Google is celebrating the second anniversary of its Google Chrome browser with the release of new stable and beta versions that have a cleaner and simpler user interface and increased speed and performance.
As the Google Chrome Blog points out, Chrome 6 is years beyond where most imagined browser technology would be when Chrome was first introduced just two years ago.
The Google Chrome Blog takes a retrospective look at how much browsers have changed over the past two years, remarking that when Chrome was first introduced in August of 2008, “JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn’t yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project.”
In addition to some cosmetic changes, the new version of Chrome brings form autofill features, making it so you don’t have to type in again and again that ridiculously long email address you now regret choosing. It also brings extension and autofill synchronization, meaning that your autofill data will remain the same from desktop to laptop to netbook.
Among the myriad features, the user interface seems to have an impact in the browser market. The soon-to-be-released Internet Explorer 9 looks like it stole a page from Chrome, adopting the clean and simple design that lets the browser step out of the way. Chrome’s design manages to portray what we find most appealing about Chrome (which replaced Firefox as the default browser months ago now) – its lightweight operation. Just as it steps out of the way of the page, in terms of design, the browser manages to step out of the way of other programs, managing to run well (even on a netbook) without hogging all of the processing power.
If you haven’t yet, we highly recommend giving Chrome a spin.
