Google continues to polish Chrome

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 18 March 2009 03:11

IT Industry - Development

A new beta of Google's Chrome browser delivers improved speed and additional features.

Launched last September, Google Chrome has had a modest impact on browsing habits despite its goal of making the web faster, safer and easier.

Since it only came out of beta in December, it shouldn't be a great surprise that its web share as measured by Net Applications is only 1.15 percent.

It isn't the primary browser delivered with any major operating system, so at this stage it would be unrealistic to expect its use to reach levels similar to Internet Explorer (currently 67.44 percent), Firefox (21.77 percent) or Safari (8.02 percent).

But it quite an achievement to move so quickly into fourth place, ahead of well established browsers including Opera and the one inside Sony's PlayStation consoles.

Despite being out of beta with a stable release version, Chrome is still a work in process. The team at Google has judged that it's time to get wider feedback on recent developments.

Hence a new beta release.

The new beta is significantly faster at executing JavaScript than the stable version. Given Google's interest in web applications (think Google Apps and GMail), JavaScript speed has always been an important goal.

According to product manager Brian Rakowski, compared with the stable release the new beta is 25 percent faster on the V8 benchmark and 35 percent faster on the SunSpider benchmark.

So what's new? Find out on page 2.