Looking At Google's Flashified Chrome

An anonymous reader writes "Google quietly released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which not only blows its rivals out of the water as far as performance is concerned, but comes with half a dozen new features, including direct integration of Adobe Flash. First benchmarks show that the new beta is about 10% faster than the previous beta in the SunSpider and V8 benchmark, and about 30% faster than Chrome 4, which remains the fastest JavaScript browser available today."

Comments

Re:Thanks Google!

[D Ninja]

Hmmm...I think saying that Flash is "about to die" and that "nobody uses Flash for anything serious" is...well...wrong.

As it stands now, Flash is, by far, the most popular and ubiquitous plug-in in use on the internet. It is used in many different places and can be relied on more than trying to rely on the fact that users will have new, up-to-date browsers. Yes, Apple won't be supporting Flash, and, yes, I hope HTML5 replaces a great deal of Flash (as I can't stand plug-ins). But, in no way is Flash going the way of the dodo anytime soon. Heck, even to get everybody to switch to HTML5 is going to take at least a few years, and probably more.

Still has the same old problems

[Daetrin]

I haven't had much of a chance to play around with it, but it looks like it still suffers from all of the "problems" (ie things i don't like) that i've complained about before.

In particular, it's still lacking a lot of options that i think ought to be available, like making new tabs open at the end of the list, having a minimum size that tabs can shrink to and a scrollable tab bar, having a drop-down list of all open tabs, and the ability to move the tab bar below the rest of the toolbars. Which is mostly just a list of all the fixes that the Firefox browser has already introduced. There's no shame in benefiting from the experience of those who have come before if you're unable to think of a way to improve the interface yourself.

Obviously not everyone wants those features, which is why the should be options and not defaults, but i think enough people do that it _is_ worth making them options. Unfortunately Google's view towards user customability remains... unencouraging at best. (Or, IMHO, "stupidly wrong.") Luckily _some_ of those changes can be implemented by extensions, but not all of them.

Story and article is bogus: Opera excluded

[hkmwbz]

Google quietly released a new beta version of its Chrome browser, which not only blows its rivals out of the water as far as performance is concerned

Yeah, if you leave out Opera. However, if you do include Opera in the test it beats even Chrome 5.

First benchmarks show that the new beta is about 10% faster than the previous beta in the SunSpider and V8 benchmark, and about 30% faster than Chrome 4, which remains the fastest Javascript browser available today.

No, again, that is Opera.