Yesterday, Google announced a new beta version of Chrome, which features a significantly faster version of V8, Google’s JavaScript engine. Today, Google also launched Chrome Experiments, which showcases JavaScript intensive games, apps, and visualizations. The site is obviously meant to highlight the power of the combination of V8 and Chrome, though quite a few of the apps should also work on Firefox, Safari and IE. In our tests, however, Chrome did indeed provide the best experience.
Chrome Experiments currently features 19 apps, and Google plans to constantly update the site with new experiments and encourages developers to submit their JavaScript apps for inclusion.
Note: If you want to live on the cutting edge, here are the instructions for enabling the Chrome Beta and Developer channels.
Some Highlights
Here are some of our favorite apps in the current Google Chrome Experiments line-up:
Social Collider might just be one of the coolest Twitter visualization tools we have seen in the recent past. Social Collider shows the connections between different Twitter users. You can use a user name or keyword to initiate Social Collider, but it can also be used to visualize current Twitter trends.
Note: Using Social Collider can be quite CPU intensive, but the results are definitely worth it.
Google Gravity
This is an utterly useless experiment, but it shows off some of the surprising possibilities of using JavaScript together with the Box2D Physics Engine. After you have seen gravity take its toll on the Google homepage, also try to perform some searches.
Smalltalk
Smalltalk is another Chrome Experiment that uses the Twitter API to visualize real-time chatter on the Internet. Specifically, Smalltalk looks at comments about the weather in the US (sunny, foggy, windy, etc.). Besides JavaScript, Smalltalk also makes use of the canvas element in HTML5 and the jQuery framework.
BallDroppings
Josh Nimoy’s BallDroppings is a cool little musical toy that has already been implemented in a number of other languages. Here is the JavaScript version. Just draw a few lines on the screen and see what happens.
