Google Betas Chrome 4, Touts 30% Speed Boost

CWmike writes "Google upgraded the beta version (4.0.223.16) of its Chrome browser yesterday, boasting a 30% speed improvement over the current production edition and adding integrated bookmark synchronization. Developers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin, who announced the release, tout Chrome 4.0's faster JavaScript rendering speeds. 'We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30% since our current stable release, and by 400% since our first stable release,' they said, referring to Chrome 3.0. The new beta includes the ability to sync bookmarked sites across multiple computers."

Comments

Smoking

[Nithendil]

Loads reddit.com and slashdot.com almost instantly. Occasionally the browser will just hang for a second but it makes firefox look like molasses. I have serious reservations about using Google as my search, browser, voicemail, and email but it is difficult when they keep blowing the competition out of the water.

Speed is nice, but lets get some basic features

[pyrico]

I really wish they would put at least one developer on getting some of their basic features requests done.

For example, I wanted to use Chrome as my HTPC browser as it does a good job scaling it's plugins to the system 2x DPI (unlike Firefox where flash applets are tiny squares in big dark frames they are supposed to fill).

But Chrome does not save the full page zoom setting! Every time you open a tab or browser instance you have to Ctr + which becomes unusable. It has not browser-wide options related to full page zoom and their font options are confusing and seem to make no effect.

Worse is the how easy it is to fine lots and lots and lots and lots of people complaining about this on their own help forums without a single response from the developers.

I know they are avoiding feature creep and keeping things slim, but even by a 80/20 rule, this kind of thing should be picked up (and could even replace their useless font settings dialog).

Re:100% less advertisements would be nice...

[Temporal]

I know. Perhaps this is the real reason Chrome even exists. They can prevent people from blocking ads, and of course track peoples surfing habits.

Actually, Chrome 4.0 has extensions, and multiple ad blockers have already been written using the system, without being stopped by Google.

Quite sad actually. The browser is pretty nice overall. Its too bad they will most likely treat their users like most corporations do... like shit.

Actually, we're a little bit smarter than that. As it turns out, treating users "like shit" -- for example, by crippling our products just to drive away the small minority of users that run ad blockers -- is actually not profitable. On the other hand, making the internet better for users, in general, is profitable to us, since it directly leads to more usage of other Google products. Which is why Eric (the CEO) frequently tells employees, in plain terms, that we should be doing whatever we can think of to improve the internet for users, without worrying about how to monetize it -- in the long term, this approach is far more profitable than being dicks.

(This post is my personal opinion -- I am not authorized to speak for Google.)

Re:Sucks To Be You

[causality]

Say what you will, but it is nice having an OS that is *tightly* coupled with the hardware -- it cuts way down on poorly written drivers that are responsible for many of the BSOD in MS land. It is a premium to pay, but the frustration spared is well worth it.

Ah yes the "blame it on the drivers" apologetic for various Windows issues. It's the perfect excuse, really, because it's difficult to falsify. So I'll ask you this: how, pray tell, do you explain how properly-installed Linux has its rock-solid stability on such a wide variety of hardware? If indeed the support of a wide variety of commodity PC hardware is the cause of instability, and if the Mac is so stable because it has such a comparatively narrow range of hardware to support, what would be your answer to that question?

Note, my question was about Windows. I don't dispute that the Mac is quite stable. I just believe it's stable because it's based on Unix and Unix had this kind of stability long before Apple decided to use it. Apple was just smart enough to recognize that and smarter still to put a pretty and usable GUI on top of it. It's the "faulty drivers" excuse for Windows that I don't quite buy, and mostly because I've never received an answer to that question that made sense.

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[ElectricTurtle]

What is with people whining about AdBlock all the time? OH NOES TEH ADZ@!1!One. Is it really that big a deal? Thanks to my Slashdot obsession and excellent karma, I have the option to disable ads on Slashdot natively, but I don't even use the option. Why do people care so much about little images trying to sell things?

Re:Cheating on my first love - Firefox

[BitZtream]

Heh, considering I develop software for a living, one of our products is embeds on XULRunner 1.9.1 (which is what Firefox 3 is built on top of) and several of our products use WebKit for rendering HTML.

So yes, my knowledge of them and profiling them tells me this.

You can find my name in the Gecko commit logs and all over the developers mailing lists, wheres yours? I don't think I've seen Anonymous Coward committing anything.