Google is currently working on apparently more than 1000 minor and major modifications of Chrome browser features and we are seeing plenty of new items hitting Chromium releases this week. In the past week alone, we noticed about three dozen core and GUI changes that highlight the fast pace of Google’s browser team.
There are few application areas at this time that move as quickly as browsers. After a number of substantial improvements especially in Chrome 6/7 and 8, it almost appeared that the Chrome team took a breather with version 9 and 10 and slowed the development speed. However, the opposite is the case, as Chrome’s nightly builds are advancing quickly.
If you are running one of the recent Chromium 12 nightly builds, you are already used to the new touch tabs that let you select you multiple homepages with app icons, similar how you would organize a sfumartphone app screen. A “Recently Closed” option was added a few days ago that is now fully functional and opens a pop-up window with a listing of the pages that were closed. The individual screens are now labeled. The underlying Webkit now supports Windows 7 gestures. There is also note of new fav icons for the touch interface that will be 32 x 32 pixels in size, up from the standard 16 x 16 pixel size. Another welcome upgrade is the fact that Webkit can now support Chrome’s Skia backend, which will be used to enable PDF rendering in Chrome’s print preview.
The primary tabs are also seeing some changes. Tab scrolling is being introduced in horizontal and side tabs and the tab labeling now fades on Chrome for Windows as it does on the Mac version. Multi-tab-Select is also moving forward (by using SHIFT or CTRL). Not yet visible is a new full screen button that forced the Chrome team to move the profile button on the right top a bit to the left. Expect more focus on multi-profiles in Chrome, which should be supported by default in Chrome soon (you need to run the Google Pack to use more than profile at any given time today.)
There are plenty of relatively quiet, but ongoing performance upgrades. We discussed yesterday the integration of SPDY, but there are also smaller efforts such as the enhancement of simple drawing capabilities as well as more significant upgrades, such as the accelerated WebM encoder Bali, which was released about a month ago. Depending on the platform, Bali is about 30 – 40% faster than the preceding WerbM encoder, according to Google. We should note that Google almost exclusively shows ARM hardware to highlight the performance of Bali, which lets us still believe that now only will Chrome OS get a touch interface, but Google will also bringing a version of the Chrome browser to Android in the foreseeable time.
Also, I should mention some changes to the content security policy that addresses Chrome’s needs to be much more attractive for corporate use and will be critical for Google’s cloud computing strategy that will use Chrome to pitch and advertise Google’s cloud services. System administrators are now able to block very detailed content types, such as plug-ins, images, styles, fonts and inline scripts.
There are few application areas at this time that move as quickly as browsers. After a number of substantial improvements especially in Chrome 6/7 and 8, it almost appeared that the Chrome team took a breather with version 9 and 10 and slowed the development speed. However, the opposite is the case, as Chrome’s nightly builds are advancing quickly.
If you are running one of the recent Chromium 12 nightly builds, you are already used to the new touch tabs that let you select you multiple homepages with app icons, similar how you would organize a sfumartphone app screen. A “Recently Closed” option was added a few days ago that is now fully functional and opens a pop-up window with a listing of the pages that were closed. The individual screens are now labeled. The underlying Webkit now supports Windows 7 gestures. There is also note of new fav icons for the touch interface that will be 32 x 32 pixels in size, up from the standard 16 x 16 pixel size. Another welcome upgrade is the fact that Webkit can now support Chrome’s Skia backend, which will be used to enable PDF rendering in Chrome’s print preview.
The primary tabs are also seeing some changes. Tab scrolling is being introduced in horizontal and side tabs and the tab labeling now fades on Chrome for Windows as it does on the Mac version. Multi-tab-Select is also moving forward (by using SHIFT or CTRL). Not yet visible is a new full screen button that forced the Chrome team to move the profile button on the right top a bit to the left. Expect more focus on multi-profiles in Chrome, which should be supported by default in Chrome soon (you need to run the Google Pack to use more than profile at any given time today.)
There are plenty of relatively quiet, but ongoing performance upgrades. We discussed yesterday the integration of SPDY, but there are also smaller efforts such as the enhancement of simple drawing capabilities as well as more significant upgrades, such as the accelerated WebM encoder Bali, which was released about a month ago. Depending on the platform, Bali is about 30 – 40% faster than the preceding WerbM encoder, according to Google. We should note that Google almost exclusively shows ARM hardware to highlight the performance of Bali, which lets us still believe that now only will Chrome OS get a touch interface, but Google will also bringing a version of the Chrome browser to Android in the foreseeable time.
Also, I should mention some changes to the content security policy that addresses Chrome’s needs to be much more attractive for corporate use and will be critical for Google’s cloud computing strategy that will use Chrome to pitch and advertise Google’s cloud services. System administrators are now able to block very detailed content types, such as plug-ins, images, styles, fonts and inline scripts.
By Wolfgang Gruener in Products on April 12
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