Friday, September 03, 2010:
It's time for celebrations at the Chrome development office. The browser is celebrating its second birthday. According to Net Marketshare, in the past two years, Chrome has come to control more than 7.5 per cent of the worldwide browser market. Internet Explorer and Firefox still hold the top two slots at 60.4 per cent and 22.9 per cent, respectively. Opera took 10 years to reach close to 2.4 per cent, so Chrome's number is fairly impressive. Chrome 6 is available for download at the company's website, but existing users should expect the update to reach them automatically.
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Two years back when Chrome was released it was evident that the browser had potential, coming from the biggest company on the Web. What made the Chrome stand out was its emphasis on performance and an intriguing minimalistic user interface.
To mark Chrome's second anniversary and reward the fans who have forced Google not to abandon this project like most others, Google has announced the official release of Chrome 6, a new major stable version of the browser. Google has tagged the Chrome 6 as "The Modern Browser." It does boast a number of improvements, but the focus remains on speed and simplicity.
The new version has all the features that we saw in the beta version which Google rolled out last month -- significant JavaScript performance improvements, built-in synchronisation capabilities, auto-fill feature that can automatically complete form data and some user interface enhancements. Like its predecessor, the new version has Adobe Flash built in. Chrome's handling of HTML5 still remains topnotch.
There are a few changes in this version which struck me instantly:
* the "go" button has been removed
* there is a single menu
* the browser does not show "http://" in the address bar
* the bookmark button has now been moved to the right
* the toolbar has a new color scheme.
Recently Google demonstrated some highly experimental tab features. It is a foresight into how Chrome tabbing might eventually be enhanced. Mozilla currently rules the tabbing space with its Panorama. But, compared to something like Panorama, Google's tabbing looks to be more automatic that doesn't require much user intervention.
The Chrome team is definitely taking the fight to the other browser. They adopted a very rapid and incremental development model. Starting with version 6, every six weeks will see a new stable release. With the increase in growth of HTML5, it's hard to believe that Chrome’s browser share won't grow further.
Shabbir Akhtar, EFYTIMES News Network
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