Google says its new Chrome version has some serious speed. Thought the limits of browser speed had already been reached? Perhaps not. Google now claims to have something even better up its sleeve.
According to its Chromium blog the version 7 of the Chrome browser could get a healthy speed boost.
Chrome already holds a strong position when it comes to speedy performance so increasing this even more could leave all other browsers in the dust.
The new technique relies on hardware acceleration and picks the best graphics API (application programming interface) for each
operating system the browser runs on.
The benefit is in significantly. improved speeds for 2D applications, Chrome developers say. Browser hardware acceleration is not entirely new and Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer already incorporate some form of hardware acceleration.
The technique passes off multimedia content on a website to the graphics processor for rendering while the browser renders the text portions of the site.
The Chrome developers say that their current developments are showing significant returns. "These early numbers show up to 60x speed improvement over the current version of Google Chrome," developers wrote on the Chromium blog. "With Google Chrome's fast release cycles, we expect to be able to get these enhancements to users quickly and add new performance
improvements over time."
The Chromium development team says that the current benefits are for 2D graphics but that they are working on 3D graphics acceleration for future releases. 3D
acceleration is the "next big thing" in browser technology. With that in place developers will be able to
create sophisticated games, gallery features, 3D visualisations and virtual environments, all in a web browser.
Chromium 7, the current development version of Chrome, is available for Windows, OS X and
Linux systems.
