Chrome users will need to either unlock their Android screen or use the Password Manager PINfeature to use passkeys on new devices. | Illustration: The Verge Google is improving passkey support in Chrome by making it easier to use the passwordless sign-in credentials across different devices. The search giant is introducing a Google Password Manager PIN that allows users to securely save and synchronize passkeys for use across Windows, macOS, Linux, and Android devices. These updates are available in beta on ChromeOS as well, with iOS support coming soon."Passkeys needed to be saved to Google Password Manager on Android prior to this update and required users to scan a QR code on their Android device to access them on other platforms. The new PIN replaces the need to scan the QR code while ensuring that your saved passkeys remain protected by end-to-end encryption, so not even Google can... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Google is rolling out some new Chrome memory management features aimed at helping you wrangle out-of-control tabs more easily. The updates include new Performance issue alerts" and some tweaks to the existing Memory Saver mode, which already tries to free up the resources of inactive tabs in the background.The new alerts appear when a new Performance Detection tool finds that one of your tabs is using more resources than it should. The notification appears next to your account thumbnail in Chrome's toolbar as a tiny graphic that looks like a speedometer. (If I didn't know about it already, I might think I'd accidentally added an Ookla Speedtest extension to my browser.) If you click the graphic, it will list the offending tabs and give... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge The iOS version of Google's Chrome browser is getting upgraded with several features from the Android iteration, including simultaneous Google Lens image and text search. Chrome for iOS could already use Google Lens to search for a picture on your iPhone or one taken from the camera, but now you can add words along with it to narrow your search in one go.For instance, you can upload a picture of a t-shirt design you like into Lens and type the name of a color that you prefer into search, and it will try to find the shirt you want. This update comes as Apple launched its own Visual Intelligence search, which only works on iPhone 16 and 16 Pro. GIF: Google Search a picture of a snowboard design you like, but see if... Continue reading...

Illustration: The Verge Right now, text highlighting is broken for anyone using recent Chromium-based browsers on some websites. The cause appears to be a change to selection styling that doesn't play nicely with Tailwind CSS. We've noticed it on our site, and so have several people posting about the issue in threads on Github and Chromium.For affected sites, you may still be able to select, copy, and paste text on websites but there's no visual indicator that you did so. Or you may not be able to copy and paste text at all or have other unexpected behaviors when you try to select specific text. Tailwind has updated its CSS tools and offered a workaround, but not every site has implemented the fix. That includes The Verge (we're working on it!), Bloomberg, and... Continue reading...