Google released the first developer version of Chrome 7 under the Chromium label today. Early Chrome releases typically do not reveal the upgrades for the browser, but Google there are promising hints that Chrome 7 will be focusing on graphics performance: First tests show that Chrome 7 is notably faster in Microsoft’s complex HTML 5 tests than Chrome 6 Beta.

Following its promise that Chrome will be rolled out on a much faster pace than before, Google quietly released Chrome 7 as a Chromium 7.0.498.0 developer browser as part of its nightly builds. The browser seamlessly connects to the version numbering of Chrome 6 dev (which carried the version number 6.0.494.0 in its latest release) and there are no apparent changes in Chrome 7.

We have seen the same scenario with Chrome 6, which was virtually identical with Chrome 5 dev in the beginning, but later brought dramatic UI changes that have transformed Chrome into an entirely different and much faster browser today. Google did not say what justifies the switch to Chrome 7, but there are early signs that Google is content with the JavaScript performance of Chrome as Chromium 7 is about as fast as Chrome 6 dev within a 3% margin of error in Sunspider and we would not expect dramatic interface change in Chrome 7 with the exception of the long awaited print preview button.

Where Chrome 7 differs is its HTML5 support, which now hits a record 228 of 300 points in html5test.com, ahead of 227 that was posted by the Chrome 6 Beta. IE9 scores 85 of a possible 300 points. Chrome 6 Beta hits 227 points, Opera 10.61 166 points, and Firefox 4 Beta 4-pre 199 points.

Google has remained suspiciously silent on hardware acceleration features, which have been introduced by the platform previews of IE9 and are already present in the Firefox 4 betas. While Chrome 7 does not show any signs of hardware acceleration, Google is absolutely working on improving Chrome’s performance to display complex HTML 5 content. It can’t touch IE9 and Firefox (with activated D2D acceleration) yet, but there is notable improvement over Chrome 6 Beta. In Microsoft’s psychedelic wheel test, Chrome 7 hits 9 rpm, while Chrome 6 is stuck at 5. 100 fish can now be animated at 17 fps instead of 2 fps. 256 flying images are shown at 11 fps instead of 9 fps and the potato gun runs at 33 fps instead of 26 fps on our test system.

IE9 and Firefox are significantly faster in these tests than Chrome and it may be ironic that Firefox already creams IE9 in its own tests. Mozilla’s hardware acceleration isn’t finished yet and if the current performance is any indication, Firefox may clearly outrun IE in HTML5 performance.

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