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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It was only a matter of time before a search engine would attempt to bring search-as-you-type results to the world, and it looks like Google is trying to be the first to bring this into the wild. As pointed out by SEO consultant Rob Ousbey, Google has begun testing a live updating results page, as seen in the video above.

As Ousbey enters terms into the search box, the results page is automatically reloaded to reflect the changes in search terms. To reduce server strain and loading, the page only refreshes once the predicted search terms (which are already displayed on Google search pages) change, and it appears to only refresh to the topmost result. Once the predicted terms are exhausted it switches to updating every few characters. Ousbey never needed to manually refresh the page.

This new innovation of Google’s is a very interesting one. Constantly updating searches will enable you to find what you are looking for more quickly and should be well received if Google do decide to release it to the world, however it could actually make searching slower for those who have low bandwidth connections -- more refreshes equals constant loading and this can be annoying on slow connections.

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At some point you’ve probably heard about how Google is under fire from many countries over their collection of data from unsecured wireless networks via their Street View cars. Google acknowledged that this was an “accident” and blames the collection of data on some rogue code from a single engineer, but also believe that they haven’t violated any laws and thus are being investigated by numerous countries including the US, Canada and Australia.

Today this debacle has escalated as South Korean authorities decided to conduct a raid on Google’s Soul office seeking out any data that may have been obtained via the Street View cars and the rouge code. Google says they have been fully compliant with the investigation. The raid comes after “security experts” claim that the data collected by Google could include email messages, visited websites and some passwords, although UK authorities claim nothing meaningful was collected.

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After the slow take-up of Google’s web application for real-time collaboration known as “Wave“, Google today has decided to end development on the project and has begun to slowly shut down the service after over a year in business. Google says that they will continue to maintain the site “at least until the end of the year” and could incorporate the technology into other Google products. Source code for the project is available in-case you feel like continuing the project.

Last year at Google I/O, when we launched our developer preview of Google Wave… Developers in the audience stood and cheered…. We were equally jazzed about Google Wave internally, even though we weren’t quite sure how users would respond to this radically different kind of communication…. But despite these wins, and numerous loyal fans, Wave has not seen the user adoption we would have liked. We don’t plan to continue developing Wave as a standalone product

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If you have recently checked out Google Image Search then you would have immediately noticed the fresh new look given to the image search service. One of the great new features of the image search is the removal of all text below the images, along with adding instant scrolling between pages with no page refreshes in between. This new tiled layout gives it a great fresh new look and provides fantastic ease of use, especially for those with larger monitors.

Google Images now also has larger thumbnail previews, which are activated by mousing over the image for a short period of time. This not only brings up the larger preview, it also brings up the image information in-case you need to know where the image comes from and how big it is. Upon clicking on this thumbnail you are presented with the full image in a pop-up box over the source website. This is a absolutely fantastic way to view the images and greatly improves upon the old way which required several clicks to save images from Images. Read the rest of this entry »

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

In the emerging netbook market, Google decided it would announce a new-style Linux-based OS that would be perfect for netbook owners, set for release in Q4 2010. Recently, Google has also showed off a new application market for Chrome and Chrome OS. We at The PC Report have used Chrome OS briefly when it was first released, but today we’ve taken an in-depth look at the OS and how it will affect the OS and netbook markets.

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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 

Celebrate the 30th anniversary of the classic game Pacman by playing the game on the Google homepage. The completely playable Pacman Google logo will be available for 2 days only. Go on, you know you want to play it.

Update: Missed out on the action? Pacman continues to live at google.com/pacman

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.