A Complete Run-Down of New Features in Google Chrome 8

Google has pushed the first official release of Chrome 8. Google Chrome 8.0.552.0 dev is now available for early adopters and testers. This is just the first step towards a stable release of Chrome 8. Note that a stable release of Chrome 7 hasn't been made available yet.

"The Chrome Dev channel has been updated to 8.0.552.0 for all platforms. It contains a number of stability and other improvements," Google's Jason Kersey announced.

While Google is launching Chrome 8 with little fanfare, there is already a lot to look forward to in the upcoming release.

Since the release of the Google Chrome 7.0.517 beta, the team has pushed ahead and implemented several features that have been in the pipe-line, including better hardware acceleration support, native 3D graphics, better support for Chrome OS and the Web Store and a number of Labs experiments.

The existing Chrome 7 dev channel release has slowly morphed into the upcoming Chrome 8, but there will be several more testing releases before the team is ready to label it as beta.

Hardware acceleration

One feature that has gotten a lot of attention lately is support for "full" hardware acceleration. The very latest Chrome builds add support for even more components enabled by default meaning that most of the content in web pages is now accelerated.

Users have noticed a significant improvement in the smoothness of UI animations, especially when detaching and re-attaching a tab, which may signal that hardware acceleration is used for the interface as well.

Note that not all hardware acceleration features have been enabled by default. A brand-new Labs experiment was introduced in 8.0.552 labeled "GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D" which, as the name implies, enables acceleration of the Canvas HTML5 element.

WebGL

Support for WebGL, the native 3D graphics API, which Mozilla, Google and others have been working on to make it a web standard, is enabled by default in Chrome 8. A Labs experiment based on WebGL is also coming, as comments from Google developers indicate.

More Labs experiments

Labs, one of the few but major features introduced in Chrome 7, has proven a veritable treasure trove when it comes to new features.

Since it was introduced, a number of experimental features have landed offering eager users a glimpse of things to come.

In Google Chrome 8 users can enable Tabbed Settings, which allows them to configure Chrome from a tab-based menu which will eventually replace the Preferences dialog.

A couple of security features are available in Labs as well, "Disable outdated plug-ins" and "XSS Auditor." Once these get the testing they need, they will be enabled by default.

Chrome Instant

This is one of the most impressive UI features to land in Chrome 8. Windows dev channel users have had access to it for a while now and it's still the only platform for which a Labs experiment is available.

Mac users won't have long to wait though as early support for Instant has been built into the first Chrome 8 dev release, though it's not available in Labs just yet. No word on the Linux implementation yet.

Chrome OS-related Labs features