More Reasons To Love Chrome

The latest beta version of the Chrome web browser, Google Chrome 5.0.375.29, is breaking speed records according to Google and it's testing. The performance has improved by 30 to 35% and the browser will support HTML 5 features such as geolocation APIs and drag-and-drop. The beta version is available for Linux, Mac and Windows and has integrated Flash support.

Source: computer world

Google Announces Google Chrome OS

A post on the Official Google Blog introduces Google's latest shot across the bow of Microsoft. "Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems. While there are areas where Google Chrome OS and Android overlap, we believe choice will drive innovation for the benefit of everyone, including Google."

Google Chrome OS is said to be able to run on both x86 and ARM chips, and the company is working with OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year saying "... netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010."

It sounds as though this is a cloud computing initiative to rival the efforts of Microsoft and Windows 7. The Chrome OS is said to have a minimal user interface and is made up of "Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel." Applications for the OS will be developed as web apps and therefore will run on any standards-based browser.

A Faster More Stable Chrome

Google has taken the wraps off of a new version of their Chrome browser, fixing some 300 bugs and making the rendering of javascript intensive pages up to 30% faster. A few new features have been added such as the ability to remove thumbnails of your most visited sites and auto-fill for forms. Guess it's time to give Chrome another try...

Google Unwraps Chrome Experiments

Over the past few months Google has enlisted the help of a number of JavaScript gurus to demonstrate the power of Chromes V8 JavaScript engine. The result is Chrome Experiments a collection of fun and interesting projects that push the boundaries of the browser. Check out the video and the link above:

Source: Official Google Blog

Google Chrome Tips

Tom Spring of PC World has posted some handy tips and tweaks to the new Google Chrome browser. The highlights for me are:

1. CTRL + SHIFT + N automatically opens up a Chrome 'incognito' window which allows you to surf on a PC without leaving behind any digital footprints.
2. CTRL + SHIFT + T will open recently closed browser tabs.
3. Type about:internets into the address bar and you'll see a tribute to United States Senator Ted Stevens' take on the Internet. (This only works in Windows XP)
4. Chrome allows you to peel browser tabs off a browser so they can become their own browser window. Chrome also allows you to take two separate Chrome browsers and drag them together creating one window with two tabs.

Check out the complete list here.

Get Your Chrome Now

As noted in yesterday's post Google has announced the release of it's new browser dubbed Chrome. This morning the Official Google blog is indicating that the beta version is available for download. At the moment Google Chrome Beta is available for Windows XP and Vista users. My First impression is that it is sleek looking with a simple google-esq interface and renders pages quickly. The install was fast and provided the option to import my Firefox bookmarks and prompted for the preferred search engine, it recognized that Google was my default but asked if I wanted to choose another anyway. I'm an avid Firefox fan but will be giving Chrome a chance. Click here to go to the download page! Send us your comments!

Introducing Google's "Chrome" Web Browser

The Official Google Blog is reporting the release of a Google browser named Chrome. The Google team has decided to start from scratch and create an open source browser that is "...is clean and fast." According to the blog post "By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers." The desire for these isolated tabs was apparently the work of the Google Gears team who complained that current browsers were "...inherently single-threaded." To explain their thinking and describe the features of the Chrome browser, Google has created a comic book which does a great job I might add! Keep an eye out here for a download link, at the time of this post Chrome was not available to try but the Google guys are promising it's availability shortly.