Google just released a new beta version of its Chrome browser for Windows PCs. The company claims that it is 30 percent faster than the current stable version of the browser (based on V8 and SunSpider benchmarks).
What may be more significant, though, is that this is the first version of Chrome that adds some support for HTML5, including video-tagging capabilities. The latest Firefox 3.5 beta also adopts HTML5, which allows for all sorts of cool things inside Web video like links and other interactive elements. It lets you treat video more like a Webpage. Along with Google’s acquisition of On2 today for its video codec, it looks like Google is getting behind open video in a big way. (Read this post from last year for more on the evolution of HTML).
The new Google Chrome beta is also prettier. Those themes we’ve been telling you about are now fully incorporated. And the new beta also improves the New Tab and Omnibox features.
When you create a new tab, Chrome shows you thumbnails of the sites you visits the most often (just like in Safari). These act as automatic bookmarks. Now, you can rearrange the thumbnails in any order you like by dragging and dropping them, or you can pin one down so that it doesn’t move even if you don’t visist it as much as other sites.
The Omnibox is Chrome’s all-in-one address and search bar. As you type words in, it gives you drop-down suggestions, which now have icons distinguishing between search results, bookmarks, and Websites.
For Mac?
Sounds really great. Would love to check it out. Is it available for download yet? You didn’t mention in your post, Erick.
For Mac (currently a developer release):
http://www.goog...dev.html?dl=mac
Chrome is soo fast, i had given up earlier, but looks like Google has really worked some magic on it, this new beta is super fast
FF is still faster, and FF has better memory. If I want to blow up pages so the font is bigger, FF stays that way when I return.
Chrome = not quite there yet.
Even if Firefox is marginally faster — an assertion that doesn’t seem to hold up in most benchmarks — chrome is multithreaded/multiprocessor.
That means one crash doesn’t take down the browser — just your window, and when you visit a resource hogging website in one tab, your other tabs are still responsive if you have a multi-core machine.
That’s bizar. Here at work we run tests on Chrome and FF 3.5.
And testing JavaScript performance the current Chrome is like 5% faster than the latest FF release.
Looking at memory management you can see that Chrome uses way less memory than Firefox
Where did you get your information?
And the Mac version is where?
in your dreams
stainlessapp.com while you wait for the Mac version
Google is busy building themes for the winblows version and yet no Mac version (from Google) available yet?
HUGE FAIL!
Google probably doesn’t care about Mac users. To be honest I don’t blame them.
Troll.
Mac is getting as much attention as their market share encourages google to give them. Much less than windows.
After the Google Voice incident, I think he might not be a troll at all. I think he’s right >:)
Mac version has been available for a while. I have been using it every day. I don’t miss the Firefox beach ball of death on Mac.
http://www.goog...dev.html?dl=mac
perhaps when theres a Mac marketshare worth supporting, people will start to make mainstream software for it.
In your dreams. Mac will always be the 2nd one to get anything new.
Come on @plunge … that canard is at least a decade old you arsehat. Do you have a grey beard too?
Hey author, Webkit nightly has HTML5 support. I know we are all supposed to ignore Apple now that you think they are evil since their agreement with a cell carrier makes them do stupid things but Webkit is the beans man and it’s what powers Chrome.
For Mac (currently a developer release):
http://www.goog...30;..tml?dl=mac
^
Mac version only exists as a dev build. But beware, it does not have too much functionality (lacks flash support right now).
@Author: Umm, Firefox 3.5 beta??? Unless you have been living in a cave, officially FF3.5 launched a few weeks ago.
chrome’s speed is nice
except it crashes way too often and freezes when i have too many tabs open…
it also has trouble rendering a lot of sites properly
in a year or two it will be great
chrome looks so horrible
even IE8 looks better than chrome
“When you create a new tab, Chrome shows you thumbnails of the sites you visits the most often (just like in Safari).”
Cue the pedants pointing out that Chrome had this first (it did), though Safari’s implementation (which I prefer) is more like a cross between this and Opera’s ’speed dial’ feature.
I thought Opera had it first
Opera had it first, but for a different purpose. It’s called “Speed dial” in Opera, basically, 9 slots for fast access webpages, shown in new tab with sites’ screenshots.
Chrome calculates the contents of it’s “Speed dial” itself, that’s the difference.
Still can’t beat the speeds of firefox 3.5.2.. so what’s the point really…
step it up google -even my safari is faster..
