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?

[Anonymous Coward]

There's an unofficial Linux build called Chromium:

http://code.google.com/p/chromium/

A story ran on it yesterday on a familiar website... I think it's called "Slashdot" or something:

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/17/2345216

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?

[IceFox]

Who cares about 90% of software, we are talking about browsers. Browsers come on all platforms these days. And to top this Chome is advertising on slashdot which is known for have tons of Windows Loving users and users who like to talk about windows only software in positive ways. As long as Chrome does not exist on LInux or exists in a form that is a joke expect it to get trashed on slashdot. And for the second part I have contributed to Chrome to help get it to compile on Linux, but it is a long way off before these is anything close to what a user would expect. Chrome really has a PR problem with Linux which a lot of early adopters use.

Re:Is it going to come to Linux?

[basementman]

I tried Chromium and at this stage it is so buggy and slow that it is totally unusable. At this point I am forced to run FireFox with a bunch of add ons to try and mimic chromium's functionality, but that won't help you get to the speed of Google Chrome.

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.

No Linux Release != Evil

[andrewd18]

Just because a company's informal motto is "Don't be evil." doesn't mean they have to release their products for Linux.

Now I think it'd be unwise if they didn't release it for Linux, but it definitely doesn't make them evil.

Re:No Linux Release != Evil

[SultanCemil]

I'm just saying, on a scale of 0 to 100 (0 being kittens rolling around, 100 being Vader running hell), not releasing Chrome for Linux is somewhere around 70. That's all. Fell free to disagree. Discuss amongst yourselves.

Re:No Linux Release != Evil

[xant]

Kittens are a zero? Man, kittens can *kill* you. I almost choked on one once.

Re:No Linux Release != Evil

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm thinking a 14. Seeing as how a browser with what, 4% market is being asked to make a version for a loosely confederated set of GNU/Linux based OS'es with a less than 5% market share?

So they would run on, let's see, 3,752 machines?

Re:No Linux Release != Evil

[__aamnbm3774]

4% market share, but 99% awesome.

Re:No Linux Release != Evil

[Crayon Kid]

GP meant it as in various shades of evil. That "kitties rolling around" is actually "rolling around in a frying pan".

Who asked for this?

[Anonymous Coward]

Who wanted really fast JavaScript?

Re:Who asked for this?

[Rayban]

Yeah... I hate seeing anyone use a language with closures and prototype-based-objects for more than form validation and yellow backgrounds for results.

We should go back to static HTML pages and get it right this time!

Re:Who asked for this?

[rockNme2349]

Google's applications all run based on javascript. The current browsers didn't run javascript very fast, so performance lagged. Google released a browser and spat really fast javascript in the face of mozilla and microsoft. Next thing you know firefox and ie have new releases with faster javascript to compete with chrome. People switching to chrome is just a side affect for google. They're goal of making other browsers faster is completed. I have to say, evil or not, they're really smart guys, and know how to get what they want.

Re:Who asked for this?

[nschubach]

I think the Mozilla javascript engine projects (Tamarin turned Tracemonkey) were well on the way before Google "spat" out Chrome. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

worst summary ever

[jgarra23]

Chrome is not in beta, there has ALWAYS been beta builds around for Chromium & they are advertising those builds more since the new features are pretty solid (and the speed too) but Chrome is NOT in beta.

Re:worst summary ever

[caffeinejolt]

This chart shows deployment stats on the "stable" 1.x releases of Chrome. There are instructions on getting Chromium to compile on Linux. Chromium is the open source project behind the Chrome browser.

Re:Linux version

[dkegel]

There are daily builds you could try. They're pre-alpha, though, so don't expect too much yet. Or you could build it from source, it's not too hard. See http://chromium.org/

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.

Noo . This is the 2.0 Beta

[AlienRancher]

Google has not reversed their position. This is the beta for what will be 2.0 eventually. The 1.0 branch is and will be release. See: http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/03/17/2345216

Hilarious that speed is key evaluation

[presidenteloco]

I find it vastly amusing the amount of press that browser "speed" gets (compared to trivialities, like, say, "usability in peoples' computer-based work patterns").

Ok sure, javascript engine speed might be important, but javascript clearly is inadequate as a rich-client development platform anyway.

I for one do not sit here on my macbook or my dual-core 2.6GHz 2G RAM pc and think to my self "damn these 70 browser windows and tabs are rendering slow - damn damn damn". No, I pretty much never have to think about that, thanks to good work done by hardware and software engineers over the last 15 years or so.

Speed is SO NOT the key issue anymore. Netbooks prove this. Usability in the context of always-on info and my persistent context and where the hell is the stuff I was working on etc. is way way more important as a surfing quality of life issue.

Re:Hilarious that speed is key evaluation

[castorvx]

I'm guessing you don't use some pretty heavy duty JavaScript sites? There is a substantial difference in performance between browsers on some sites, and I say this with a very high powered system.

There are a lot of performance issues that could still be resolved. While your other points are relevant, I would say that the issue of performance is a long way from being resolved, and not just with JavaScript.

Re:Hilarious that speed is key evaluation

[WoLpH]

There is a very simple reason for it, speed is one of the few things that can be measured objectively. All forms of usability tests tend to vary per person.

That makes it really easy to post some benchmarks while any article about usability will be bashed to no end.

Re:Hilarious that speed is key evaluation

[Braino420]

I'm guessing you don't use some pretty heavy duty JavaScript sites?

*shudder*

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.

Re:If it doesn't run on Linux it is trash.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, since no one cares about your opinion, e.g. "trash", just stuff it. Fact is, running on Linux will have little impact on the usage of Chrome.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

faster? so what?

[CAIMLAS]

Maybe I'm in the minority here, but what's all the fuss with a "faster" browser, at this point? They're pretty damn fast as they are (pick one). The big problem, in my mind, is their memory use. That goes for both "normal running" memory use, and "my god it's leaky" memory use.

Currently, Firefox is running with 360M virtual and 131M resident memory utilized. The browser window has been open for 85 minutes with exactly 20 tabs - no flash, and 1 slashdot page. I've got to shut down firefox due to excessive swapping/poor system performance more often than I used to have to reboot Windows 9x due to stability issues!

Firefox, IE, and Opera have all shot up in their memory use extremely quickly - to the point where Firefox has become almost unusable on my laptop with 512M, while having Tbird and OO.org open at the same time. And that's only with about 20 tabs open, noscript, flashblock, and a bunch of other things to reduce the memory overhead.

Just because RAM is cheap doesn't mean you should leave people out in the cold who have older stuff. Likewise, if you bloat your products, porting them to portable devices (cell phones, etc.) is going to be a bit troublesome: RAM doesn't seem to be having the same speed or capacity leaps that CPUs are - and in a portable, sticking more RAM in is only going to decrease battery life.