Revamped V8 engine delivers 30% speed boost to fifth-gen browser, which also gets integrated plugin-free Flash plus file drag and drop in HTML5.
It’s not as if Chrome needed any more juice as it
shoots up the charts, but all the same Google has outed a supercharged first beta of its fifth-generation Web browser.
Now available for download on
Windows,
Mac and
Linux, Google calls Chrome 5.0.375 “our fastest beta to date” and says the browser’s V8 JavaScript engine “incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date”.
The claimed 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks
compared to the current 4.1 edition continues Google’s push to continue
boosting speed with every major release of Chrome.
In addition to supersonic speed, Chrome 5 includes fully integrated Flash support so there’s no need to separately download Adobe’s own plug-in – the player is baked into the browser’s codebase.
And building on the bookmark sync introduced in Chrome 4, which synchronises bookmarks across multiple browsers through your Google account, Chrome 5 adds the ability to synchronise browser preferences including homepage and startup settings, Web content settings and themes.
Web pages and apps built with HTML5 allow users to drag and drop files, while Chrome extensions can also be installed and used while browsing in ‘incognito’ mode (just in case your porn needs plug-ins).