You must have broken Chrome somehow because Chrome has always been faster than Firefox, especially when you’re first opening either of them. Firefox’s improvements in 3.5 were significant, but I don’t think Mozilla had quite closed the gap.
Safari on the other hand takes _ages_ to start but does run fairly quickly once it’s up and running, though it’s a heavyweight in the RAM usage.
“Safari on the other hand takes _ages_ to start”
On the Mac, Safari takes les than 3 seconds to start on my 2007 MacBook. FF3.5 takes 10 to 15 seconds.
And Firefox makes a bad use of memory compared to Safari, too.
Right, on my 2006 MBP it takes about 5 seconds to start cold (first launch on a fresh restart of computer) … you’ve got other issues @Noah.
Safari does consume a ton of RAM. The Webkit nightly does much better on the resources out of the gate but it still balloons to hundreds and hundreds of megabytes of RAM usage.
I can load the same tabs in FF as in Safari and see 1/3 the RAM usage. Hah! What gives?
Safari is faster for me but FF is leaner, go figure.
… Chrome … Firefox… but I don’t think Mozilla had quite closed the gap.!
Google Chrome, Firefox and Apple Safari all use Mozilla code as the code is a development of Netscape.
Use the following java script code if you don’t beleave me.
alert(navigator.appName);
alert(navigator.appCodeName);
I hate the way Chrome modifies all the .html registry classes to point to CHROMEhtml, thereby disabling hyperlinks in other applications when your uninstall it. That’s just plain rude.
And what’s the big deal with RAM useage these days? Storage, both fast and slow, has never been less expensive.
Really? I found Chrome to me much faster than any browser than the new FF. It’s really not even close.
Do you have some tested benchmarks comparing the two?
Thanks!
Firefox is an ugly and slow piece of hacks, well marketed though.
I understand Google, their engineers had a look at FFs codebase and decided it’s not worth investing time in this crap.
Opera/Chrome are best browsers in market today.
I tried using Chrome, but I don’t know, there’s something about all Google products that feels rushed and unfinished, Chrome is no different.
I have the same feeling. When you look at Bing and Google, or Yahoo Mail and GMail, or iPhoto and Picasa that’s pretty clear.
The only products that i know and think they really look almost finished are GMaps and Analytics.
And by finished, you mean stagnant? Like Yahoo Mail which has not updated in ages and still defaults to the old version?
That’s because they start by offering only basics, essential stuff and build it from there, based on user feedback.
Now with MS/Apple you have different situation, they think they know what’s best for the user, spend lots of time developing features that THEY think are needed and release the final product.
But when you look at it (Chrome for example), it started out as optimized GUI over Webkit, now they release themes, because that’s what users want, plugins/extensions are comming too.
Eric,
Does Google want to become omniscient by keeping a record of everything you type into Omnibox as well as analyzing the content of secure websites you visit?
If Chrome supported Firefox add-ons I’d use it more then once or twice a week. I’d make it my default as it seems more stable then FF based on friends who use it as their default.
Well said Ryan! Would love to see Stumble Upon supported on Chrome
Mac plz!
Niggly point – Firefox 3.5.x is in production, not beta.
But, like everyone else, give me Chrome for my Mac. Unless, of course, this is a purposeful delay from the Googleplex to make a point.
See numerous posts above for Mac version, or here because you can’t scroll or you would have seen it:
http://www.goog...dev.html?dl=mac
“Supports HTML5″ (in your headline) is incorrect. Nothing supports HTML5. Chrome (and other WebKit-based browsers) support a small part of HTML5 draft.
Exactly, but it is a start.
I would love them to support HTML5 fully. As a developer of mostly web based applications it would be great to have full HTML5 support in any browser. To make it even better it would be great if they push HTML5 a little further and make it capable of all the great things FireFox can do with XUL.
IE 6 rulz !!
Currently I am using chrome more than firefox (which i use only for fire bug and web developer plug ins) . I am glad they are improving the browser cause the current version does eat up lot of system resources and occasionly hangs.
With the support of HTML 5, i love it even more. Chrome is going to beat Firefox in the near future.
Would love to see a Mac version of the browser. I have been playing with Chromium’s nightly release cycle on the Apple side however, for a while it has been buggy but insanely fast and light on the resources. Perhaps when this build is ripped from beta, we will see the official Mac release. Here is to hoping.
Non sense… on my system, it takes 4-5 clicks to launch it. What’s the point if it is faster to load…
we need it for mac!
