Yet another way to access Google Hangouts. Photo: Jordanna Chord/Google

Google’s chat and video messaging service, Hangouts, got a whole new standalone web app on Monday afternoon.

“We are launching another way to use Hangouts today,” writes Google’s Jordanna Chord on Google Plus. “From our new site you’ll be able to take advantage of the best of Hangouts in the browser, along with an inspiring image to get you through the day.”

Now you’ll be able to keep in touch with all your Hangouts-using buddies in any web broswer, including Safari, without having to run Gmail or Google Plus (or the Chrome app).

Google is in the midst of pushing out a much-anticipated compatibility update for it’s official Hangouts application via the Google Play Store. In terms of added functionality, this upgrade brings support for ‘hidden contacts’ and new notification settings, in addition to a handful of bug fixes, stability improvements and speed optimizations.

Google is in the process of rolling out its much-anticipated update for its official Hangouts application which comes pre-loaded on all Android devices. This upgrade brings some interesting new features, including SMS & MMS integration, location sharing and animated GIF support.

Google Hangouts received a minor update on the Play Store earlier this week, which is only now just rolling out to its users. This upgrade to version 1.1 brings some new emoji’s, bug fixes and the inclusion of some “butter” to Hangouts, in an effort to make it run faster and increase the fluidity of the app.

We were surprised to see no new Nexus hardware at Google I/O on Wednesday. We were expecting at least a new Nexus 7, and possible a white Nexus 4 with 32GB of storage. The closest we got was a Samsung Galaxy S4 “Nexus edition” with stock Android.

But we may not have to wait too long before Google updates its 7-inch slate. In fact, it looks like the company has already begun teasing the device in its new promotional video for Google Hangouts.