Google Chrome 10 Beta Gets Speed Boost, New features

In the spirit of the New Year, search engine giant Google (News - Alert) has kicked off the year with a slew of enhancements to beta version of Chrome 10, which was released last week. It includes dramatic improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings. Stable Chrome 9 was released early this month.

According to a Google Chrome blog post, in the new Chrome version, the JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even faster than before. In fact, as per the description in the official Chrome blog, this beta release sports a whopping 66 percent improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over the current stable release Chrome 9.

The beta release also includes a preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video. Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage, said the bloggers Jeff Chang and Min Lin Chan. That means, in full screen mode, CPU usage can decrease by as much as 80 percent. All that translates into substantial improvement in battery life, said the bloggers.

Regarding a password, the new feature allows the user to save password along with bookmarks, extensions, apps, and themes in Google Account so that they are available no matter what computer one is using. In essence, one can synchronize saved passwords across multiple computers to enjoy the same web experience everywhere, said Google. The blog post says that the user can enable sync on as many computers as you like and across different operating systems.

Speaking of the new browser settings, the look and feel of the settings dialogs has been reworked. Instead of opening in a separate window, they now open in a tab. More importantly, two new settings features have been added that make it easy to customize Chrome to your liking, wrote the bloggers.

First, if one does not remember where a particular pesky configuration setting is, simply type its name into the search box to see the settings that match as you type. Second, it permits you to go directly to most settings pages using dedicated URLs, without needing to navigate through a sequence of windows, the Google blog post stated.