Only a year after Google’s Chrome entered the browser market, we’re already hitting version 3. While Chrome 3 had been available in the developer and beta channels for a while now, the company has now released the first stable Chrome 3 version. Technically, this means Chrome 3 has been released.
The release process for Chrome is a bit different than in other browsers. While others generally follow the traditional scheme of stable releases and test releases with version numbers, Chrome uses three different channels to which you can subscribe. If you subscribe to the developer channel, you get the most bleeding edge Chrome code, with lots of updates and possibilities for breakage. The beta channel is more stable and gets updated a little less regularly, and the stable channel speaks for itself.
Chrome 3 brings several new features to the stable channel. The new tab page has been redesigned, bringing some often requested features. You can now rearrange the thumbnails by drag and drop, and you can pin thumbnails so they stay in the same place. You can customise the new tab page even further by hiding parts you don’t want to see, or by opting for a simple list view of your most often viewed websites.
The omnibox has also been improved, and as a die-hard Chrome user, I can tell you that the small changes really matter here. The drop-down list now uses icons to differentiate suggestions that come from your history, your bookmarks, or from Google search results. In addition to the revamped omnibox, Chrome 3 also brings support for themes.
The other big addition is of course support for various parts of the HTML5 specification, such as the video, audio, and canvas tags. Google also throws a whole bunch of performance figures around, but those are usually meaningless: just compare Chrome 3 to other browsers yourself, and I can assure you it will render sites faster.
People who are subscribed to the stable channel will receive the update to Chrome 3.0.195.21 automatically in the background. If you want to try out Chrome 3, you can download the installer and get going.
Chrome is the kind of development model I like. Because its not doing the normal rollout method it doesnt seem to have the need to include ‘sales team’ features with every update.
For example the omnibox update is small and will be found helpful by many users. Its not enough of a reason to upgrade itself, but enough ‘small things’ and the whole package becomes very attractive
And yet when Apple or Microsoft do this, people bitch and whine, saying that they’re being “forced” to upgrade.
I think there’s a few differences, here. For one thing, Chrome “3” doesn’t really change much on the surface from 2, so the change isn’t particularly jarring. The second factor is the seamless way that Google Chrome updates itself. For example, Apple’s software update process on Windows is a spitting example of how not to design a software updater.
I don’t think anybody will blame them if the updates are installed in the userside only and don’t mess anyhow with the system and if they made a open version of the software that’s 99.9% equal and don’t include these features that some users may have doubts about…
Edited 2009-09-16 00:38 UTC
I would, I want to know what is being updated and when.
Yeah.. like I said… you better use the open source version, Chromium… and update it yourself.
them, everybody has cookies and be happy.
No, I’ll continue to use Firefox, Chrome isn’t my cup of tea
No, I’ll continue to use Firefox, Chrome isn’t my cup of tea
I am right now pondering about switching to Chrome. Couldn’t find any Adblock for it, but I learned about Privoxy. Now I just wish to find Flashblock-like thing for it..
So are Google charging for updates now?
Why would they want to do that when they make their money from advertisements?
If they start charging for updates then users will switch to another browser which might not have Google search integration (and certainly won’t be as well integrated into Googles range of search tools as Chrome is).
So charging for updates is completely counter productive to Googles business model.
Edited 2009-09-16 08:07 UTC
Laurance, m4r35n357’s comment was in reply to Tom K’s comment that that ‘when Apple and Microsoft [force users to upgrade their software], people bitch and whine’. The difference being that Apple and MS charge for upgrades, whereas Google don’t, so being forced to upgrade is less of problem.
I don’t think you too are talking about the same ‘forced update’ thing… On is talking about an “stealth” ‘auto-update’, and the other about the ‘forced update’ by end-of-life-product-support and by new versions bringing a lot a incompatibility with older versions (like new libraries/frameworks), that in the end feels like you’re force to buy the new version…
…well, two different talks…
Yes, because everytime Safari updates I fork over $100’s of dollars.
Edited 2009-09-16 21:52 UTC
Neither MS or Apple charge for browser upgrades. MS only charges for Full OS upgrades not service packs, and Apple does not charge for point releases.
Thanks for glossing over the facts though.
Due to the HUGE security risk that browsers pose to most systems (you know what i mean, this is where the user can be most foolish) I am in favour of browsers auto updating with security fixes.
Now I also see the advantage of updates not being carried out without the user’s knowledge. I think this is simple to resolve. By default auto update on the sly. But have a tickbox for it to ask you.
If a user knows enough to care about it auto updating, I am sure they can find and tick a box 🙂
I second that; personally I’ve always preferred updating on my own schedule – having been bitten in the past by broken updates, I’d sooner wait till I hear that the coast is clear before proceeding. Google might think they’re doing the end user a favour by keeping their software up to date but such a system is an open door to being exploiting in some manner.
