14 DAY TRIAL // Google has just released the first Chrome 9 Beta. The beta adds quite a few new features, including a sandboxed Flash Player, the first taste of Chrome Instant and better support for the WebGL 3D graphics technology, which is now enabled by default. The stable version of Google Chrome is expected to land mid-January next year.
"Last week, we previewed several upcoming features that will be available to users on Chrome and Chrome OS. Today we’re excited to introduce a few of these new security, speed, and open web platform features into Chrome’s beta channel," Carlos Pizano, Software Engineer at Google, wrote.
Last week, of course, saw the release of the Google Chrome Web Store and the preview release of Google Chrome OS. Incidentally, Google Chrome 9 brings a couple of small new features for web apps as well, like the possibility to create a desktop shortcut or open it in a new window.
Sandboxed Flash Player
"As one of the engineers working on Chrome’s sandbox, I’m happy to announce that we’re bringing Chrome’s existing sandboxing technology for web pages to the Flash Player plug-in in Chrome for Windows," Pizano writes.
"The sandbox adds an additional layer of protection to further guard against malicious pages that try to hijack your computer or steal private information from your hard drive," he explained.
The sandboxing technology isolates applications running in Flash from the rest of the system, minimizing the risk of harm. For now, it's Windows only, but Google says work is underway on bringing support for the sandbox on Mac and Linux as well. Once it's working on Linux it will be working in Chrome OS, of course, since Google's new operating system relies on Linux underpinnings.
Chrome Instant
The Chrome Instant feature finally graduates to the beta channel. The feature started out as an experimental flag and was finally built into Chrome in the dev channel releases.
Chrome Instant works in much of the same way as Google Instant. Pages are loaded as soon as you start typing in the Omnibox and any changes to the query or URL will be immediately reflected in the page loaded.
WebGL is now enabled by default.
Finally, web 3D graphics are getting a big push with the introduction of WebGL support in the beta channel. The JavaScript library enables web developers to leverage the GPU for hardware accelerated graphics. You can check out one of Google's impressive examples of the technology in action here.
The technology is still early stage and there aren't that many websites that leverage it, but most major browser makers, including Mozilla, Apple and Opera, are working on standardizing the specifications which are now close to being finalized.
WebGL has been available in Chrome, and other WebKit based browsers, for a while now, but it is only now being enabled by default.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here. Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here. Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.