Latest Google Chrome Beta Is “30 Percent Faster,” Supports HTML5, And Is Prettier Too

[Sazar]

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/05...-prettier-too/

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.

Other than attributing features brought forth first in Opera to Safari, the article is pretty much a copy of the Google Chromium blog regarding the update

Yes, I HATE it when dumb people assign credit for something to someone besides the original creator.

Anyways, personal experience, the new Chrome seems just as snappy as before. Haven't really played with it that much. The new themes seem daft, honestly, but I am expecting more transparencies and more versions to be introduced in the future. There is definitely hope

I am still waiting to see if there will be a more advanced ad-block style tool that will debut for Chrome. The speed of Chrome + ad-block would be maximum win.

Side by side comparo of the FF 3.5.2 and Chrome 3.x builds shows that Chrome is seemingly light-years ahead in speed and the over all look blends in much more cleanly with Vista/Win 7. Tabs are still superior and the "speed dial" home page is still better than the speed dial extension for FF. FF has Chrome beat on the extensions front however

I will check on Chrome's performance on Win 7 x64 when I get home tonight and see if it still has issues with x64 or if those have been resolved. Plus, I'll probably do a more in-depth write-up when Win 7 RTM debuts.

[Toss3]

Been using Chrome 3.XX for awhile already(dev channel) and haven't really run into any bugs yet. It's faster than 2.0 and has themes, although lacking in visual appeal!

[ViN86]

Feels faster than FF atm...

[Sazar]

FF, even with the extensions and custom adjustments to improve speed is just lacking something.

I have no idea what it is But no matter what I do, I just can't get it to speed up any more. Opera is blindingly fast and I'm not even using Turbo mode (which is a little broken tbh. If you have it set to ON instead of Auto, it will break some page loads).

IE8 is also blindingly fast, although it will wait a little longer for some graphical loads. Chrome just zooms along, like Opera, loading as needed and being completely readable and providing a page you can interact with almost immediately.

I have FF fully customized, using a chrome theme and even using the address bar to search with (just like in Chrome) but, it just doesn't feel right

[mailman2]

FF has always been slow for me. Chrome FTW!

[Sazar]

Apparently AdSweep is supposed to work pretty good with Chrome

http://www.adsweep.org/

I am going to wait for an official release myself, but looks promising

[glObalist]

Originally Posted by Sazar

FF, even with the extensions and custom adjustments to improve speed is just lacking something.
(

What are these extensions and custom adjustments you speak about? If you use FasterFox and similar manual tweaks, these are really obsolete and have long been proven to cause more harm than speed.

I just tested Chrome against my FF3.5.2 + Adblock + 10 other (non- "speed-tweak-related" extensions) and I can tell you FF is rendering pages noticeably faster than vanilla Chrome, mainly due to Chrome loading all the additional advertisement crap on websites.

I suppose if I installed an adblocker for Chrome it would be on par with FF speed-wise, maybe couple of miliseconds difference here and there, nothing "blinding" for sure. Seriously dude, try them side by side on a different PC, preferably not yours seeing as you have all these trouble.

[Sazar]

Originally Posted by glObalist

What are these extensions and custom adjustments you speak about? If you use FasterFox and similar manual tweaks, these are really obsolete and have long been proven to cause more harm than speed.

I just tested Chrome against my FF3.5.2 + Adblock + 10 other (non- "speed-tweak-related" extensions) and I can tell you FF is rendering pages noticeably faster than vanilla Chrome, mainly due to Chrome loading all the additional advertisement crap on websites.

I suppose if I installed an adblocker for Chrome it would be on par with FF speed-wise, maybe couple of miliseconds difference here and there, nothing "blinding" for sure. Seriously dude, try them side by side on a different PC, preferably not yours seeing as you have all these trouble.

Fwiw, I am not what you would call a noob

I have the same general browser setup on all my systems including work (i.e. Opera, FF, IE8 and Chrome). I primarily have tweaked on my HTPC and somewhat on my primary PC and the results are replicable time and time again (using vanilla Chrome v/s FF is not even fair, by the way).

The latest release of Chrome really does have speed enhancements and none of the "hiccups" FF exhibits as it renders a page.

kthxbye

[glObalist]

Your constant rants against FF here are getting quite annoying TBH. So before you make another one, may you test both (or all 4 if you wish) vanilla browsers on a PC you ain't touched before? Make a video of these "blinding differences"? kthx

I also asked you what were these extensions you were using but you didn't answer that. Then again I don't suppose you'd be a noob using dubious and obsolete FF speed-tweaks would you?

Now where's my BrowserWars(tm) smiley when I need one?

[Sazar]

I've moved back from FF 3.5 to Chrome as my primary browser after much debating.

Speed is paramount and I've decided I can deal with the ridiculously over-sized ads on this site in exchange for a browser which is just blatantly faster

FF 3.6, I await your debut.

[hokeyplyr48]

My chrome is god awful slow. If I have more than like 5 tabs open or two windows it just lags horribly. There's like a second delay to anything (clicking on links, new tabs, etc)

On firefox now hoping they'll fix it...

[mailman2]

I don't ever recall Firefox being faster than anything. I always have IE, FF and Chrome installed but mostly use Chrome its still the fastest and best over all for me. FF just added multicore support, I can't ever remember FF being touted as the fastest browser. It was always just more secure than IE.