Google Chrome 2 Brings New Features and Serious Speed

Google pushed an impressive new Chrome update into the developer channel on Thursday. This experimental prerelease, which is labeled version 2.0.156.1, gives users a first look at some of the items that are the focus of the developers working on Chrome 2.0.

Chrome is an open source web browser that is built on Apple's WebKit rendering engine. When Google launched the first release of Chrome last year, it was surprisingly polished but it lacked a handful of critical features. Google has moved swiftly to close the functionality gap by adding a bookmark manager and other improvements.

Unlike much of Google's other software, Chrome didn't stay in beta for very long. It got the 1.0 treatment last month and Google is already courting OEMs with the aim of getting it preinstalled on new PCs so it can reach users as soon as possible.

Now that the 1.0 version is out the door, Google is leaping ahead and beginning work on a major 2.0 release. The new version that was pushed into the developer channel on Thursday—which includes several significant rendering enhancements, new user interface features, augmented extensibility, and a number of other nice additions—demonstrates Google's commitment to making Chrome a serious contender on the desktop.

New Features :

Here are some improvements that you'll notice right away:

(1) Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.

(2) Full Screen Mode: If you've ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.

(3) Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you've previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that's easy to do from the Tools menu.


(4) Customized Profiles are a great way to separate Chrome's settings in different categories: you could create a work profile with its own homepage, bookmarks and browsing history and profile for your personal projects. The great thing about Chrome is that you don't have to close the browser to change your profile: just open a new window in a separate profile.


(5) Support for Greasemonkey scripts (or user-scripts): To enable this experimental feature you need to right-click on Chrome's shortcut from your desktop, select Properties and add -enable-user-scripts in the Target field. For now, you'll need to place the scripts in c:\scripts, but the location will change in the next builds.

(6) Autoscroll by middle-clicking on a page and indicating the direction


And here are some improvements that aren't immediately visible, but will make web browsing with Google Chrome more enjoyable:

(7) Increased Stability: Google Chrome is more stable than ever--we have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch.

(8) Increased Speed: Making the web faster continues to be our main area of focus. Thanks to a new version of WebKit and an update to our JavaScript engine, V8, interactive web pages will run even faster. We've also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open. Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark. You can read more about V8 in our JavaScript scalability post on the Chromium blog.

Google attributed the speed boost to the incorporation of a new version of WebKit — Chrome’s underlying engine — and an update to the browser’s V8 JavaScript engine. As a result of these changes, Darin Fisher of the Chrome team wrote in a blog post, “interactive web pages will run even faster”.If you are already using the beta version of Chrome, the features will be familiar, including the speedier JavaScript performance of the browser’s V8 interpreter. Google touts a 30 percent speed increase for Chrome; my testing actually showed a 44 percent improvement.

Chrome 2 completed the well-known SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 1503ms, compared with 2689ms for version 1. This leaves the competition in the dust: Internet Explorer 8 required 9,065ms, while the Firefox 3.1 beta took 3,045ms.

“We’ve also made sure that JavaScript keeps running fast even when you have lots of tabs open,” Fisher wrote. “Try opening a bunch of web applications and then running your favorite benchmark.”

Chrome, like rival browser Opera, displays a panel of most-visited site thumbnails on each newly opened tab. One feature of Chrome 2 is the ability to remove certain of those thumbnails, if the user does not want particular ones to be displayed.

Another new feature is a full-screen mode, which entails hitting F11 to maximize a video or presentation by hiding the title bar and the rest of the browser window. Chrome 2 also introduces form autofill to the browser for the first time.

[ Download Google Chrome 2 ]