Google has released a new beta version of Chrome today, which the company says is much faster and improves upon the tab page and Omnibox features. It also comes with some new options for themes.
“As always, we continue to focus on speed, and this beta release shows over 30% improvement on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over our current stable channel release,” says Google Software Engineer Glen Murphy.
The Tab Page
The new Chrome beta release comes with a new Tab page that lets users move desired content into the “Most Visited” slot (by dragging). This has apparently been a heavily requested feature. You can now rearrange website thumbnails and pin them to specific places. In addition, you can hide parts of the page if you don’t want to see them. Do this with the layout buttons on the top right of the new tab page.
Omnibox
Google has also changed the Omnibox in this version of Chrome by optimizing the presentation of the drop-down menu and adding icons. This helps the user to distinguish between suggested sites, searches, bookmarks, and sites from their browsing history, Murphy explains.
Themes
There is now a themes gallery that users can select a browser theme from. Google says there are only some basic ones available right now, but there will be more coming in the future as the release moves into stable status.
The big improvement to the new Chrome beta release is the speed though. Google says its now smarter about prioritizing requests, and pages will load faster. That is a good thing, considering Google has been all about speeding up the web lately. The release also comes with HTML5 capabilities, including video tag functionality and web workers.
