Google’s Chrome 1.0 has emerged from beta testing. The change to a final release came just 100 days after testers began submitting feedback about bugs and other outstanding issues, noted Google Vice President Sundar Pichai.
“Some of the areas where we’ve made great progress include better stability and performance of plug-ins,” with video and audio glitches “among the most common bugs fixed during the beta period,” Pichai said. “If you had problems watching videos with Google Chrome in the past, you should be pleasantly surprised with the performance now.”
Gaining Market Share
Chrome’s ability to start up fast and load pages quickly has already attracted a small but loyal following. Chrome’s share of the browser market recently rose to 1 percent for the first time since the days immediately following its early September launch, according to Net Applications.
“One cause of this rise is that Google is leveraging its dominant search engine by intermittently placing a nine-word link on their home page advertising Chrome,” the Web metrics tracker said.
Google hopes to build on Chrome’s reputation for speed by promising more turbocharges. “Since the first beta, the V8 JavaScript engine runs 1.4 times faster on the SunSpider benchmark and 1.5 times faster on the V8 benchmark — and there is more speed to come,” Pichai said.
Chrome’s development team has also made it easier for users to control their browsing data. “All of the features in Google Chrome which affect user privacy are now grouped in one place with detailed explanations for each one,” Pichai said.
Chrome beta users made better bookmark features one of their top requests, and Google responded. “It’s now easier to switch between another browser and Google Chrome with the bookmark import and export features, and we added a new simple way to manage large numbers of bookmarks,”…