That’s true, but one thing everyone should notice, is how stable even the dev builds are. Even if you leave the browser open with dozens of tabs for days, it’s rock solid compared to others (or even other kind of software).
just because THIS dev build is stable does not mean they all are or will be.
the think is, they usually are REALLY stable… I’m using them in about 4 different computers for months… hardly any problem at all. (just for the records, Windows OSes. I know mac and linux versions aren’t up to these standards yet, but they’re evolving fast too and they’ll probably be after a stable release in each OS)
It makes all the difference when this kind of stability attracts real users (non-developers) to the development community and feedback grows a lot with this. It’s a win-win situation.
Edited 2009-09-16 12:22 UTC
what I was trying to convey is that you shouldn’t recommend alpha software as ‘stable’
stable = stable
The word stable is often to quickly used in computing. Stability takes time and diverse testing to establise. (take Debian as an extreame example)
I know I for one would not let the dev edition be deployed within our company. Not in a million years. Stable… I’ll listen
Edited 2009-09-16 14:40 UTC
I think he says that the development trunk is “stable” meaning that the functionality committed in it works and the possibility that things gets broken don’t happens often. I think this is related to developpers development model. They must use fork and commit to the main tree once a feature is complete/stable. You know, commiting something that don’t compile or isn’t free of show stoppper bug is somewhat wrong practice and considered rude.
Edited 2009-09-16 15:39 UTC
Does Google provide Linux version for Chrome 3 ?
(I don’t speak about chromonium)
Yes, but only in developer channel variant. However, after extensive testing on my end, I can safely say that it is quite mature.
http://dev.chromium.org/getting-involved/dev-channel#TOC-Linux
Not sure where the “blame” lies, but there’s a big show-stopper bug that hits me at least once a day: opening attachments in webmail, or auto-opening files via download will cause kwin 4.3.1 desktop effects to go nuts, requiring a complete restart of X.
(Yes, I have put in a bug report about.)
Only happens with Chromium and Chrome. No other apps cause this. And it’s reproducible. And it’s annoying, as X takes upwards of 95% CPU on all cores. CTRL+ALT+Backspace sometimes works, CTRL+ALT+F1 sometimes works, SSH from another system sometimes works.
Until this is fixed, it’s very hard to use it as a daily browser.
Does that still happen if you tell chrome/chromium to use the window manager’s titlebar and window border?
How does one do that? Nevermind, found the setting.
Will test it today to see if it makes a difference.
Edited 2009-09-16 15:44 UTC
Yes, it still happens. Twice so far today.
Doesn’t seem to be reproducible here. Opening two different attachments from Gmail, one PDF and one Word document, Google Chrome opens them more or less correctly in Okular and Kword. Kword’s Word support is broken at the moment, but otherwise I can’t see any problem.
This is with Debian and KDE 4.3.1.
I’m currently testing with Desktop Effects turned off. So far so good (but that’s what I thought with the Use System Titlebar option set).
Like I said, I don’t know exactly who to blame, or where in the stack the issue originates.
Edited 2009-09-17 18:34 UTC
Perhaps the video driver? I use radeon with EXA, and a Radeon X1950 Pro card. Desktop effects are on. The only weird thing I’ve noticed with Chrome is the lack of shadow under the window. Still, I prefer Iceweasel.
Could be. Running an nVidia card with the binary drivers.
did that NaCL thing make it in there?
It looked interesting, but it didn’t run at all outside of the one test machine with the ‘right’ level & version of XP…. sigh.
So much potential though, much like the Flash C/C++ stuff.
…OSX version
There are developer versions on OS X, I’m running it fine. It’s still alpha quality but the speed is ridiculous. Don’t worry, the OS X version will be released when it’s good and ready and it will knock the socks off of Safari and Firefox; this is not a market where the competition is needed right here and now, and a half-baked product just won’t do.
Not really all that useful if it’s not EASILY available to the public.
And what happened to it “Coming soon”
How long ago was Chrome announced now? Almost a full year ago now.
Well… in the Linux world we grabbed the source and made Chromium, which works quite well. You guys can’t do that?
Why sit and whine, helplessly, when Google has given you the power to do for yourselves?
I will never have any interest in running Chrome on the Mac. If they can’t match the development cycle with the PC version, I’m not going to run it.
That is one thing that keeps me in Windows land. The best combination of closed and open source software.
I just would like Microsoft to be a bit more of fair player…
Google has enough of my data.
http://www.dataliberation.org/
The Data Liberation Front is an engineering team at Google whose singular goal is to make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products.
Edited 2009-09-16 07:25 UTC
Heh.
This reminds me of all those cases where, say, police investigates police, and surprisingly never finds anything wrong.
