’s going away and all of these plugins will be blocked by default.
Dispatches From The Front 