Good news everyone! Google Chrome is getting faster. The Google Chrome Blog has details of the new beta, which suggest that the next version of Chrome is up to 35% faster.
The benchmarks used include Google own V8 benchmark, where the browser was an 25% faster, and the Sunspider benchmark which achieved a result 35% faster than the current stable release.
These improvements should make their way in to the stable release shortly.
A new report coming out of Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is on average faster than both Google Chrome 1.0 and Firefox 3.0.5.
The report titled Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analyzes how various parts of the browser and their network components can impact on performance benchmarking.
Contradictory to all other tests, Microsoft claims that IE8 outperforms both Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Of interesting note, IE8 loads mozilla.com faster than Firefox while Firefox loads microsoft.com faster than IE8.
The full 14-page report is available from the Microsoft Download Center.
Results for Februrary are in and Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera are all winners for the month.
Februrary statistics from Net Applications shows that Internet Explorers share continued its decline, dropping 0.04% to 67.51%.
Firefox was a big winner, with a 0.2% increase to 21.73%, while Google Chrome increased its share by 0.03% to 1.15%.
Opera also had a good month increasing its share by 0.01% to 0.71%.
Apple’s Safari did not far so well, with the first decrease in months to 8.00%. That’s a 0.29% drop from last month.
The next month will be interesting, with the inimant release of Internet Explorer 8 expected this month and Apple’s Safari 4 beta being released just days ago.
Google Chrome may soon have full-screen mode. An avid user has spotted that the versions available from the Dev Channel now include full-screen support.
To enable full-screen in the development release of Chrome you just press F11, much like any other browser.
This much anticipated feature should make it’s way in to the public release of Google Chrome in the coming weeks.
Ben Gooder from Google has revealed that the Linux version of Google Chrome will be using the Gtk+ developer libraries.
This is partly the cause of the delay with both Mac and Linux versions of Chrome, as using native GUI libraries for each version of Chrome requires a large amount of extra time.
Gooder explains “that using these frameworks also limits what you can do to a lowest common denominator subset of what’s supported by that framework on each platform”.
In the long run, this means that Chrome for Linux will look like Chrome for Linux, instead of having a foreign interface.
A release date for Google Chrome Linux is still to be announced.
Google Chrome on Mac
Google’s Mike Pikerton has posted the first screenshots of the Mac build of Google Chrome.
Apparently things are coming along nicely, with tabs now able to properly render web pages.
Mike comments that there is still a “very very long way to go” and a release date is still impossible to predict, although a July release date has been hinted at previously.
The latest nightly build of WebKit now includes support for CSS animations. WebKit is the rendering engine used by many browsers, including Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome browser.
Dean Jacksons explains the benefits of CSS animations:
CSS Animations is one of the enhancements to CSS proposed by the WebKit project that we’ve been calling CSS Effects (eg. gradients, masks, transitions). The goal is to provide properties that allow Web developers to create graphically rich content. In many cases animations are presentational, and therefore belong in the styling system. This allows developers to write declarative rules for animations, replacing lots of hard-to-maintain animation code in JavaScript.
The new effects are already implemented in the iPhone and iPod touch browsers, and should make their way in to releases of Safari and Chrome shortly. In the mean time, you can test the new CSS animations by downloding the latest nightly release of WebKit.
After news that Google Chrome is no longer using WinHTTP libaries in alpha versions of its web browser, Google now hopes to relese its browser for both Mac OS X and Linux before the first half of this year.
Chrome’s product manager Brian Rakowski said Mac and Linux versions are progressing. “That team now is able to render most Web pages pretty well. But in terms of the user experience, it’s very basic”.
“We have not spent any time building out features. We’re still iterating on making it stable and getting the architecture right.”
The status of the Mac OS X version can be tracked on the Google Chrome Dev Channel.
Google has released a pre-beta release to its dev channel allowing developers to take a look at new features packed into Google Chrome.
With a version number of 2.0.156.1, the release includes a new version of WebKit, autocomplete for forms, and an updated spell checker.
This release also brings Google closer to bringing Chrome to Mac and Linux, with its own version of the HTTP protocol. In previous releases Google has been using WinHTTP library, tying the browser to Windows only.
Google is yet to announce a release date for the final version of Chrome 2.0.
Your next PC could very well come loaded with Google Chrome. Google is in talks with PC vendors about the possibility of including Chrome with both desktops and laptops.
Manufactures such as Dell, HP, Acer, and Toshiba are all showing interest in shipping Chrome as the default browser. Currently, the majority of PC’s ship with Internet Explorer as the default browser, as it is included with both Windows XP and Vista.
Google Chrome currently has about 1% of the browser market, while Internet Explorer has around 70%.