Five Hot Features Coming to Google’s Chrome Browser

The pace of browser growing seems to be reaching breakneck speeds as Mozilla, Google and Microsoft hie to keep back their contenders ahead in the ongoing battle for supremacy.

After announcing a new, speedier schedule for Firefox, for example, Mozilla on Wednesday launched its "Aurora" convey to enable early testing of coming features and innovations in the web browser. Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9, interim, is barely tabu of the opening gates, merely that hasn't stopped up the company from introduction a preview of its own next variant.

And what of Google Chrome? It, so, is a openhanded part of the reason for this new sense of haste, with a six-week refresh schedule that has long made its competitors look like the proverbial tortoise by comparison.

Just in the past calendar week or soh, in fact, Google has reportedly made several dozen changes to the inner workings and user interface of its Chrome web browser, many of them proper plain in regular builds over the past few years. It won't be long-range before they render up in stable releases of the software, so here's a feel at some of the highlights of what's coming down the pike.

1. 'SPDY' for Speed

Though it began to show up in Chrome in mid-January, the SPDY communications protocol (pronounced "speedy") is now fully enforced, reported to a report on ConceivablyTech. SPDY is an alternative to HTTP that's intentional for transporting content o'er the Web with borderline latency, and in Google's lab tests, information technology's created reductions in page load multiplication of up to 64 percent. Currently, however, those improvements are visible exclusive when using Chrome to visit Google's own sites. All currently downloadable versions of Google Chrome–nightly build, canary, developer, beta and stable–right away reportedly support SPDY, which will sooner or later be released A assimilative author, Google says.

2. Beefed-Up Security

Targeting enterprise users, Google has also made close to changes to its content security policy, ConceivablyTech notes. Specifically, systems administrators can now use Chrome to engine block particular types of content, including plug-Immigration and Naturalization Service, images, styles, fonts and inline scripts. This, of flow, is additionally to the new warnings Google announced earlier this calendar month that wary users to potentially dangerous downloads.

3. Touch Tabs

As of the latest Cr 12 nightly builds, new "touch tabs" allow users to blue-ribbon multiple homepages with app icons a good deal like on a smartphone app screen. Just in the last fewer days, Google also reportedly added a "Latterly Closed" option that lists such pages in a pop fly window.

4. Tab Scrolling

Untried scroll buttons have now been added to Chromium-plate's side tabs so as to help users access them all. Judging by user comments, tab scrolling has been a ofttimes requested feature for some time. In gain, tab labels now reportedly feature film a fading font in the Windows version of Chrome also.

5. WebKit Improvements

With the latest WebKit version comes support for Windows 7 gestures as well as for Chrome's Skia backend, which will enable PDF rendering in print preview musical mode, reported to reports.

In Jan, Chrome surpassed a 10 percent share of global web browser usage for the first time, according to market researcher Net Applications. By March, it claimed 11.57 per centum of the worldwide browser market.

As the browser wars continue, information technology's titillating to find out the on-going march of innovation. I'm already looking forward to the next round.

Follow Katherine Noyes on Twitter: @Noyesk .