What’s New in Chrome 2.0?

Google’s Chrome browser was first released 8 months back, with a Beta version later coming in March. Now a stable version called 2.0 is available for download. I you already have Chrome installed on your PC, you will get 2.0 by an automatic update soon. However if you want it right away you can update Chrome manually.

New Features of Google Chrome 2.0

Removable Thumbnails

Chrome’s New Tab feature earlier showed Thumbnails of the recently visited pages with no options to modify. Now you can delete all those Thumbnails which are not needed.

Full Screen Mode

F11 is now supported in Chrome to increase your screen real estate.

Forms AutoFill

Fills text boxes with previously entered information.

Increased Stability

Around 300 bugs causing the browser to crashe have been fixed in this version.

Increased Speed

Chrome 2.0 claims to be 30% faster than it’s predecessor. Chrome’s javascript engine V8 has been updated along with WebKit. Google’s V8 benchmark suite has been used to tune V8 during it’s development. Running the benchmark scripts on different browsers has led to the following results:

A bigger score in the above graph means better performance. Chrome definitely stands out amongst the other browsers in this benchmarking test.

In order to have some independent comparison of browser speeds, we used a millisecond timer to note the load time of our homepage, which has 13 javascripts. Here are those results:

Chrome definitely proved to be faster than the other 3 browsers, but the margin is not so high as the benchmarking suite results.

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