Version 2 of Google's Chrome browser has been in the developer channel for a while, but now Google reckons it's ready for the average punter to play with.
The good news is that it's very, very, very fast; the bad is that some of the features we'd really like to see haven't been implemented just yet.
That doesn't mean you don't get some useful new features. There's full-screen browsing, which means Chrome has just become even better on netbooks, and there's middle mouse button-autoscrolling for easy page navigation.
The zoom feature is smooth and increases or decreases the entire page, not just the text, and the previous version's form field resizing has been supplemented with form autofill. You can also drag tabs out of the browser to display them side by side, although we're not sure how useful that really is.
Chrome 2 is super-speedy
The big news here, though, is speed. The last time we benchmarked Chrome it was narrowly pipped to the fastest browser post by Apple's Safari 4 beta, but this time round they're neck and neck: with the Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks Safari achieved 958.6ms and 1,079.6ms in our two tests, with Chrome lagging a bit behind at 1,332.4ms and 1,371ms.
This time, though, the beta whizzed through the benchmarks at 991.2ms and 976.0ms. Memory footprint is unchanged, with Chrome taking 36MB to display the Techradar site while Safari needs 44MB. As ever, we tested on our trusty Core 2 Duo running Windows Vista Ultimate, a machine with a Windows Experience Index of 5.5.
Chrome 2 launches in an instant and feels snappy no matter what you're doing, whether it's just browsing web pages or fiddling around in Google Docs or Gmail. So what's missing?
RSS support still hasn't been implemented, although it's coming soon, and there's still no support for extensions - such as the all-important ad-blocker - or themes. If you're sticking with Firefox because you love AdBlock Plus, Chrome won't tempt you away unless you fancy installing ad-blocking proxy software.
Is Chrome the best browser your PC can get? The answer depends on what you use your browser for.
On our desktop machine we're sticking with Firefox for its extensions such as FireFTP, but on our crappy laptop Chrome is the hands-down winner. If we could just make the address bar a little bit smaller, we'd like it even more.
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You might also like: Tested: Chrome vs IE8 vs Firefox 3.1 vs Safari 4
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Your comments (6) Click to add a new comment
orizens
April 27th
6. looking forward for chrome2. in the meantime, use these bookmarklets for chrome:
(sorry - used the wrong link....)
http://www.orizens.com/wp/blog/categories/bookmarklet
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orizens
April 27th
5. looking forward for chrome2. in the meantime, use these bookmarklets for chrome:
http://www.orizens.com/wp/blog/categories/bookmarklets
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kasino72
March 18th
4. labrowp - "when it's ready" appears to be the plan: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/pinkerton/archives/019848.html. As of february it was crashing "like nobody's business".
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jmace86
March 18th
3. I started using Chrome a few months back and I have to say I have never wanted to go back to using Firefox or IE (the two browsers that I mainly used before).
I do not use extensions and I do not use RSS, so all that really matters to me is speed and boy does Google Chrome deliver on that!
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mcdragon
March 18th
2. I am looking forward to Foxmarks working on Chrome so I can sync my bookmarks on both browsers. After that my Chrome usage might increase a lot, perhaps even more than Mozilla would like.
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labrowp
March 18th
1. And the Mac version will be when exactly?
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