14 DAY TRIAL // In a move that has taken Apple roughly two years to get done, the Mac maker has quietly upgraded iTunes to provide music fans with the ability to preview whole albums. In the second part of our story, we discuss how Google's newly released Chrome browser was 12 percent slower than Apple's Safari in benchmark tests, with Firefox left in a trail of dust, having been beaten by a margin of 50 percent.
New iTunes functionality – Album Preview
A TUAW reader directed the site’s attention to the addition of a “Preview All” button for albums on the iTunes Store. By using the respective command, the music plays 30-second increments (for each song in part).
iTunes has always allowed buyers to preview tracks before they buy. However, for one reason or another Apple forgot to add a handy feature for previewing an entire album, without forcing the customers to go back and forth on the iTunes Store. Amazon.com has been offering this functionality for quite a while now, while customers have been very pleased with this ability, so it’s a mystery why Apple never bothered to include it in its own music store. Before the addition of the “Prevew All” button, if one wanted to buy an entire album, one had to click the preview button in front of every single song.
Safari – Benchmarks show Apple still leads the pack
As reported by Softpedia yesterday, the Chrome development team said on its official blog that the Mac version of the browser was something it was very proud of. One reason was speed, Brian Rakowski, Google Chrome product manager, said.
“As you might expect, the speed of Google Chrome for Mac is something we're very proud of,” Rakowski wrote. “If you have a Mac, try installing the beta and see how fast it launches – there's hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!”
However, while the browser is fast (Softpedia can confirm), benchmark tests run by Computerworld show that Apple's Safari was bound to claim the top spot over Firefox, Opera, and even the lightning-fast Chrome. Of course, Chrome is still in Beta and is behaving beautifully, may we add. The results showed that Chrome was just slightly edged out by Safari. Apple’s browser, however, was nearly twice as fast as Firefox, and over ten times faster than Opera. Ouch!
Computerworld used the same methods it generally employs to test out web browsers, namely the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite. Run three times for each browser, the tests were carried out on a machine running Mac OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard).
