New Chrome 5 stable released today: Welcome, Mac and Linux!

Tuesday, May 25, 2010 | 8:59 AM

In our most recent beta release, we fired up all engines to bring to life our fastest version of Chrome to date.

Today, we’re bringing all this beta goodness to the stable channel so that it’s available to all Chrome users. We’re particularly excited to bring Chrome for Mac and Linux out of beta, and introduce Chrome’s first stable release for Mac and Linux users. You can read more about the Mac and Linux stable releases on the Google Mac and Chromium blogs respectively.

Today’s stable release also comes with a host of new features. You’ll be able to synchronize not only bookmarks across multiple computers, but also browser preferences -- including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings. Meanwhile, for avid extensions users, you can enable each extension to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager.

Our stable release also incorporates HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop. For a taste of HTML5’s powerful features, try browsing through websites developed in HTML5 such as scribd.com, dragging and dropping attachments in Gmail, or by enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps. We’ve also given Chrome’s bookmark manager a facelift with HTML5:

Pedal to the Chrome metal: Our fastest beta to date for Windows, Mac and Linux

Tuesday, May 4, 2010 | 8:31 AM

Here in Aarhus, Denmark -- home of the V8 project, Chrome’s JavaScript engine -- we’ve been tuning, testing, and polishing the V8 engine to give Chrome a hefty boost in speed.

Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over the previous beta channel release. In fact, looking back in time, Chrome’s performance has improved by as much as 213% and 305% on these two benchmarks since our very first beta.





Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features. Not too long ago, we introduced bookmark sync into the browser, which allows you to keep your bookmarks synchronized on multiple computers using your Google Account. Beta users can now synchronize not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language. By popular demand especially from avid Chrome extensions users, you can now install and use Chrome extensions while in incognito mode.

Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.

To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.

Lastly, with this beta’s crazy speed improvements, we designed a series of equally unconventional speed tests for the browser. While the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks have their strengths, we felt that more could be done to measure speed on the browser. Here’s an early preview of how we designed, built, and implemented these speed tests. Stay tuned for the full results; we’ll post them here tomorrow.



Source: The Chrome Blog http://chrome.blogspot.com/

Here is the download link:

http://www.google.com/chrome?platform=linux

Chrome 5: Faster and better

Chrome 5: Faster and better
Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, Cyber Cynic-Computer World

The first thing you'll notice with Google's new beta of its Chrome Web browser is that it's faster -- much faster -- than the last version. You don't need any fancy tests to see that. All you have to do is use it, and you'll see that it blows other browsers away.

But if numbers are what you want, here's what I found using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks. I ran these tests on a pair of Dell 530S desktop PCs. These older computers are powered by a 2.2GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor with an 800MHz front-side bus. Each has 4GB of RAM, a 500GB SATA (Serial ATA) drive, and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator) chipset. One was loaded with Windows XP SP3 and the other used MEPIS 8.0 desktop Linux. First, I ran the benchmarks with an old copy of Chrome 4, which I installed just for these tests, and then with Chrome 5.0.375.29, the latest beta. The average result was 660.4ms for Chrome 4 and 380.0 for Chrome 5.

Other Chrome tests haven't shown such significant improvements, but the bottom line is that the new Chrome is visibly faster than most other browsers. While it's true that Opera Software's Opera 10.53 is faster still, it's also true that Opera has been plagued with numerous serious security problems. For the best combination of speed and security you can't currently beat Chrome.



For sheer silliness, and to get an idea of just how fast Chrome really is in a very visual way, check out Google's Chrome video of Chrome pages loading with potato guns firing and Tesla coils blasting model pirate ships in the foreground.

The new Chrome has more than just speed and security going for it though. It also includes several new features. The one I like the most is expanding Chrome's bookmark sync, from just letting you keep your bookmarks in sync with multiple computers to letting you sync browser preferences such as themes, homepage and startup settings, and Web content settings across PCs. If you're like me and you use several computers this is one handy feature.

It also includes several HTML5 features such as Geolocation APIs (application programming interfaces), App Cache -- HTML5's answer to the old Google Gears for offline Web applications -- and file drag-and-drop capabilities.

This is also the first version of Chrome where, as promised, Adobe Flash Player is built-in. While Flash has recently had more than its fair share of serious security problems, bundling them together is probably a good thing since Chrome quietly and automatically updates itself, and now Flash, as soon as fixes are available. Considering how many security holes are exploited simply because users can't be bothered to update their software, I like Google's automatic update model.

