New features make their debut

May 5, 2010 07:20 GMT  ·  By

Google Chrome 5.0 has graduated from the Dev channel to a fully fledged Beta build and is now available for download for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. The latest Dev channel updates to Google’s open source browser stopped at version 5.0.375.23 for all the operating systems supported. In this sense, Google Chrome 5.0 is now the most advanced version of the Mountain View’s search giant open source browser. Early adopters that followed the evolution of Chrome Beta and Dev builds thus far will be able to notice a range of improvements, with Google choosing to highlight the performance boost that v5.0 Beta brings to the table, ahead of anything else.

Still, there are additional changes beyond the optimization of the V8 JavaScript engine, designed to squeeze a few more milliseconds of JS speed. For example, Chrome 5.0.375.29 Beta introduces new HTML5 Features, including Geolocation application programming interfaces (APIs), App Cache, web sockets, as well as new file drag-and-drop capabilities, according to Mads Ager, Google Chrome software engineer.

“Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability -- you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism,” Ager stated.

Chrome 5.0 Beta comes with enhanced synchronization capabilities, which build on top of bookmark sync. Requiring nothing more than a Google Account, Chrome 5.0 Beta is capable of synchronizing not only bookmarks, but also browser preferences. Specifically, by leveraging the new synch capabilities of the latest Beta development milestone of Chrome 5.0, users can enjoy the same themes, startup, homepage, web content and language settings across all v5 Beta instances on multiple computers.

With the new tweaks to the V8 JavaScript engine, Google has boosted Chrome 5.0 Beta’s performance 30% and 35% over Chrome 4 Beta, and 213% and 305% over Chrome 1 Beta, considering data from the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks.

Google Chrome 5.0 Beta for Windows is available for download here.