Google Returns Chrome To Beta, Touts Speed Boost

CWmike writes "Google yesterday reversed its decision to ditch the beta label from its Chrome browser, saying it is restoring the moniker to some builds to get faster feedback to developers. 'Since we took the 'beta' tag off Google Chrome in December, we've been updating two release channels: developer and stable,' said Brian Rakowski, a Chrome product manager, in a new blog Google kicked off on Tuesday. 'With our latest release, we're re-introducing the beta channel for some early feedback.' The first beta, Chrome 2.0.169.1, includes several new features, said Rakowski, and it boasts a significant speed increase over the current stable version of the browser, 1.0.154.48. According to Google's tests, the beta is 35% faster than the stable build when measured by the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite, and 25% faster on the company's own V8 tests." Reader Al notes too that "Google has launched Chrome Experiments, a site where Javascript coders can upload projects that make use of Chrome's speed and processing abilities. The site already features a handful of cool 'experiments' including a balls that jump between browser windows, a gravitationally-challenged version of the Google homepage and a game that runs through nine different browsers. It's cool stuff alright, but some experts wonder whether browser security might be a more important thing to focus on."

Comments

Is it going to come to Linux?

[SultanCemil]

It'd be nice if a company that prided itself on not being evil released the browser for more than one platform (dare I say, the evil one?)....

Re:Is it going to come to Linux?

[moderatorrater]

What does the platform have to do with evil or not? 90% of the software out there only works on one platform, and surely you're not going to say they're all evil. Chrome is open source and has been from day one; if it doesn't work on another platform, do the work yourself to get it there. As it is, they're releasing for the platform that has far and away the most users and not diluting their development efforts.

Re:Is it going to come to Linux?

[nschubach]

You could show your interest and give them an email list of Linux hopefuls...

http://www.google.com/chrome/intl/en/linux.html

Who knows, maybe that actually look at the count of email addresses to decide on the proper resources to allocate.

Cool Experiments

[AKAImBatman]

One of the cooler ones I saw for Firefox 3.1b3 was real-time chroma-key replacement* in video. (i.e. The blue screen technique) Does anyone know if this new version of Chrome supports the video tag yet? I've been doing experiments with real-time video effects in Firefox, but I'd like to start ensuring that they're cross browser.

* I did my own version of the Chroma-Key replacement that ran a Javascript function for each pixel. It managed real-time playback even on slower PCs!

Re:Cool Experiments

[AKAImBatman]

I looked up the Firefox 3.1b3 experiments in case anyone is interested. Here's the experiment itself:

https://developer.mozilla.org/samples/video/chroma-key/index.xhtml

Here's the page explaining the experiment:

https://developer.mozilla.org/En/Manipulating_video_using_canvas

Don't let the small video size fool you. I've managed much larger videos thanks to TraceMonkey's high performance. In doing my own experiments, I realized that they shrunk the final product so that areas where the color wasn't being properly replaced (or worse yet, reflections from poor camera technique) wouldn't be as visible.

Perfect for Linux

[Anonymous Coward]

It makes perfect sense for Google to release a fast Javascript browser. Many of their apps require active javascript and the performance of these apps, or at least the perceived performance, is directly related to the javascript speed.

On Linux it's an interesting story. Firefox is slow. I use it on a daily basis, and unfortunately, it's annoyingly slow. Bugs that should have been fixed months ago are still evident. Granted, some of these problems are related to Flash, but not all.

(I'd go as far as to say that Adobe Flash is deliberately being crippled because it works so poorly on Linux.)

Re:Hilarious that speed is key evaluation

[prockcore]

Speed is SO NOT the key issue anymore. Netbooks prove this

Netbooks prove the opposite. Throwing hardware at the problem isn't a solution anymore. No one in their right mind is going to run an office suite on a netbook. The browser is the one place where speed and lightweight memory usage *has* been important. That's why netbooks pretty much run browsers and that's it.