The PC Report

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.

The easiest way to add support on Wordpress is with the plugin.

For all those people out there either looking for a new browser to try or using Chrome right now to view this: Chrome 3 is out of beta and has hit full version status, and is still as speedy as ever. Google claims Chrome 3 is 150% faster than Chrome 1, and 25% faster than the last stable release; pretty good going Google.

New features to the browser include HTML5 capabilities, a redesigned New Tab page, capabilities for themes (yay!) and an improved Omnibox, as well as the speed increases mentioned before. You can grab the new browser from Google’s Chrome web page (Chrome updates automatically for those already using it).

According to the guys over a CNET, version 4.0 of the popular Chrome browser has his the Mac OS X platform, and its the fastest browser available. Chrome 4.0 beats the default Safari browser, using the same Webkit engine, by 34% according to their testing

They say Chrome got a score of 657ms on the SunSpider Javascript Benchmark, beating Safari (886ms), Firefox (1,508ms) and Opera (5,958ms). While they say its faster than the PC version of Chrome, we beg to differ, as during our testing we managed to scrape 531ms out of Chrome 3.0.195.6 Beta, which beats the OS X version by 19%. However, these are results from a beta version, so we’ll have to wait and see what the full version pulls with it.