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VIRTUALISATION Google continues to polish Chrome
VIRTUALISATION Google continues to polish Chrome | Google continues to polish Chrome |
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| by Stephen Withers | |
| Thursday, 06 August 2009 | |
  
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Will the latest beta lead to a further jump? Quite possibly - although it's still only available for Windows. Let's get the 'shiny, shiny' stuff out of the way first. Chrome now supports themes, so you can configure the browser with your choice from a range of colour schemes and patterns. There are only a couple of dozen themes at this stage, but the Chrome team promises more by the time this feature reaches the stable version of the browser. Now for the technical improvements. Google claims the beta delivers 30+ percent more speed on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks. Speed has always been an important consideration for this project - not surprisingly, given Google's interest in web applications. Other factors contributing to improved page load times are said to include DNS caching, more efficient DOM bindings, and the use of V8 for proxy auto-configuration. The new Chrome beta also prioritises the loading of elements for a new web page ahead of other pages that are still loading. (Not a bad idea, but wouldn't it be better to always prioritise the frontmost page?) This beta release also marks the arrival of HTML 5 features, in particular video tags (allowing video in a page without requiring plugins) and web workers (essentially a mechanism for putting selected tasks into the background so they don't impact on the normal operation of the browser). Both features arrived in Firefox 3.5, and Safari 4 supports web workers. As for usability, the beta tweaks the display of Omnibox results to better distinguish between different types of results, and the New Tab page can be customised to set the Most Visited site regardless of actual frequency, to fix the location of selected web sites, and to hide unwanted parts of the page. According to a blog post by Google's product manager Brian Rakowski and associate product marketing manager Min Li Chan, beta releases give "you a sneak preview of things to come with occasional rough edges, but [they're] a great way for us to quickly churn out new features and get your feedback." |
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