14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome 17 has been graduated to the beta channel. As usual, don't expect any huge changes, but the latest Chrome beta comes with a couple of new features.
One addition should make a difference in the perceived loading speed of new pages. The second enhancement should make browsing the web more secure as Chrome now warns about a larger number of treats and potentially malicious or infected websites.
"One of the things people like best about Chrome is that it loads web pages quickly. To get you where you want to go even faster, Chrome will now start loading some web pages in the background, even before you’ve finished typing the URL in the omnibox," Dominic Hamon, software engineer and speed demon at Google, wrote.
Page pre-rendering has been available in Chrome for several months now, but it has been experimental so far. Google is ready for a wider test, though it's still with a limited audience since a lot less people use the beta than they do the stable version of Chrome.
Based on your browsing history, Chrome can predict which pages you are very likely to load. When a suggestion is provided in the Omnibox, the page starts loading immediately, before you hit Enter.
"To help protect you against malicious downloads, Chrome now includes expanded functionality to analyze executable files (such as '.exe' and '.msi' files) that you download," Hamon explained.
So far, Chrome has used Safe Browsing to protect users by maintaining a list of websites which may have been able to infect a computer without any user action, by using browser or plugin exploits and so on.
Now, Chrome will also warn about executable files which may be infected or websites which are known to contain such files. The feature is not foolproof, no security measure ever is, so caution is still advised when downloading and install stuff from the web.
Update: Google Chrome 17 has been made available in the stable channel.