Google quietly released the first trunk builds of Chrome 7 under the Chromium label last week. There is no information what exactly justified the version upgrade other than a subtle improvement in graphics performance. Speculation about upcoming hardware acceleration around the web was the result, and we got more curious when a ConceivablyTech reader told us that hidden switches would unlock a much faster Chrome – the claim was a 30x speed improvement. Fact or fiction?
Rumor has it that Google is close to be releasing a dramatically faster version of Chrome that catches up with IE9 and Firefox 4 in hardware acceleration. While Chrome is (sorry, Opera fans) the currently fastest browser in terms of boot times and JavaScript performance, it is much slower than IE9 PP and Firefox 4 Beta in complex web content that can be accelerated using the multicore CPUs and GPUs. GPU acceleration is new in IE9 and Firefox 4 and has revealed itself to be a much more significant advance than one may think, given the fact that multithreading content with browsers was not a topic we have heard of just a year ago.
State of browser GPU acceleration
There is quite a bit of confusion and deception about GPU acceleration out there. IE9 is believed to be the first browser to offer this feature and it was Microsoft that pitched this story aggressively. However, Firefox has GPU acceleration capability as well since version 3.7a5. Mozilla just did not advertise it that much as it was incomplete and rather buggy. Both IE9 and Firefox are in beta and both browsers support GPU acceleration. IE9 offers this feature by default, Firefox requires users to manually activate it.
Mozilla recently said that it may activate hardware acceleration support for all users by default in the next Firefox 4 Beta, which is due tomorrow, but it retracted the activation as it did not feel comfortable to make it generally available just yet. If you want to use it, you can and it works well enough to rival and outrun IE9 at any GPU acceleration test Microsoft has published and we are aware of.
Chrome, Safari and Opera do not integrate GPU acceleration.
Chrome 7: Waiting for big news
Google may be shifting versions numbers much faster these days and Google may have said that changes from version to version may be evolutionary, but, at least for now, we do see big improvements between different versions. Chrome 5 brought massive JavaScript performance improvements. Chrome 6, currently in Beta, got faster as well but features a thorough UI refresh that, conceivably, turns Chrome into a very different browser experience. Buttons have been removed, menus have been combined and modified, and the menu bar has lost its blue background color in favor of a neutral grey.
The first nightly build of Chrome 7 was a seamless transition from the directly preceding Chrome 6 nightly build. The interface remained the same, the JavaScript performance was about the same and the version numbering system did not show any disruptive changes. We noted in our first look review that Chrome 7 (Chromium 7) feels more nimble and faster in Microsoft’s hardware acceleration tests. CT reader Julian Troy noted that Chrome now supports hardware acceleration – you just need to activate it. According to Troy, the feature can be unlocked by using the right Chrome switches when launching Chrome.
In fact, there are more than 100 options or “switches” that can modify Chrome at launch. Some of them refer to GPU acceleration. You can combine them and launch them together simply by right-clicking on the Chrome shortcut on your Windows desktop and change the target to a sequence like this:
C:\Users\Wolfgang\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe -enable-accelerated-compositing -enable-gpu-rendering -enable-video-layering -enable-webgl -enable-accelerated-2d-canvas -enable-fastback -enable-aero-peek-tabs
You can also launch the browser in this way from the “run” menu (Windows key + R) in Windows. The browser launches as usual, but is it really faster? I had no idea, but was curious. I cleaned up my Chrome installations, started from scratch and took all current Chrome versions through Microsoft’s Psychedelic Wheel, Sunspider and Google V8 benchmarks. When I say “all versions”, it does mean that you have the choice between 5 different Chrome versions at this time: Stable, Beta, Developer, Canary and Nightly Build. Stable is the browser you should use for everyday browsing, beta is the browser that gives you an idea what is coming to Chrome in the near future, the developer versions is a bit further out and the Canary build is a very rough, untested developer version. If you are brave, you can try the nightly builds, which occasionally come with hiccups, do not require a separate installation and are typically advanced versions, even if they are not always feature complete.
Read On the next Page: Benchmark Results
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