Submitted by After about 8 months of work, Google has “released Chrome 2” to the general public. Technically, this just means they moved the version of Chrome in the beta channel up to the stable channel. “We’re referring to this as Chrome 2, but that’s mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don’t give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible.” There’s lots of decent goodies in Chrome 2.
A big focus for the Chrome 2.x branch has been stability and speed. The have fixed over 300 bugs that caused crashes since launch. In addition, they’ve improved performance of the browser not only by moving to a new version of the Webkit rendering engine, but also by updating V8, Chrome’s JavaScript rendering engine.
V8 has been tweaked to deliver a 30% performance improvement, but it’s important to note that that figure comes from the V8 Benchmark Suite, V8’s own benchmark suite. They also worked on V8’s scalability, making sure that even when you have countless JavaScript-heavy pages open, performance will remain good.
Thee are also a bunch of user-visible changes, such as a revised “new tab” page which allows you to remove thumbnails from the speed dial function (so I can finally remove that link to Greatponies.com). There’s also a new full-screen function using the F11 key, and very pretty finally: form autofill.
Product Manager Brian Rakowski details the new features in this video:
Because of Chrome’s successful auto-update feature, users of Chrome will automatically be updated to this latest version. If you don’t yet have Chrome, you can download it from Google.
So what’s it called if osnews causes a website to crash? (Surely My Little Pony can’t withstand our geek onslaught)
osnews’d!
It doesn’t quite ring right…
Does it RSS already?
Google Reader does.
Online RSS readers are great. I used to think Akreggator was the best RSS reader around … until I tried to use it across three separate computers and realised that it didn’t sync read/unread status across computers.
Since then, I’ve switched to Google Reader, and can honestly say, that’s where RSS feeds belong — on a central server somewhere online, accessible from various places (phone, palmtop, laptop, desktop, etc).
just like email
Nah, I much prefer local apps for e-mail, using IMAP to keep the messages on the server. Until webmail gains full keyboard support with user-assignable shortcuts, it won’t replace local e-mail apps. Zimbra’s web UI comes close with a lot of keyboard shortcuts, but they aren’t user-customisable. Same with GMail.
Using the mouse is just too slow.
GMail supports keyboard shortcuts (press shift + ? for help). A labs feature, which has to be enabled separately, allows to customize the shortcuts.
I knew about the keyboard shortcuts in GMail, but not about the Labs feature to customise them. Thanks for the head’s up. I’ll have to give that a try.
How’s about the Linux and OS X versions they keep promising?
http://dev.chromium.org/Home
Have a play 🙂
Their waiting for Hell to freeze over.
It’s alpha software, but works pretty well. I’m using it right now to post this message. But I still need Firefox to do everything.
http://www.stefanoforenza.com/chromium-on-ubuntu-how-to/comment-pag…
Brickbats to Google for taking Chromium (developed open source on Linux), making it into Chrome, and then abandoning Linux.
You got it wrong buddy.
Chromium was not developed in Linux. It is open sourced, but not developed in Linux. Why do you use Microsoft Visual Studio to debug it?
Anyone can take the source code and build a Linux browser from Chromium. Do it and don’t wait for Google to build it for you.
FOSS programmers are cutting edge, right?
True. What he probably meant is that Chrome is based on WebKit based on KHTML initially a FOSS/Linux/KDE project.
You have that one so backwards it’s unbelievable. Chrome is the original (Windows) product built by Google – Chromium is the project under which they’ve subsequently released the source code.
I wonder if we won’t see Chrome until Snow Leopard. I really hope this disparity isn’t a sign of things to come… (ie one platform receiving more attention than the others and I’d hate for there to be any sort of feature disparity.)
The OS X version is coming in the next two months. The Linux version will come when Linux hits 5% of the market! 2035?
LOL.
Finally my gf won’t see that I visit http://www.gaybikerporn.com/ quite frequently.
LOL…What about setting it as default home page for granny?
I can’t access Gmail with Chrome 2.
http://img190.imageshack.us/img190/5126/gmailg.jpg
It works on Firefox 3.0.10
Anecdotally, it’s working fine on my end.
Clear all your cookies. That should do it. If not, then something got b0rked on your system, as GMail works fine here as well.
I really do like Chrome. I like its look, its speed, the tab animation, the speed the tabs get closed etc however, “Save Web Page Complete”, unless I did something wrong, did a pretty bad job. This must change. “Save Web Page Complete” works really well with IE and FF.
One other browser to pay attention to is Maxthon 3.0. Looks like it’s using Webkit. It scored 99% at acid3 and it mentions Webkit in the documents. I just tried it and I was quite impressed. Nowhere complete as the older releases but looks really promising. It’s also sleek. Starts up very quick too. Super Drag&Drop already works with the beta. I think this is what made Maxthon popular at the first place. The way Super Drag&Drop is implemented in Maxthon is really good.
Edited 2009-05-22 11:24 UTC
Does Chrome have similar plugins to Firefox’s Firebug, adblock plus and flashblock?
Chrome will have plugins like Firefox.
I am now using Flashblock script for Chrome and it works great.
You can get it here : http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/46673
But I still have problems login on websites.
I couldn’t log in to OSNews, I had to use Firefox.
Something is definitely wrong with it at the moment.
userscripts and preliminary extensions:
http://www.adsweep.org/ (scroll down to the flashblock)
Excellent browsing experience…..however…I still miss the more robust adblock and the RSS features with firefox. I have to admit chromium(no spying on what you do) is winning me over bit by bit though. It really is a much quicker/more pleasant experience. Just wish it was on Linux too
Webkit certainly seems the way to go these days Hopefully the new performance updates coming in firefox 3.6+ will even the field a bit more.
It’s rare luxury having 2 standards compliant browsers that are good!
I’m seeing pages that now look loosely held together, where with version 1, they were better constructed.
I guess having faster JavaScript doesn’t help if the page looks bad.
No Linux or Mac versions. Sorry but Chrome is dead in my book. Its the Duke Nukem forever of Google.