Chrome 9 and 11: Instant Search, More Speed

Google has begun pushing new browser versions to Chrome users. The stable version has been updated to 9, the beta channel and dev channel moved a step higher in the 10th generation and the nightly builds are now at version 11.

Google introduced the sixth major upgrade to its web browser within the past 12 month. Chrome 9 finally delivers Instant Search as standard feature of the browser, which allows users to use the URL bar in a similar way as the Google front page. The feature, which surfaced originally in the first nightly builds of Chrome 7 (and has shown a substantial transformation since then), essentially replaces Google’s main search page for Chrome users.

While the complete set of GPU/hardware acceleration features of Chrome are still hidden behind flags, Chrome 9 supports accelerated 3D graphics via WebGL now by default. Google posted a few demos to show off the newly added horsepower in its browser. You may also notice that the Chrome Web Store was treated to a default link on the New Tab page in the stable browser version as well.

Chrome 11: Menu Changes and More Speed

With the release of Chrome 9, the Chromium developer channel moved to version 11. The actual differences to the developer channel (10) are somewhat blurry, but it appears that Google is trying to find more speed and is cleaning up its tabbed menu structures. The Settings menu isn’t quite as messy anymore and looks much more like what you would expect from a professionally designed software.

Version 11 cleans up the Sync menu and removes all checkboxes. The Web Content menu (chrome://settings/advanced) received language and spell checker options that now work across more than 100 languages and language versions. The interface isn’t entirely translated for all versions yet – however, if you live in a multi-lingual household or work in a corporate environment that deals with many languages, this is a feature that will be widely appreciated and is one of the benefits that cloud computing provides. The times in which your operating environment needed complex local updates to switch language versions will be over in the near future.

We also noticed that Chrome 11 is noticeably faster in some JavaScript and benchmark applications. The Chrome 11 nightly build is a few V8 and Webkit versions ahead of Chrome 9 and 10 (Chrome 11 currently runs on Webkit 534.18 and V8 3.1.1 vs. Webkit 534.16 and V8 3.0.7 of Chrome 10 Dev), which gives the browser an advantage in Mozilla’s Kraken and its own V8 benchmark. On our 6-core test system, Chrome 11 now scores 10,400 points in the V8 benchmark and slightly edges out Firefox 4 Beta in the Kraken benchmark with a time of 7214.5 ms. However, IE9 still holds the performance crown in Sunspider, where Chrome is, on our system, about 12% slower.