Back in February we were announcing that while the Stable channel was serving Chrome 9.0 (which rolled to the stable channel earlier in the month), the Beta channel started to serve Chrome 10.0 to Windows, Mac and Linux users.
At the time Google was boasting the fact that Chrome 10 Beta comes with a new version of the V8 JavaScript engine, Crankshaft, which greatly improves JavaScript performance. Referencing the fact that this is the Year of the Rabbit in Chinese culture, Jeff Chang, Product Manager, and Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager, said the JavaScript engine is “as quick as a bunny” and that Chrome 10 Beta “sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.”
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Google was also proud of the fact that Chrome 10 Beta can run apps and extensions in the background. If you for example rely on an extension or an app to get timely notifications for calendar events, incoming chat messages, and other things of the sort, for the extension or app to work, you have to keep a Chrome window open. Not with Chrome 10 Beta you don’t. The nuisance of having to keep a Chrome window open went away because Google made it for extensions and apps to keep running even though you don’t have a Chrome window open.
“Apps and extensions that use the new 'background' feature can continue to run in the background—even if the user closes down all of Chrome’s windows. 'Background apps' will continue to run until Chrome exits. The next time Chrome starts up, any background windows that were previously running will also be re-launched. These windows are not going to be visible but they will be able to perform tasks like checking for server-side changes and pre-emptively loading content into local storage,” explained back in February Andrew Wilson, Software Engineer and Michael Mahemoff, Developer Relations.
Google was also proud of the fact that Chrome 10 Beta came with a revamped look and feel of the settings dialogs (the settings pages open in a tab not in a dialog box), that the security has been enhanced (malware reporting, outdated plugins are disabled by default), that password sync (which is part of Chrome Sync) is now enabled by default, that the browser comes with a preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video, and a webNavigation extension API.
If you stayed away from Chrome 10.0 because it still carried the Beta tag, if you kept away because you didn’t want to mess around with buggy Beta releases (Beta releases do tend to be buggy), then you will be glad to know that Chrome 10 has graduated out of the Beta channel.
Google announced yesterday that Chrome 10.0 made it to the Stable channel. All the features mentioned above, they are all present in Chrome 10.0 Stable. There’s one feature that wasn’t mentioned above: Chrome’s sandboxing technology now covers the integrated Flash Player as well, providing even more protection to Chrome users.
“We hope that Chrome’s speed, simplicity and security will continue to make your daily life on the web more enjoyable. You can download the browser at google.com/chrome, or if you’re already using Chrome, you’ll be automatically updated to this new version soon!” said Tim Steele, Software Engineer.
Back in February we were announcing that while the Stable channel was serving Chrome 9.0 (which rolled to the stable channel earlier in the month), the Beta channel started to serve 