Wednesday, May 22, 2013

New Chrome browser is out


Google has released a new version of its Chrome browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Armed with the catchy title of "version 27" the browser is apparently five percent faster at loading pages than earlier versions. Anyone who can spot a five percent speed increase without monitoring tools is probably imagining it, but it does show the level of programming skill that Google is throwing behind its new browser.
Firefox, on the other hand is getting slower than an asthmatic turtle on its way to a turtle soup convention while towing a VW beetle.
You can update to the latest release now using the browser's built-in silent updater, or download it directly from google.com/chrome.
The speed boost is down to improvements to behind-the-scenes resource scheduling, Google tells us. Starting with this release, the scheduler more aggressively uses an idle connection and demotes the priority of preloaded resources so that they don't interfere with critical assets. The last thing anyone wants is their critical assets interfered with.
The browser comes with something called the Sync FileSystem API, which is a new offline storage application programming interface for Chrome packaged apps which automatically synchronises stored data across clients via Google Drive.
The files are stored in private sandboxes and can be manipulated with the HTML5 File API and FileSystem API.
There are also a few other enhancements in this release including improved ranking of predictions, improved spell correction, and improvements for Omnibox predictions.
There are also the usual bug fixes, a new version of V8, and more than 14 security holes fixed -- 11 rated High, two marked Medium, and one considered Low.
You can download the thing here.