Yeah, it may be faster and prettier, but it’s still a Google browser and I’m not too keen on giving them data about my web surfing habits.
Totally agreeing with you. Enough Google already!
It’s an opensource project, they are not stealing any data from you.
You can download the source and build Chrome yourself if you’re paranoid
It’s really fast! Compare Safari/Chrome with this Canvas Demo:
http://9elements.com/io/?p=153
Cheers
Sebastian
No ability to have tabs at the bottom. No extensions.
No point.
By that logic, there was no point in any web browser something like 8 – 10 years ago.
Give it time, it’ll get there. And there is a “point”, Chrome is lightning fast at running javascript, on which majority of these so called web 2.0 apps depend, including the ones from Google.
They are building a platform for their apps, for the future of the web, because most other browsers are moving too slow (Opera/Safari being exceptions).
we will see…..
crashes at startup in a loop.
No Mac release yet for Chrome is another example of Google’s growing stupidity.
Well, the most recent poll numbers indicate that over 90% of all global web traffic is conducted via Windows. I would say they are focused in the most logical direction.
It’s not effective to keep working at same loads on both, win/mac versions, if that would happen, both versions could be released at the same time, but later and with more bugs.
Doing such small iterations, focusing on one platform will only get better results on the other.
The stupidity is on you my friend, for lack of reading comprehension.
http://www.goog...dev.html?dl=mac
Html 5? I never thought that could keep on getting better when I first got Interent. I guess there are no limits.
Chrome is the best Browser in browsers market.But let’s see which browser will win the race in this field.
No doubt, Google is providing the best and free services to its users….
how many sites do you open daily ???
how much time do u spend on the internet surfing ???
how much time ur browser remains idle ???
how many tabs do you open???
If answer of any of the above question is “NOT MUCH” (here not much is of course less than 2-3 hours) then u really don’t know the problems of Chrome.
It starts faster than any other browser that’s true but it has hell lot of problems.
Oh Great questions?
I open 100-250 sites daily.
Wrong Sir, Opera is the best in every way
just downloaded a copy. Looks pretty indeed!
I dont know if anyone has checked but once you download this latest beta the themes announced yesterday work.
I couldn’t get the themes to work even with the new beta. I click on the button to activate them and get error messages about pixel channels.
Check out: Portable Google Chrome 3.0.195.4
http://redir.ec/J1X2
Have fun & greetings from Germany
Thanks! I love running your Portable Chrome versions on my roaming profile university machines because it lets me control exactly where the cache is stored.
Chrome is now my primary browser.
Google used to be about simplicity. Kind of funny how we’re heading back to the theme days lead by google – gmail, igoogle now chrome!
Is http://www.goog...30;..tml?dl=mac and Chromium http://code.goo...e.com/chromium/ the same thing?
Chromium is to Chrome what Webkit is to Safari.
I like the fact that I can organize the home page most visited sites. Because the sites that appear first are not the sites i need to visit first and I hate when they move to other place.
It’s prettier and i think it still will stay as my default browser.
There “We need a Mac version!” people are driving me insane. It’s in development. You can run it and check the changelogs to see whats happening. It’s not simple to port Chrome because of its multiprocess architecture and extensive use of sandboxes.
Secondly, the number of Windows uses vastly outnumbers Mac users, so it makes sense to start with a Windows version.
Imagine if you were checking out an update to say, Delicious Library, and all you could read is “WELL WHERE’S MY LINUX VERSION?!?!?” trust me, its annoying as hell.
Well, the fanboys came out of the woodwork today. Wow.
Would it hurt any of you too much to add “for me” at the end of the following sentence: “(something) is the best browser”?
Simply saying “Opera is the best browser” or “Chrome is the best browser” doesn’t make any sense without qualification. But if I say, “Firefox is the best browser for me,” then that is a qualified statement.
I’ve just put some brief instructions on how to create Chrome themes with your own images and colours on my very fresh blog: http://blog.ahu...-chrome-themes/
It doesn’t go in to too much detail, but I am happy to answer any questions.
I am already quite used to Chrome since its launch, and i love every bit of it. The only thing which i felt was missing from it was support of a few applications which I think is better in the newer version. Would add more on the newer version as and when I explore it. But I believe this is one of the best products of Google in the market at the moment.
Sonal Maheshwari
USourceIT your single source for all IT needs
Google doesn’t “get behind” open source – Google uses open source to Google’s own end.
” faster than the current stable version” Ohho where do you get this? I have the spontaneous reboot version. Not as good.