14 DAY TRIAL // Chromium, the open source, 'avant-garde' development version of Google Chrome has introduced a few new features in the latest versions, both visual and practical. One cool change is the brand new Chromium logo, the first revamp since the project started.
There are a couple of experimental features related to usability and the UI and also a few relating to hardware acceleration and 3D content.
The new Chromium logo does look rather similar to the old one, for obvious reasons, but is somewhat more refined and more polished. Despite having simplified lines, it feels better defined than the logo it's replacing.
The new logo is visible in the About box, the biggest in-app version, but also in the new tab page. Of course, it also replaces the default Chromium icon used by the operating system.
While Chrome and Chromium do maintain separate identities, the revamp signals a similarly redesigned logo landing in Chrome soon enough as well, perhaps even in the next dev channel release.
The two logos have always been identical, apart from the color scheme. The Chromium logo features shades of blue, while the Chrome logo is made up of the Google colors.
On a more practical note, the latest versions of Chromium also feature quite a few new experimental flags. For example, there's an improved Omnibox which does a better job at matching URL's you have visited to what you're typing.
With substring and multi-fragment matching, the enhanced Omnibox should be even better at recovering and providing the history suggestions that are the most relevant to what you're typing.
Another small tweak hidden behind a flag works similar to Firefox 4's Switch to Tab, a functionality we knew the Chrome team was already working on.
With the "Focus existing tab on open" experiment enabled, choosing an URL that is already opened in a different tab from the Omnibox will bring that tab to the foreground rather than opening the URL in a new one.
Another interesting addition, also in the experimental zone, is a FPS counter which shows up when hardware acceleration is enabled as a way of monitoring performance. It's of no real use to regular users, but regular users wouldn't be running Chromium in the first place.
