Nov 13, 2010 12:10 GMT  ·  By

With development for Google Chrome 8 settling down, the stable version is set to launch by the end of the month, Chrome 9 is picking up steam. The Chrome team has been adding quite a lot of experimental features in the past few days which are available in the Chromium builds for now.

One new experiment available in about:flags in Chromium 9 is Snap Start which is described as "an experimental TLS extension which removes a round trip from HTTPS handshakes."

TLS (transport layer security) is the latest protocol for encrypted communications over the web. Start Snap, from the description, shortens the handshake process for secure HTTPS connections. It's unclear if this has security benefits rather than just being faster.

Another addition to the Labs/Flags section is Experimental Extension APIs. The name is pretty self-explaining, it adds support for several extension APIs which have not yet been built into the browser. This ensures that extension developers can start testing and working with them as soon as possible.

Support for Native Client is also introduced in experimental form. Native Client is a new technology developed by Google to enable web developers to write or convert their code into native binary code for the architecture on which the browser is running as an alternative to interpreted languages, like JavaScript and pretty much any web technology out there.

This provides significant speed bonuses and it also enables developers to access certain platform specific technologies. Google is interested in Native Client as a way of making web applications as fast and powerful as regular, desktop applications.

Google has also included the Click-to-play feature for plugins in the Flags section. This feature has actually been available for quite some time now and Google has experimented with it before, but it looks like it's only now getting ready to enable it by default.