14 DAY TRIAL // Google has toned down the hardware accelerated capabilities of its open source browser in the latest release served to early adopters through the Dev Channel.
Google Chrome 13.0.782.20 Dev is now up for grabs for testers running Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. According to the Mountain View-based search giant Chrome Frame was updated to the same version.
Just as rivals Internet Explorer 9, IE10 and Firefox, Chrome is designed to use the computer’s GPU in order to increase the performance of Cloud applications and service, and enable next generation user experiences.
As with its competitors, Chrome’s hardware acceleration capabilities have HTML5 at the core, with some parts of the specification receiving the royal treatment, including Canvas 2D.
Back at the start of June 2011, Google shipped a Dev Build of Chrome in which it had enable GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D by default.
Until the start of this month, although the GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D was included into Chrome 13.0 Dev, early adopters needed to turn it on, since it was disabled in the copies that the search company was offering users.
It appears that there are some issues with GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D in Chrome 13.0, since Google decided to switch it back off in version 13.0.782.20.
“This release contains a number of stability fixes and we put hardware accelerated Canvas 2D back behind a flag,” stated Anthony Laforge, from the Google Chrome team.
Users that want to enable the feature need to enter about:flags in Chrome address bar and hit Enter. They will be presented with a range of features which Google has labeled as experimental and it shouldn’t be all that difficult for them to find and enable GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D.
Of course, if the new feature makes Chrome 13.0.782.20 Dev instable early adopters testing the browser can always revisit the menu mentioned above and disable GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D.
According to Google, GPU Accelerated Canvas 2D “enables higher performance of canvas tags with a 2D context by rendering using Graphics Processor Unit (GPU) hardware.”
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.