Google is well known for the bad habit of launching a product in beta version and then keeping it as beta for years together. However, Google Chrome, its browser is an exception in this regard. After launching it about a year back, Google has not only removed the beta tag last year itself, but has also now released stable 3.0 version of Google Chrome. In fact, Google states that this 3.0 release follows 51 developer, 21 beta and 15 stable updates and 3,505 bug-fixes in the past one year itself! Quite impressive indeed!!
Google Chrome is the fastest browser around. If you have not downloaded it so far, you can do it free from here. Inspite of the fact that it lacks certain features, especially with regard to add-ins or extensions, Google Chrome is an excellent browser mainly because of its excellent speed and simplicity. My default browser is Chrome, though occasionally I use Mozilla Firefox if I have to use certain features thereof made available by a large number of useful add-ins. Sometimes, I also use Internet Explorer as some of the sites that I often visit, have been designed to work mainly for Internet Explorer. But, my browser of choice remains Chrome.
And now, with the new version 3.0, Google Chrome has improved further. In fact, its speed has further improved keeping it way ahead of other browsers in so far as speed is concerned. It starts really fast – a marked difference in speed over IE and Firefox. Moreover, the web pages and various web applications are also loaded quite fast in Chrome. Google claims to have further drastically improved the Javascript performance as well in this new release. Have a look at the following benchmarks for speed:
Moreover, following additional changes have been made in 3.0 release of Chrome:
(1) New Tab Page: Several changes have been made to the New Tab page in Chrome, which opens up when you start a new tab. You can rearrange and customize the thumbnails of your most-visited websites by simply clicking and dragging your mouse. The New Tab page itself can now be customized in different ways.
(2) Omnibox: The Omnibox acts as a search bar as well as the web address bar; it helps you to get to the web sites / pages of your interest with just a few keystrokes. It has been further optimized with the presentation of the drop-down menu and addition of little icons to help you distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from your browsing history.
(3) HTML5 capabilities: The latest HTML5 capabilities have now been added to Chrome, including the <video> tag in HTML5, which facilitates embedding videos in a web page as simple as embedding regular images. This <video> tag also allows video playback without there being a need for a plug-in.
(4) Themes: Themes allow you to select various schemes for colors, patterns and images for your browser. Themes have now been included in this stable version of Chrome, though themes had earlier been added in the beta version also (see, my earlier article, New themes for Google Chrome).
While this new version is welcome, there are several other features which need to be included in Google Chrome, particularly the add-ins which can enrich your browser experience tremendously by offering several additional features and customization. For example, Firefox offers about 5000 add-ins at the time of this writing which make it a very useful browser. Once similar additional features and add-ins are available for Chrome, it has the capability to be the market leader in browsers. As of now, inspite of being the fastest browser, Google Chrome lags far behind Internet Explorer and Firefox in the browser-war. In fact, its current market-share amongst various browsers is only about 3% but Google is aiming at a market share of about 10% for Chrome.
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