What it all comes down to me is that Chrome is continuing to become my favorite Web browser. I still have lingering fondness for Firefox, but Chrome, which also runs on Linux, Macs, and Windows is moving into first place in the browser races.

http://www.google.com/chrome

Firefox 4 guns for speed

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 4 in October or November, a new version that has speed among its top goals. -from Zdnet.com

"Performance is a huge, huge, huge thing for us," said Mike Beltzner, vice president of engineering for Firefox, in a webcast on Tuesday about plans for the browser. "We created the performance story, and we've got to keep at it."

Among other features planned for Firefox 4 — and Mozilla emphatically cautions that plans can change — are support for high-speed graphics and text through Direct2D on Windows; a tidier user interface with more prominent and powerful tabs; support for several newer web technologies; 64-bit versions; and compatibility with multi-touch interfaces.

Performance means any number of things in a browser. Among them: the time it takes to launch the program or to load a web page, the responsiveness of the user interface to commands such as opening new tabs, and the speed with which web-based JavaScript programs execute. Firefox programmers also will work on more perceptual speed improvements, Beltzner said, such as changing the order that web page elements appear on the screen and the appearance of the page-loading progress bar.

Mozilla's Firefox 4 design shows tabs above the address bar and a home-page button replaced by a home tab.
(Credit: Mozilla)

Speed is only one item on a long list of changes Mozilla has in mind for its five-year-old open-source Firefox browser. Improving Firefox is arguably a greater challenge now, though, for several reasons.

Below is  an early screen shot of Firefox 4 for Windows 7 showing the tabs above the address bar:

And with the bookmarks bar"

Below is Firefox 4 with tabs below the address bar under Windows 7:

And with the bookmarks toolbar shown:

First, there's new energy in competitors including Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 and Chrome from web powerhouse Google. Second, making abrupt changes is harder without ruffling feathers among its large user base — Firefox accounts for roughly a quarter of the browser usage worldwide. Third, Firefox is expanding from PCs to mobile phones and tablets with very different hardware requirements. Last, a long list of new technologies are profoundly transforming browsers into a foundation for web applications, but many of those advancements are far from settled. Beltzner recognises the challenges.

"We are in it to win it," Beltzner said. "It's no longer the case where it's all easy wins. There's hard work to be done here. We have to make sure we're the ones leading the charge in keeping the web open for users."

Scheduling

Mozilla established a Firefox 3.6, 3.7 and 4.0 release plan in 2009, but the organisation warned early this year that the browser schedule was changing. Tuesday's webcast offered a new schedule with no Firefox 3.7.

One key feature of 3.7 called out-of-process plug-ins, which moves plug-ins such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player to their own separate memory area for better stability, was advanced to Firefox 3.6.4, code-named Lorentz and in beta testing right now. Meanwhile, Mozilla concluded it needed more time for a planned user-interface overhaul and to be liberated by a "rebooted" plan for a new extensions foundation called Jetpack.

"I think we need to get to a first beta by the end of June", before the Mozilla Summit in early July, he said. Releasing that version "puts us in a position where we can ship [the final version] somewhere in October or November".

Mozilla's new schedule for releasing Firefox 4 — if all goes well....November 2010.
(Credit: Mozilla)

Given past experience, this deadline may not be met. Firefox 3.6 had been due in that time frame in 2009 and slipped into early 2010. "This is an aggressive schedule to be sure. We have to focus the efforts of projects already under way so it can come together to be a really great Firefox 4," Beltzner said. And programmers will have to prove the merit of any new projects very soon if they want them included.

So what else is new?

Beltzner grouped the Firefox 4 plan into three broad areas of interest: features for browser users, features for web developers, and underlying platform features.

Tabs are one area of change for users. Tabs will be above the address bar, as is the case with Chrome, and a home tab replaces the home button. In addition, narrower application tabs can be dedicated to various web apps. Instead of a menu bar across the top, there's a single Firefox button with a drop-down menu. Typing in the address bar can be used to switch to other tabs.

One change that had been bandied about, though — a unification of the address bar and the search bar, a la Chrome — didn't appear in Beltzner's designs.

Mozilla hopes to change some dialog boxes to make them more effective. Two examples are the option for Firefox to remember a website's password and to permit a website to use the browser user's physical location.

