14 DAY TRIAL // Just one day after everyone else, Chromebook owners get to enjoy Chrome 18. The latest Chrome has made it to the stable channel and should be landing on people's computers over the next few days.
The latest Chrome 18 for Chromebooks, that would be Chrome 18.0.1025.140 part of Chrome OS 1660.98.0, comes with all of the enhancements of the regular Chrome 18 plus some specific updates.
Chrome 18 came with two title features, hardware acceleration for Canvas 2D content and software rendering for WebGL. Neither of the two features really applies to Chromebooks though.
Hardware acceleration for 2D content is great for games built on top of Canvas, there aren't that many of them, or other type of graphics applications that rely on the HTML5 element.
But the feature was only enabled for Windows and Mac OS X, and not on Linux, on which Chrome OS is loosely based. Hardware acceleration of Canvas is unstable at the moment on Linux. Of course, Google has a much tighter control over Chrome OS hardware, so it should be much less of a problem.
The other big feature in Chrome 18 is the software support for 3D graphics via WebGL. Basically, if your graphics card can't handle WebGL, if there's a bug or the drivers are too old, you can run WebGL content on the CPU rather than not at all. Of course, Chromebooks have reasonably powerful GPUs and the latest and greatest drivers, so this isn't an issue here.
But there are Chrome OS specific updates. WiFi connectivity has been improved in the latest update Google informs. The File Manager has also gotten some improvements. Video playback from the File Browser works better now as well.
There are a number of control changes as well. The Caps Lock key, which is replaced by the search key by default, is now activated via Shift + Search Key. Previously, users had to double tap Shift to enable it.
Likewise, two-finger click when one finger is already on the touchpad now works. Three-finger click has been disabled to fix this.