Review: Google Adds Faster Engine To Chrome 10

Google Chrome 10 Boosts Performance, Management

Chrome 10, the latest version of Google's regularly updated Web browser, has a few very welcome new capabilities, including a revised Options interface and a brand new and faster JavaScript engine.

To say that Google has been on a fast revision schedule with the Chrome browser would be an understatement. They've been pretty close to a new version every six weeks and, if this rate holds up, we should be at Chrome 20 by summer 2012.

This pace means that each new version of Chrome is hardly a massive upgrade and, with version 10, most Chrome users probably won't even realize that they have a new version when the browser automatically upgrades itself. But that doesn't mean that Chrome 10 lacks worthwhile new features.

Probably the biggest is its use of the new Crankshaft V8 engine for JavaScript. This, along with other performance improvements in version 10, clearly puts Chrome right at the top of browser performance, at least when looking at currently shipping browsers and not betas.

Chrome 10 does well across a variety of Web performance benchmarks. In tests that I ran using Futuremark's Peacekeeper browser benchmark, Chrome 10 did very well, scoring right at the top of browser performance along with Opera 11.

When it comes to new interface features in Chrome 10, the most noticeable for users will be the revised Options interface. Now, when users open the Options from the Chrome Tool menu, instead of launching a separate box, the options are displayed in a standard browser tab.

I found this to be a very good option for managing browser settings. Along with the cleaner interface, users could now use a search box to jump to where the settings they wanted to change were in the Options window. This even worked when a search term was inside another box inside the Options, with a yellow arrow pointing to where to click to find the searched-for term.

Probably my only complaint about this was that I would like to see it used across all settings and for the search to work across everything, from standard Options settings to Add-on and extension controls.

The Chrome Sync feature, which makes it possible to use a Google or Gmail account to share bookmarks and preferences across installations of Chrome on different systems, has also been updated in Version 10. Now, it is also possible to share saved passwords between Chrome installs on different systems.

For users running Chrome 10 on Windows 7 or Vista, the browser now can also use a sandbox feature to limit the ability for Flash, and any malware that subverts Flash, to access and attack systems resources.

If you are currently a Google Chrome user, your browser has most likely already upgraded to version 10. For those looking to download and tryout the free Chrome browser, go to www.google.com/chrome.

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