I know this isn't exactly software development news, but every software developer needs a good web browser behind him. I'll leave off the debate about which browser is the best, but it should be sufficient to say that Google's Chrome browser has been turning some heads.

The beta stamp was removed from Google Chrome back in December of 2008, but they have a new release and that stamp has come out of retirement. Google Chrome 2.0 (actually, 2.0.169.1, if you're curious) was released on March 17th, and has some cool new features:

• form autofill
• full page zoom
• autoscroll
• side-by-side view for tabs
• a big speed increase

Form autofill is probably the most anticipated feature on my wishlist. Form autofill is where your browser records your form input (for non-password fields) and gives you a list of items to choose from when filling in a similar form in the future. It actually uses the HTML client id of the text box to determine what previously entered items to show you, so it's at least marginally intelligent. It may not seem like much, but once you're used to it from Internet Explorer or Firefox, form autofill is tough to live without. It used to save me a lot of time, and I'm looking forward to finally using it again with Chrome. More information on autofill at Google Chrome Help.

Full page zoom is an improvement over the fairly standard text-based zoom offered by most browsers. When you use full page zoom, both text and images are scaled up or down. It didn't make sense for the browser to disciminate between those two anyway, did it? This is a good accessibility feature.

I suppose you're wondering what I meant by side-by-side view for tabs. Google Chrome 2.0 will allow you to drag a tab out of the main tab bar on your browser, just like Chrome 1.0 did (which happens to be a feature I love). However, now, if you hover your cursor over the middle left or right side of another tab, Chrome will automatically lay out your tabs next to one another. This is great for comparison, or referencing some material while doing data entry in another tab. Still don't know what the hell I'm talking about? Watch this video provided by Google:

Ah, I mentioned a big speed increase. Here's are the benchmarks Google provided when they released Chrome 2.0:

Pretty impressive. Will it really go that fast? Who knows. They are claiming it is between 25 and 35% faster than their current stable version. I'm looking for an even bigger speed increase, though, because I was using the old beta. I can be slow to adapt sometimes.

I did run into an issue during install where the version of Chrome that the installer ran when complete was still my old version. Restarting and running the installer again solved it, though. If you think you're having the same problem, find out what version you are using by opening the about box like so:

On the window that appears, look for version 2.0, shown here:

That's it! I'm looking forward to whatever the Chrome team has in store for us in the future. There are still some standard features that Chrome is lacking, but they are catching up, and continually delivering fun, new ideas for browsing.

Links

The Google Chrome blog entry annoucing Beta 2.0 on March 17th.

Download Google Chrome Beta 2.0