Google Chrome 2.0 pre-beta: a first look

Charles McLellan ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 16 Jan 2009

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Other new features
Extensibility has been a big gap in Chrome up to now, and although third-party extensions are not yet supported, Chrome 2.0 does have user scripting support — similar to Firefox's Greasemonkey. This is not enabled by default: to do so, you'll need to right-click on the Chrome desktop shortcut, select Properties and add '-enable-user-scripts' to the Target field:

Enbling user scripting in Chrome 2.0 pre-beta.

You'll also need to create a directory for your scripts — C:\scripts for build 2.0.156.1, or a folder called User Scripts in the Chromium user directory in subsequent builds. Other new features include: importing Google Bookmarks, although these are not kept synchronised; faster and more reliable Safe Browsing; a Mac- and Linux-friendly implementation of HTTP network protocol; a new HTTPS-only browsing mode that will only load HTTPS sites; and an update to the V8 JavaScript engine.

Performance
Chrome is already a fast browser (especially when rendering JavaScript) and this is a pre-beta, so we didn't expect great performance improvements. This was confirmed when we ran the SunSpider JavaScript tests and detected no difference from the previous stable build:

Time in milliseconds; shorter bars are better.

Note, though, that Chrome is three times quicker on this test than the current version of Firefox.

There is an improvement in web standards compliance, as measured by the Acid3 rendering test. Here are the results for Chrome builds 1.0.154.43, 2.0.156.1, Firefox 3.0.5 and the reference result:

Acid3 rendering results for (from the top) Chrome 1.0.154.43, Chrome 2.0.156.1 and Firefox 3.0.5, plus the reference result.

Outlook
New developer builds of Chrome are expected roughly weekly, with more stable betas arriving about once a month. More features, notably support for RSS and Atom feeds, are expected in due course, while Google hopes to release Mac and Linux versions — which users have been clamouring for — before the first half of 2009 is out.

 

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