Google Chrome polished for new stable release

Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 16 September 2009 05:44

IT Industry - Development

A new stable release of the Google Chrome browser delivers more speed, themes, and other user interface changes. Oh, and there's improved HTML5 support too.

Google Chrome is just over a year old, and there's a new stable release.

Javascript performance is said to be 25% faster than the previous stable release, and 150% improved on the original beta (which was regarded as being pretty quick at the time).

The New Tab page has been changed to give a less cluttered and more Google-like appearance. It also bears some resemblance to the Top Sites page in  Safari or Opera's Speed Dial.

The New Tab page is now readily customisable, with options including pinning, click-and-drag rearrangement, and a list view of most-visited web sites.

The Omnibox address/search bar has been tweaked to display icons to help distinguish between different types of result (search results, bookmarks, history and so on).

Themes are now officially supported, with a modest selection of around 20 initially available for download. More themes are promised in the near future.

The new stable release also includes improved HTML5 capabilities, including the video tag that allows video playback without a plug-in. It also simplifies the inclusion of video content in a web page.

The bad news is that there still isn't a stable release of Chrome for Mac OS X or Linux.