Planned for Firefox 4 will be a more elaborate mechanism to see what privileges a person has granted to various websites.
(Credit: Mozilla)

Mozilla has always been motivated by the idea of giving the user control, and it's hoping the new Firefox will go further with a revamped control panel for managing passwords, cookies, pop-up blocking, geolocation, local data storage, and related details. Users could see what permissions have been granted to websites for each category, or alternatively, see which various permissions a specific site has.

Below is an early screen shot of Firefox 4 running on Linux with a brown theme:

Significant changes to the user interface can lead to confusion, but in the long run, the pain can be worthwhile, Beltzner said. Sometimes, he said, "we're going to have to do the uncomfortable thing."

For developers, Mozilla also has a number of features planned for Firefox 4.
For web applications, the Firefox 4 plan includes support for WebSockets, a mechanism for easier communication between the browser and a web server. And as for dealing with the new class of touch-enabled devices, which often don't have a keyboard or mouse, Firefox should be able to let web developers build pages controlled with a multi-touch interface.

The heart of web programming is Hypertext Markup Language (HTML), and Mozilla is building into Firefox a new HTML5 "parser", the part of the browser that interprets the web page code. The new parser can handle Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and mathematical equations interleaved with the rest of a web page, runs as a separate computing process to improve browser responsiveness, and fixes "dozens" of long-standing bugs on the previous parser, Mozilla said.

In industry shorthand, HTML5 often stands for many new technologies that aren't part of the actual HTML5 specification or even the broader HTML renovation effort.
Firefox 4 will support some of those, too, but two important ones are only tentative at this stage: the newer Indexed DB effort designed to improve how information from a website is stored locally on a computer, and the WebGL effort to build hardware-accelerated 3D graphics into the web. Required driver support for graphics chips complicates WebGL, and the Indexed DB specification isn't likely to be finished in time, Beltzner said.

For the movement to sidestep Flash with web technologies, Firefox 4 has a few features planned. Some newer aspects of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), used for formatting, are set to be supported, including transitions that can animate the transformation of one web element into another. Firefox 4 also is expected to support more of the newer CSS3 specification.

Areas of Firefox that Mozilla is hoping to improve
(Credit: Mozilla)

Also stepping on Flash's toes will be support for SMIL, the Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language that can be used for some animation chores, and faster performance with the 2D drawing interface called Canvas.

Under the hood

Performance improvements to Firefox will come through improvements to the underlying software. One significant change coming is JaegerMonkey, which combines Firefox's current JavaScript engine with elements of those used in Chrome and Safari browsers.
"JaegerMonkey has reached a halfway point: we've closed about half the performance gap between our baseline performance and the competition," JaegerMonkey programmer David Mandelin said in a blog post on Monday. However, he added, "you can build a browser with JM [JaegerMonkey] today, but you probably won't get too far before crashing. Fixing that is next on my list."

Also on the Firefox 4 plan is support for 64-bit processors. Operating systems have now made the jump in earnest, but not all software has followed suit.
Other hardware changes planned for Firefox 4 include support for Direct2D on Windows, a feature that lets the browser tap into the engine for hardware-accelerated graphics and text. That support exists on Windows 7 and the latest service pack of Vista, but here again, "driver hell" is a risk.

Support for Windows 7 interface features including Aero peek, jump lists, and icons with progress bars are also on the to-do list for Firefox 4.
Support for cameras and microphones is only a tentative goal, as is tighter integration with Mac OS X.

Below are some early Mac OSX Firefox 4 design screen shots with tabs below:

And with the bookmarks bar:

Firefox 4 will offer tabs at the top of the address bar seen below:

And with the bookmarks bar:

 Deeper under the covers, for security and stability reasons, Mozilla is splitting Firefox into separate memory areas with a project called Electrolysis. Its first element, out-of-process plug-ins (OOPP), is the chief feature of Firefox 3.6.4, but more is planned for Firefox 4. The new Jetpack interface moves add-ons to a separate memory area, too. Firefox 4, though, won't get the broader sandboxing design in Google's Chrome, in which browser tabs are separated from one other.

These plumbing details might sound arcane, but they're important as browsers become a foundation for ever-increasing amounts of computing chores. A Monday blog post from Firefox programmer Vladimir Vukicevic captured the essence of the matter.

"Today's web browser is in many ways acting like a miniature full operating system," Vukicevic said.

Source: http://www.zdnet.com.au/firefox-4-guns-for-speed-339303057.htm