Google has released a new Chrome beta that is designed to offer a compromise between stability and more up-to-date features.
The new version of the browser, released on Tuesday, offers zooming for graphics as well as text, autofill to save re-entering information in website forms, and new tab-dragging features that allow browser windows to be docked at the sides of the screen.
The beta is essentially the same as Chrome 2.0.169.1, which was released on 11 March to the Chrome developer preview channel for less-tested versions of the browser, Google said.
In a blog post announcing the new version, Google focused on the improved JavaScript performance from a new version of the browser's V8 engine. "It's 25 percent faster on our V8 benchmark and 35 percent faster on the SunSpider [JavaScript] benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast [as] our original beta version," Chrome product manager Brian Rakowski said in the blog post.
The improved speed in the JavaScript benchmark is significant because JavaScript is used to power complex web applications such as Google Docs and refinements on countless websites. Google, Mozilla, Apple and Opera all are working hard to improve how their browsers handle JavaScript.
Since releasing Chrome 1.0 in December, Google has offered only two of the three promised versions of its browser: a stable version that has received only minor tweaks, and a less-polished developer preview version on which Google tests new features. The new beta makes many of the developer-preview features available to a wider audience.
The Firefox browser has an advantage over Chrome in its ability to accommodate extensions that endow it with new features. Google is working on such extensions for Chrome, and on Monday Google programmer Aaron Boodman published a how-to document for writing Chrome extensions.
"Right now extensions can only really contain content scripts, so that is all this doc covers. But we'll be expanding it over time as more features develop," Boodman said in an email announcement of the how-to document.
