When we initially developed the Google Docs integration the only way to edit and modify Google documents was via Google's Apps Script which is also the preferred Google way for developing Docs addons by adding a sidebar interface. The native Apps Script extensions however are limited to that sidebar UI and wouldn't allow us to interface with the native Zotero client running on the user's system, which is why we created a hybrid Google Docs extension, part of which lives in the Zotero Connector and part of which is deployed to the Google Docs Apps Script environment as a "standalone script".

The current extension (approximately) works as follows:
1. The Zotero Google Docs extension UI is managed by the Zotero Connector.
2. Citation processing and the citing UI is managed by the Zotero client.
3. Reading the document for citation processing and then editing its contents is done via our standalone script running on Apps Script.

This update changes the part 3 of the above. In 2019 Google introduced an alternative way to interface with Google Docs - the Google Docs API. Apps Script is JS code that you deploy to Google's Servers and that's where that code runs whenever you need to interface with any document. The Google Docs API allows you to retrieve the full contents of the document via a HTTP GET request as JSON object and modify its content via HTTP POST requests.

The main reason Apps Script is slow is that each time it runs, Google needs to initialize a server with our Apps Script code, then fetch the document and preprocess it so that it can be read with the Apps Script programming API even if we only need to do something very simple. Even when we did our best to limit the number of times we need to call the Apps Script code (which is about 3-5 times for a citation insert), for a large document (think 100+ pages) just spinning up the Apps Script instance on Google's servers takes 5s+. If we needed to update all citations in a large document (say for changing the citation style), we couldn't do it in a single Apps Script call as the script would timeout after 60s of running, so we had to batch those updates, increasing the Apps Script environment overhead even more.

With the Google Docs API this is much simplified. Document reading and processing code is folded directly into the Connector. We only need to retrieve the document content JSON object once, we then batch as many updates as we need and submit it as a single call to the Google Docs API (i'm simplifying a bit, sometimes we need to refetch the document or submit multiple update calls, but this is the gist). The API itself is also much more performant than Apps Script, adding to the speed benefit.

Very quick first impression:
- It is indeed way faster and much more fun to use
- IIRC the old version prevented me from inserting citations while in suggest mode. I tried to insert a citation in suggest mode and it let me do this but then threw an "Error updating Document" (Report ID: 2132666965). I assume this still isn't possible to do, so should still be disabled (though it'd be great if it were possible -- as you probably know, many collaborative projects work in suggest/track changes a lot)

Indeed it is much faster than before but still a bit slower than native LibreOffice integration IMHO.

Just when we switched away from Google Docs due to it being too slow :(

This is now available in Zotero Connector 5.0.95 for Edge. Chrome and Safari still to come.

Hi and thank you for this, it sounds great!
Is it OK to try the beta connector while other collaborators are still on the release version, or should everyone use the same version of the connector? Just to be sure. - Thanks

@dstillman thank you!
For information, it's working very well so far - definitely faster than the previous version - and I have about 150 references. If it was faster, it would be perfect, but it looks like that's not possible.
Small thing, sometimes I can't see the Zotero menu anymore (even if I'm in Edit mode) and in these cases I have to close Firefox & Zotero and restart both (maybe in a specific order? not sure) and it always ends up working. This may not be specific to this latest update though.
In any case: Thank you!

Just to give an update on this, there's unfortunately a Google Docs bug that results in errors in some documents when using the new integration method. We reported it to Google a few months ago but are still waiting for a fix from them. Until then, we're leaving the v2 integration disabled by default.

You can still enable the new method from the preferences if you want the faster performance — just be aware that you might hit an error that will require switching back to the old method.

There's no separate download. It's part of the standard Chrome connector, you just have to enable it in the connector or preferences as described

We don't currently recommend using Google Docs Integration v2 due to a bug in Google Docs that causes integration to break with some documents. We reported the bug to Google last year but are still waiting for a fix. We'll be disabling v2 in an upcoming update.