I spoke to them recently and they are keen to take more of mine. In fact, they went so far as to say that they could never have enough of my data :-]
I have used chrome as my default browser for quite a while, so this is coming from a regular user (i.e. these are not first impressions).
Its certainly fast… It seems general rendering has been sped up as well, not just JavaScript. I actually notice quite a difference – its pretty dramatic actually. And it was already pretty darn fast…
The New Tab page changes are good. I don’t miss anything that was removed. Address bar changes seem good to. Overall, nothing major though, just minor tweaking. It appears the major changes are all in the plumbing.
Been awhile since I checked, but according to http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=0 chrome is now at 2.84%. looking at http://marketshare.hitslink.com/browser-market-share.aspx?qprid=1 its relative growth is only surpassed by safari (in other words: iPhone)
Does this version support logmein?
I find chrome is a bit shoddy, and getting slower and not less shoddy as development goes on
How is version 3 slower than the previous release? Rendering is faster, JavaScript is faster. Why would that make a slower browser? Nothing like a general unsupported opinion to waste forum space. Sigh.
dailytech found it a lot slower than Chrome 2 and Chrome 4 at loading a google image search: http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=16210
That’s about all I can find
I’ve been using chrome constantly since it was announced and I stick to what I said. Don’t give me your lip, nerd.
I’ve played around with Chrome off and on during its various releases (and I’ll try 3 too) and honestly, I just don’t get what all the fuss is about. I like my trusty Firefox, which is improving with each release. I’m sure others find their preferred browsers (i.e., Opera, Safari, even IE) to be just fine as well. Is it because Google is behind Chrome that makes is “special”? Otherwise, give me a good reason to switch to Chrome.
Faster cold-start, mostly.
Feature-wise it’s gradually catching up. The main things I miss are RSS live bookmarks, and right-click image -> Properties:
http://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=9278
(FYI, Flashblock is available in userscript form.)
I also wish the Stop button were more sanely-placed, but that’s a wontfix unless/until they add toolbar customization.
A more difficult issue is this Webkit bug with text-selection behavior at the borders of text fields:
https://bugs.webkit.org/show_bug.cgi?id=12593
Edited 2009-09-16 02:04 UTC
Switch because of slightly faster cold start?
Really?
Well I think the browser wars have officially gotten old. Let the OS and KDE/GNOME wars resume.
Yes, it’s probably my fault since I installed a few firefox extensios but sometimes I rather use Chrome to search something fast… due to cold start loading.
Try “order of magnitude”. On my comp, Firefox takes a good minute or so first thing in the morning. (It’s not a profile thing either, since I made a fresh profile when 3.5 came out, in hopes that it’d be quicker.)
it starts up faster but it ends up slower with all the ads vs firefox+adblock
BlockFlash Plus for Chrome:
http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/56912
Note the install instructions.
I just tried Chrome myself and jesus christ that thing opens up fast. FireFox takes a minimum of 20 seconds to show up on my PC, Chrome popped up 2 seconds after clicking on the menu icon. That’s a huge difference. And yes, when you need to quickly check something and you don’t yet have an open browser it DOES make a difference.
As for general speed: it sure beats the pants out of FireFox. Except when there are ads. I think I’ll try to hunt a FlashBlock and AdBlock variant for Chrome and be a happy camper from now on
Good lord 20 seconds? What OS/hardware are you using? Ubuntu/P3?
WinXP on an AMD Athlon 64 2.2ghz, 1Gb RAM, Radeon 9800XT.
Believe it or not, some people do other things too on their hardware than just browse the web
Only you can decide if it’s worth switching, and the only to figure that out is to try it (use it exclusively) for at least a week.
Personally, I find it to be a good companion browser to Firefox. Firefox is good for casual browsing, but even 3.5 feels slow on Javascript-heavy sites.
For Javascript-heavy sites (like out Zimbra webmail, or GMail) Chrome/Chromium is awesome. It’s also nice that the UI is minimilistic so that almost the entire screen is available for website content, without having to use full-screen mode.
It’s also nice that that it ships with all the features I need in a browser, whereas I have to add a handful of extensions to Firefox to make it work the way I want.
The only thing that’s missing from Chrome/Chromium is XMarks support for bookmark/password sync with FF/IE/Safari.
Decided to take a look of how Chrome has developed from their first release. I was positively suprised! It fast,simple and it looks great. Somehow i got a generally lighter feel on this than mozilla, though after checking Chrome’s applications, I was a bit disappointed. Comparing to Firefox, the applications seem unuseful and pointless, but we’ll see if this gets better in time, since the feature is quite new in Chrome.
I cannot take Chrome Seriously or Ask my software development staff to put any effort in Chrome until there is a Mac and Linux Version of it.
