chrome

Google's latest version of Chrome has claimed the lead in my JavaScript speed tests, but Apple's new Safari 4 beta is the first browser to challenge it on Google's own performance benchmark.

JavaScript is a programming language that powers not just innumerable ordinary Web sites, but also many Web-based applications such as Google Docs. With the computing industry's major push to cloud computing, Web application performance is increasingly important, and there's a race on to see who's got the best JavaScript engine. JavaScript engines even have become a named feature, with Chrome's V8, Firefox's TraceMonkey, Opera's Futhark and upcoming Carakan, and now the Safari's newly branded Nitro, which is Apple's version of WebKit's Squirrelfish. … Read more

With Safari 3, I admired Apple's chutzpah for bringing its browser to Windows. With the new Safari 4 beta, I'm actually starting to admire the browser, too.

A big user interface overhaul makes Safari look polished rather than clunky on Windows, builds in better search abilities, and makes good use of the fact that people often visit the same sites over and over.

However, the lack of something like the extensions architecture that Firefox pioneered still means Safari 4 (download for Windows and Mac OS X) is better only than Safari 3, not the competition. … Read more

Google has fixed a disconnect between two of its software products, its Chrome browser and the plug-in version of Google Earth.

"As of ~4 p.m. PST today, Google Chrome 1.0+ on Windows is an officially supported browser," a Google employee said on a Google Earth mailing list on Thursday. "That means Chrome users will no longer get the unsupported browser message, and the plugin and API should work just as they would in other supported browsers."

Google Earth is generally used as standalone software, but the plug-in version can be mashed up with Web … Read more

Since I helped open this particular can of worms, I feel responsible for sharing the latest news about an issue in which Adobe Systems' software opens Internet Explorer even when Chrome is set as the default browser.

I had a Twitter tirade in January after the umpteenth time that Lightroom showed me the location of a photo in Internet Explorer when I clicked the Lightroom's GPS photo location icon. Internet Explorer also showed when using Adobe Photoshop's browser-based help and when Lightroom launched my Flickr page after uploading images to the Yahoo Web site. The problems showed on … Read more

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they've begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That's key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X … Read more

Hard-core gamers might laugh at this, but if you have a budget PC that you want to upgrade cheaply to be a media center that can play high-definition content on the big TV screen, then S3 Graphics has something for you.

The company announced Thursday the latest addition to its power-efficient Chrome 500 Series graphics processor family, the 850MHz DDR3-based Chrome 540 GTX GPU. The new GPU is capable of handling dual-stream Blu-ray and HD videos. It features a DisplayPort digital interface and HDMI and dual-link DVI and therefore supports connectivity to the latest digital monitors and HDTVs.

The new … Read more

Like a lot of office workers, Rafe Needleman coveted a Macintosh but his various work assignments forced him to spend 20 years banging away on a PC. But that was then and this is now. Rafe finally got his wish--but that didn't mean he had to dump his old PC. In fact, he's come up with a way to use both machines to maximum effect on the same desk.

Today's stories:

YouTube adds purchases using Google Checkout

Together in harmony: Mac and PC

Sources: Windows 7 moving toward 2009 release

Mobile WiFi usage on the rise… Read more

Google's expertise in translation has begun to pay dividends for an entirely separate project, its Chrome browser--as well as any other software using the open-source spell-checking package called Hunspell.

Chrome combines WebKit's spell-check infrastructure with Hunspell's multilanguage library of correctly spelled words to supply spell-check in 27 languages. But many widely used words were missing from Hunspell, and Google used its translation expertise to fill in the gaps.

Here's the explanation in a Wednesday blog post from Google programmers Brett Wilson and Siddhartha Chattopadhyay:

"The Hunspell dictionary maintainers have done a great job creating … Read more

Chrome programmers have switched out a third-party software package in favor of their own as part of Google's attempt to speed its open-source browser up more.

The change came with a key component for processing JavaScript text called regular expressions. "As we've improved other parts of the language, regexps started to stand out as being slower than the rest. We felt it should be possible to improve performance by integrating with our existing infrastructure rather than using an external library," according to a Chromium blog post by programmers Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen, and Lasse Reichstein … Read more