Google's latest Chrome: faster and with "most requested" new features

By Stuart Corner
Tuesday, 26 January 2010 02:08

Your IT - Home IT

Google has released a new Windows version of its Chrome browser with what it says are two of the most requested enhancements: extensions and bookmark sync, and a significant performance boost.

Extensions lets users add new features and functions to the browser, such as providing one-click access to favourite web sites such as eBay and Digg; and tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting directions or shopping.

Announcing the new version on Google's Blog, product manager, Nick Baum, said: "We previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many new extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in our extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome."

Bookmark sync enables the synchronisation of bookmarks across multiple computers: when a new bookmark is added to the browser on any of the linked computers automatically added to all the others.

Baum claimed that "we've improved performance (as measured by Mozilla's Dromaeo DOM Core tests) by 42 percent over our last stable release and 400 percent since our first stable release last year."

He added "For web developers and designers, we're excited to integrate a number of new HTML5 APIs in this stable release, including LocalStorage, Database API, WebSockets, and more."

Users of the stable version of Chrome for Windows will have their browser automatically updated within the week. Extensions are presently supported on the beta version of Chrome for Linux. For Mac users, Baum said: "Hang tight — we're working on bringing extensions, bookmark sync and more to the beta soon."