Why because Mac and Linux people are the hungry group for other alternative browsers. Windows Users are not. They have IE which almost everyone makes sure their site works well for. Then they have Firefox and Opera if they actually kinda want to follow the standards heck they can also use safari. So they can browse in any web browser available.
Linux users are greatly reduced. (and I am speaking about the popular web browsers here) to Firefox and Opera.
Mac Users have FireFox, Opera and Safari which is a bit better but still we could use Crome fare more then windows does.
Espectially as Chrome was designed for a platform for Web Application Development. There is no reason to make windows only web application development. When you can make cross platform web application development.
I am sorry, but I cannot take your post seriously. I am replying to you with Chromium under Linux, and it works great. The Mac community has access to the same source code but, for whatever reasons, they have failed to avail themselves of the opportunity.
Google Chrome is also available for Linux.
However, until you can print, you can’t really consider it “complete”.
You probably don’t need to. Chrome is webkit-based, so any website that shows well with Safari should look the same with Chrome.
You would think this is true but all browsers have their quirks. I know firsthand that you cannot expect any two browsers to render the same way, even if you write with strict standards. The more complex the website, the greater the chance you will see this.
Will Chrome have plug-ins? Like the Ad Block Plus and Video download helper that I simply love in FireFox…
Without those, I can’t use Chrome.
Yes, Chrome will support extensions (the dev channel version already supports them, not sure about the stable channel version). And yes, there is an Adblock+ extension already (using it in Chrome and Chromium on Linux).
Chrome 4 will support extensions (dev channel).
Chrome 3 (beta channel and stable channel) doesn’t support extensions at this time.
What we’re seeing is browser war 2.0 and it’s obvious Microsoft is clearly dead last technically. They just released IE 8 and I don’t see 8.1 or 9 coming out anytime soon. In the meantime Firefox folks are working hard on 3.6 which is due out sometime early next year and I’m sure Google is already working on Chrome 4. I’m just not seeing how long this can go on. Microsoft is dragging it’s feet and it’s actually hurting the development of internet. IE6 is an example of this. Microsoft should either step up it’s game or get out. There is already a noticeable difference in speed between Chrome and IE8 now. Releasing more fake PR reports on how IE8 is better than everything else isn’t going to work anymore. IE is serving absolutely no purpose to Microsoft other than making Microsoft look bad and it’s time they realize this and kill IE. It’s for their own good.
I like Chrome overall and use it most of the time, but in some aspects it’s still slower than Firefox. In particular, if you open several tabs and then leave them for some time, it can take several seconds (sometimes tens of seconds!) for Chrome to redisplay a tab after you switch back to it. And I’m not alone with that problem, you can google it.
In addition, address bar suggestions are vastly less efficient than in Firefox. When I enter some string in address bar, FF suggests the page I actually need much more reliably and faster than Chrome. In fact, sometimes Chrome just plain refuses to display the needed suggestion in spite it being a frequently (and recently) visited page. This behavior is unpredictable.
I’m testing chromium on Ubuntu since the very beginning, when the release didn’t have menus either.
People, this software is insanely fast. And I’m really getting used to the interface, let me tell you, it’s hard to switch back to firefox once on chrome (I’m not trolling)
http://www.qtweb.net/
It is exactly same as chrome
PLUS you dont have to worry about ‘do evil’ company stealing all your clicks and personal info to track your every move on net. Also i am amazed freedom/Opensource loving people on this forum accept survaillance in the form of googleupdater or other backdoor trackings.
I can’t find any info on the page, but does QtWeb also run each tab as a separate process? (like chrome). That is an awesome feature security-wise…
Hi, I’m curious to hear why people don’t want to use the hosts file as a way of blocking adservers?
Its not overly complex to use.. just tapping adserver list into google reveals pgl.yoyo.org/adservers which provides a list of almost all the adservers on the net and a short guide on plugging this into whichever OS you use to block them..
Interestingly, the hosts file format is the same across many OS Linux/Windows/OSX/BSD – all seem to obey the same format
There is no 64bit version of Chrome for windows available. Thus chrome is late to the party on that part.
Firefox has the same issue. Of course there is the fake (nonworking) compiled 64bit builds of Firefox … none works on Vista 64 ….
Only browser that works natively (64bit) on vista is IE … which is a security flaw in itself.
.. So when can we get a secure 64bit browser for Vista?
I mean just try this page:
http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/
2-3 FPS on Firefox, and 66FPS on Chrome! On the same machine!!!!
It’s amazing!
I mean just try this page:
http://benfirshman.com/projects/jsnes/
2-3 FPS on Firefox, and 66FPS on Chrome! On the same machine!!!!
It’s amazing!
Haha
Awesome, I just HAD TO go and try, I got 6 FPS in FireFox, 60 FPS in Chrome!
Atleast this proves that javascript can be used to do pretty damn cool stuff and that FireFox sure needs some optimizing on that front