14 DAY TRIAL // After Google updated the Beta channel for its open source browser at the end of the past week, the company has now graduated version 4.0 from Beta to the Stable channel. Google Chrome 4.0 has been finalized and is now available for download for the general public. It was on January 21st, 2010, that Google released the last Beta development milestone of Chrome, namely version 4.0.249.78. And fact of the matter is that this is the same build string of version 4.0. “The stable channel has been updated to 4.0.249.78 for Windows,” revealed Anthony Laforge, Google Chrome program manager. Google Chrome 4.0 comes to the table with a range of improvements, including features requested by end users such as extensions.
“Extensions let you add new features and functions to your browser. Some provide one-click access to some of your favorite web applications like eBay and digg, or news and information sources such as NPR and Time.com. Others are useful tweaks for performing common online tasks such as browsing photos, getting directions or shopping,” revealed Nick Baum, Google product manager. “We previously launched extensions on the beta channel, and many new extensions have since been contributed by developers from all over the world. Now you can browse over 1,500 in our extensions gallery and install them on the stable version of Google Chrome.”
However, there are additional improvements. Build 4.0.249.78 of Google Chrome now aces the Acid3 test, indicating a strong support for modern web standards. Laforge explained that passing the Acid3 Test was possible because the search giant re-enabled remote font support. Another highly requested feature is bookmark synchronization.
“Bookmark sync is a handy feature for those of you who use several computers — say, a laptop at work and a desktop at home. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it's automatically added across all your computers. This means that you won't need to manually recreate the bookmark each time you switch computers,” Baum added.
Baum also revealed that Chrome 4.0 was no less than 42% faster than Chrome 3.0 while offering 400% more performance compared to version 1.0 of Google’s open source browser, according to Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests.
Laforge enumerated the features and security fixes added to Chrome since the introduction of version 3.0, including:
- Extensions, - Bookmark sync, - Enhanced developer tools, - HTML5: Notifications, Web Database, Local Storage, WebSockets, Ruby support, - v8 performance improvements, - Skia performance improvements, - HTTP byte range support, - New security feature: "Strict Transport Security" support, - Experimental new anti-reflected-XSS feature called "XSS Auditor."
Google Chrome 4.0 Stable is available for download here.