Sandy
Google has released a beta update of its Chrome Web browser -- called Chrome 10 Beta -- that is faster with both JavaScript and video, and includes a new Chrome OS-like settings interface and a password sync feature.
"Chrome's JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before," Google said in a blog post announcing the update. "In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release."
The Chrome 10 Beta also has a "preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video," which will enable users with higher end graphics cards to rely on that hardware rather than a standard CPU processor.
"In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%," for computers with the appropriate graphics cards, Google said.
Chrome is released in three versions, which Google calls channels -- Dev, Beta and Stable. Dev is meant for developers adding new functionality to the browser, Beta is a public release with experimental featurers and Stable is the most polished (and ideally bug-free) version of Chrome.
Users can also sync their passwords across multiple computers running Chrome 10 Beta, along with bookmarks and other settings.
Passwords can be encrypted, or not, and syncing takes place through Chrome's setting pane, which in Chrome 10 Beta is not a pop-up box but rather a tab opening in the browser, like a web page.
The redesigned settings pane brings Chrome 10 Beta stylistically in step with the Chrome OS browser.
These changes, Google said, are intended to make settings easier to find and share with others that a user may be helping -- such as friends and family assisting one another in using Google Chrome over the phone. An example of such a situation can be seen in the video above.
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