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New Chrome Beta Adds Themes, Speed, & HTML 5 Video

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the battle-heats-up dept.

adeelarshad82 writes "Google developers are always working on and updating Chrome in three channels — Stable, Beta, and Developer — in increasing positions on the bleeding-edge scale. Today the company thought changes to the Beta channel warranted a post on the main Google Blog. The advances range from the superficial addition of themes for customizing the browser's window borders to even faster speed under the hood to internal support for HTML 5 tags such as <video> and 'web workers,' which allows the browser to divvy processing work among sub-threads."

7 of 207 comments (clear)

  1. Still no Adblock though by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Insightful

    When will google learn that plugins, especially something like adblock, is the killer feature they need to attract the "willing to switch" audience, a lot of whom are using firefox right now. I personally love Chrome for its speed and stability, used it for a week or so, but then switched right back to Firefox because I just didn't realise how it is to do many things in Firefox with extensions such as adblock, no script, autopager, del.icio.us integration etc.

    1. Re:Still no Adblock though by Bashae · · Score: 4, Insightful

      Maybe you're asking a little too much from Google. Remember that a significant share of their revenue comes from web advertising...

    2. Re:Still no Adblock though by markkezner · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While plugins would be useful, I think you have the wrong idea about Google's motives with Chrome. Chrome is Google's bid to change the browser market to make it a better platform for their core business, web applications.

      Google isn't as concerned with making Firefox users switch to chrome, because they are already using a (mostly) standards compliant browser. IE is the real target. This seems to explain why, if I browse to google.com in IE7, I'm greeted with an ad banner that invites me to give Chrome a try. Google does not do this if I browse with Firefox or Safari.

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  2. Smooth scrolling yet? by psymastr · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Does it have smooth scrolling and adblock yet? If not then I can't move. Especially after the huge speedup in FF 3.5.

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    Improve at backgammon rapidly through addictive quickfire position quizzes: www.bgtrain.com
  3. NoScript and Adblock by pzs · · Score: 4, Insightful

    I'm a not-very-happy Firefox user, since I find it has horrendous memory leaks. I can get it up to 2GB virtual memory in a morning's average browsing. Yes, I have tried the tips on the Mozilla site.

    However, I have become addicted to a controlled web experience with NoScript and Adblock. I won't be switching to Chrome until I can get similar tools.

  4. Re:Does it install in the right place? by The+Moof · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I imagine trying to circumvent IT policies isn't winning anyone over in a corporate setting. It's probably doing the opposite. Crazy as it sounds, those IT restrictions are there for a reason, and we don't want people installing and running their own software.

  5. Re:I am willing to accept unobstrusice ads by nine-times · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Yeah, I'd like to set something like that in my browser, not just for my own ad-blocking, but I almost want to notify the websites: I am blocking your ads because they're big, slow-loading flash ads. Give me static images or text and I won't block them.

    Or what I almost, not really but *almost* want to be able to do is do it on a per-site basis. To be able to send the message to one website, "I'll accept animated GIFs because your site is awesome, but I won't load Flash files for any reason," and tell another website, "Meh, you kind of rot but I just happened across your site by accident. No ad revenue for you." Of course, it would require a lot of work to set that up, even if I had the opportunity to do it.

    And yes, I suppose I could send website emails, but I'd just be one nutjob sending an email, and I wouldn't think it'd do much. What I mean is, it'd be nice if we could all register our frustration in a simple, quick way that would be quantifiable to webmasters, maybe it would improve the situation. Like if someone could look at a set of numbers and say, "Look, if we use Flash, then 40% of our visitors will just block all of our ads, but if we use static images that only take up 14% of the display area, then only 20% will block those images," then maybe websites would actually be less annoying about ads.

    Sorry if I'm just pushing us off-topic.