The PC Report

Google Chrome, which turns a happy second birthday today, has celebrated by releasing version 6 to the world. The most noticeable change in Chrome 6 is the slightly revised user interface, which has been made simpler through merging of the two menus into one, removal of some unnecessary interface features and a brand new color scheme that is now a grey instead of blue.

Other than the user interface update, Chrome 6 brings improved syncing tools with new support for syncing of web form data and extensions along with bug fixes, patched security holes and speed improvements. Google claims Chrome’s JavaScript performance is three times faster than it was in 2008.

Why the Chrome team has decided to release a major version number Chrome update (5.0 to 6.0) with relatively minor changes is odd. Usually version number schemes leave the first number for major versions and subsequent numbers after decimal places are reserved for minor changes and bug fixes.

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In a follow up to our previous post on HTML5 we now have a video showing a speed comparison between Firefox 3.7, Internet Explorer 9, Opera (unspecified version) and Chrome 6. The latest test preview of IE9 utilises hardware acceleration as well as a new JavaScript engine and better HTML5 support. The Firefox 3.7 Alpha also uses hardware acceleration that matches IE9′s in terms of performance, and Chrome 6 tries to use its engine but ultimately fails miserably.

Most notable from the video below is that Firefox 3.7 actually beats IE9, which recently has been shown to be a speed demon, by around 5%. Both IE9 and Firefox 3.7 used the least CPU power during the test as well. As these browsers are in testing phases one would hope that by a final version things would be even smoother and faster and hopefully with interface improvements (*cough* Firefox *cough*).

It’s quite surprising to see Chrome in last place when it comes to browser speed considering that it was the fastest browser around when it was released and consistently beats non-beta Firefox and Internet Explorer versions in the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark. This could be due to (as stated in the video) an early implementation of hardware acceleration or it could mean that Firefox and IE9′s devs are just better at coding these features into their browsers.

We wait in anticipation of the full releases of all these browsers

Google Chrome has been updated to stable version 5, and it marks the first stable version for Chrome for Mac and Linux (of course there is a Windows version available too). One of the main features added in Chrome 5 is syncing of almost every setting in Chrome including themes, web settings, startup settings and more across multiple computers.

Other features included in Chrome 5 are more HTML5 features, extensions in incognito mode and a better bookmark manager. If you haven’t been auto-updated to Chrome 5 you can download a copy from here 

Remember when Chrome OS was released to the eyes of us all with a rather empty app page? Google has today announced an online web store that is set to fill up that app page in Chrome OS along with having support for the standard Chrome web browser. Free apps will be available along with paid apps (similar to most app markets these days) to enhance your netbook Chrome OS experience. As you can see from the above image from Engadget, the image editing app Dark Room is available along with other notable apps like Digg, Pandora, Scrabble, Lego Star Wars and more.

The Chrome web store will be hitting the dev channel “soon” according to Google reps.

In a quite interesting move, Google has decided to remove the http:// preceding the website URL from display in developer builds of Google Chrome. This could present users with issues especially when needing to copy and paste URLs from the address bar, however Google has said that this issue is addressed by Chrome adding http:// to the front of all URLs when copying them to the clipboard. This feature is currently broken in many instances.

Another issue is the use of other domain preceders such as https:// and ftp:// (generally the only other ones that people encounter). Apparently Chrome will still add these to the front of URLs if encountered, but this could look inconsistent if http:// is removed. OSNews suggests that an easy to recognise icon such as the RSS icon should replace http://, https:// and ftp:// and personally I think that this is a great idea and should be implemented once the copying issues have been ironed out.

Google has confirmed via the Chromium Blog that they will be in fact integrating Adobe Flash Player into Google Chrome, eliminating the need to install and update the plugin… ever. The aim for this move is to increase the security of web browsing by removing outdated software and to improve the current state of web browser plug-ins. For this project, Google is working closely with both Adobe and Mozilla – which should mean that we’ll see Flash integrated in the same way in Firefox.

Thanks to the integration, Flash Player will be updated through the auto-updater seamlessly which should remove the risk from having outdated software. Of course the problem with this is that if a flaw or vulnerability is found within Flash and Adobe doesn’t patch it promptly, Chrome users will be wide open to an attack if they don’t disable Flash. Hopefully though Adobe will patch any exploits as soon a possible and thanks to the auto-update everyone will be secure without having to do anything.

If you’re desperate to try out Chrome with integrated Flash, you can download it now through the Chromium developer channel.

Of course, not much fresh news here for those who are already using Google Chrome 4.0 via the beta channel, but Chrome 4.0 for Windows has finally gone stable; sorry Linux users, you’re stuck with the beta channel for just a bit longer. The major change for Chrome 4.0 is support for the extension framework, which should rival Firefox’s Add-ons and create more competition between the two browsers.

Currently, there are over 1,500 extensions available for Chrome, including ad blockers, several Google product enhancement tools and a lot of extensions that are available on Firefox already. Also new in Chrome 4.0 is bookmark sync, which synchronises your bookmarks across your different machines so you don’t have to create them on each machine – to use bookmark sync you’ll need a Google account which, as a Chrome user, you should have already.

Head over to Google’s Chrome page to download the browser if you feel like adopting it right now, or you can update to 4.0 from within Chrome.

Chrome lovers rejoice! Google’s Chrome web browser has managed to shove Apple’s Safari away from the prized third spot in browser market share and claim it with a total market share of 4.63%, beating Safari’s 4.46%. Of course, the gain has to come at the expense of another browser, and that browser happens to be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which is continuing to fall down the ranks at 0.92% per month.

IE still stands firmly at the top with a 62.7% market share, but projections show that this could go as low as 50% by May, with other browsers (mainly Firefox and Chrome) picking up the crowds leaving IE. Hopefully some of this drop will come out of the IE6 users, which apparently still make up 21% of all market share.

Net Applications, the company that brings us these statistics, monitors traffic from approximately 40,000 websites which generate a total of 160 million unique visitors per month. The statistics from them should be rather solid.

For everyone not using Windows, the wait to access Google’s Chrome as your web browser (officially) is now over, as Google has released a public beta for all you Mac OS X and Linux users. Unfortunately, the Mac/Linux versions aren’t as feature-filled as their Windows counterpart, but still carry enough features to make it a good enough browser to replace your current one.

While the speed and process per tab benefits of Chrome are in the Mac/Linux versions, things such as extensions, the bookmark manager and support for Google Gears are still missing. However it looks like the Mac Chrome edition integrates well with the OS X interface and utilises some key features such as native spell-check, keychain support and Mac-specific animations. The interface also fits in well with the overall Mac look, and the Linux version isn’t too bad either.

You can download the beta version of Chrome for Mac (OS X 10.5 or later) or Linux (Debian/Ubuntu/Fedora/openSUSE) from the respective downloads pages.

It’s amazing, isn’t it, that the aging Internet Explorer 6 still has a market share of around 20%, depending on the source you go by. Even more amazing considering it has an awful rendering and JavaScript engines and lacks basic features that have become a standard such as tab support.

Google to the rescue. Google Chrome Frame gets rid of IE’s rendering and JavaScript engines and adds capabilities such as HTML 5 support, for sites that request it. This works on IE6, IE7 and IE8. This is great news for web developers who are sick of having to develop for products that Microsoft didn’t bother making standards compliant.  All you have to do to make Google-modified IE installations use the Chrome Frame is add this meta tag to your site:

<meta http-equiv=”X-UA-Compatible” content=”chrome=1″>

I’ve already done it for The PC Report, as much as I would hope that we don’t have too many readers using IE, especially IE6.

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