Google Chrome (BETA)
By Sundar Pichai, VP, Product Management, and Linus Upson, Engineering
Director
Google
December 11. 2008
Since we first released Google Chrome [ http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/09/fresh-take-on-browser.html
], the development team has been hard at work improving the stability and overall
performance of the browser. In just 100 days, we have reached more than 10 million
active users around the world (on all seven continents, no less) and released 14
updates to the product. We're excited to announce that with today's fifteenth release
we are taking off the "beta" label!
Google Chrome is a better browser today thanks to the many users who sent their
feedback and the many more who enabled automatic crash reports, helping us rapidly
diagnose and fix issues. Some of the areas where we've made great progress include:
Better stability and performance of plug-ins (particularly video). Video and audio
glitches were among the most common bugs fixed [ http://blog.chromium.org/2008/10/beta-and-plugin-improvements-in-google.html
] during the beta period. If you had problems watching videos with Google Chrome
in the past, you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance now.
Even more speed. Google Chrome starts up fast, loads pages quickly, and just keeps
getting faster. Since the first beta, the V8 JavaScript engine runs 1.4 times faster
on the SunSpider benchmark [ http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html
] and 1.5 times faster on the V8 benchmark [ http://code.google.com/apis/v8/run.html
] — and there is more speed to come.
Bookmark manager and privacy controls. We heard you! Better bookmark features [
http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=95714 ] were a top
request from our users. It's now easier to switch between another browser and Google
Chrome with the bookmark import and export features, and we added a new simple way
to manage large numbers of bookmarks, too. We also wanted to make it even easier
for you to control your browsing data, so all of the features in Google Chrome which
affect user privacy are now grouped in one place with detailed explanations for
each one [ http://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=114836 ].
We've taken security very seriously from the beginning and we will continue to look
for ways to make Google Chrome and all browsers even more secure. Google Chrome's
unique sandbox technology [ http://blog.chromium.org/2008/09/security-architecture.html
] creates an additional layer of defense against harmful software, while the Safe
Browsing [ http://blog.chromium.org/2008/11/understanding-phishing-and-malware.html
] feature provides protection against phishing and malware attacks for many browser
users.
We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been
met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features
such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing
an extensions platform [ http://dev.chromium.org/developers/design-documents/extensions
] along with support for Mac and Linux. If you are already using Google Chrome,
the update system ensures that you get the latest bug fixes and security patches,
so you will get the newest version automatically in the next few days. If you haven't
used Google Chrome for a while, now might be a good time to give it another spin.
Download Google Chrome [ http://www.google.com/chrome/ ] and try it out. Let us
know what you think [ http://www.google.com/support/forum/p/Chrome ].10:00:00
AM
Copyright 2008