March 20, 2011
Chrome 10, the latest version of Google's regularly updated Web browser, has a few very welcome new capabilities, including a revised Options interface and a brand new and faster JavaScript engine. To say that Google has been on a fast revision schedule with the Chrome browser would be an understatement. They've been pretty close to a new version every six weeks and, if this rate holds up, we should be at Chrome 20 by summer 2012.
This pace means that each new version of Chrome is hardly a massive upgrade and, with version 10, most Chrome users probably won't even realize that they have a new version when the browser automatically upgrades itself. But that doesn't mean that Chrome 10 lacks worthwhile new features.
Probably the biggest is its use of the new Crankshaft V8 engine for JavaScript. This, along with other performance improvements in version 10, clearly puts Chrome right at the top of browser performance, at least when looking at currently shipping browsers and not betas.
Chrome 10 does well across a variety of Web performance benchmarks. In tests that I ran using Futuremark's Peacekeeper browser benchmark, Chrome 10 did very well, scoring right at the top of browser performance along with Opera 11.
If you are currently a Google Chrome user, your browser has most likely already upgraded to version 10. For those looking to download and tryout the free Chrome browser, go to www.google.com/chrome.
