14 DAY TRIAL // Google is finally ready to test the relatively new Chrome Aura UI stack on Windows. The company has been working on the technology – which has been part of Chrome OS for a year and a half now – for quite a while, but it's a major step for the browser.
Aura replaces the entire native UI layer, meaning that everything you see is rendered and displayed by Chrome alone.
"Aura is the (not so) new UI stack that we use in Chrome OS. It does not use native widgets for controls and it fully uses the GPU when available," Google announced in a post for Chromium developers.
"Everything else is drawn by Chrome, composited by the Chrome Compositor and uses Angle/GPU to present to the screen. Focus/Activation and in general input is managed differently as well," it added.
"We've been working on the port to Windows for a long while and it is getting to the point where we can unleash it to the experimental channels," the search giant explained.
On Windows, the only native component used is the top level window in which Chrome runs. All the buttons, the menus, and so on are drawn by Chrome alone.
What's more, the composition and rendering is done by Chrome too, using the GPU, which should mean better performance.
Aura only works on Chrome OS, but it will be included in Chrome for Windows and Linux too. Only the Windows build is good enough to test in the wild.
You may notice an "a" next to the menu button in Chrome Canary on Windows, and that means you're running the Aura UI version.
As for why Google is massively rewriting all of the UI and graphical layers that are normally provided by the operating system, the reason is simple: so it doesn't have to support several platforms and write different code for all of them.
Google wants Chrome to look the same on every platform, and the easiest way to do that is to have a common UI and graphics layer.