Posts Tagged ‘Chrome 7’

It is not really a big secret anymore that Mozilla is working on getting its Firefox 4 browser out the door, and we have had plenty of betas (six so far) of the evolving new browser. However, the next beta will be special as it is the first beta that will reveal the final version of Firefox 4 for the first time, minus the remaining bugfixes. Here is our  first impression.

It was just this week that we published a note that Chrome 9 is scheduled for branching in November 29. However, if you are into version numbers, you can use Chrome 9 already today. Expect Chrome 10 before December arrives.

You may still be using Chrome 7, but Google is already working on the first release of Chrome 9m which is due on November 29. Meanwhile, Mozilla is closing in on the release of the important Firefox 4 Beta 7 as well as the second beta of Firefox 4 Mobile.

CTPI Update – We have just completed our second run of 245 benchmarks that puts all current major browser through the paces. This time, we added a new high-end 6-core PC that complements our low-end dual-core netbook. The outcome across four disciplines shows that Firefox 3.6 is outdated in not all cases and is still among the fastest browser when you are simply viewing web pages. IE9, however, is the best performing HTML 5 and Flash browser.

We were a bit surprised to see Chromium 7 (Chrome 7 nightly build) to be switched to Chromium 8 (Chrome 8 nightly build) early this morning, as we were just told that the switch was scheduled for next week. The launch of Chromium 8 closes the feature set for Chrome 7 and opens a wave of cloud features that is quite obviously planned for Chrome 8.

Google said that version 8 of its browser will be making a first appearance early next week.

If you were to believe Google, then you would now know that Firefox 4 is about as fast as Apple’s Safari browser, based on a new version of Google’s V8 benchmark.

HTML 5 is the single most critical evolution in web standard since the introduction of HTML 4 almost 15 years ago. A huge chunk of web browser marketing today relies on HTML 5 support, even if there are very few websites that actually implement HTML 5 features. Other than getting error messages, how would you know which is the best HTML 5 browser out there?

If you quote statistics, it is always a good idea to tell the entire story, as you expose yourself to inconvenient questions. We frequently criticize Microsoft for its uncomfortably biased blogging about growing IE market shares, and it may have received a dose of the opposite bias this week. But it was exactly this bias that opened the door to a decent IE marketing opportunity and Microsoft strangely missed out on it, by choosing to simply ignore those reports. Whatever the reason for this decision was, and as much as we believe that Microsoft isn’t promoting IE in the right way, we also believe that it is highly unlikely that IE is dying.

An instant preview feature for websites as part of Google searches has surfaced and it appears that Google is moving new features into its Chrome browser at an accelerated pace.

Chrome (Chromium) 7.0.544.0 has added optional support for background Web Apps.

How do you measure browser performance? There is no way to exactly pinpoint how fast a browser will work in any given scenario. But today’s approaches that base speed claims on JavaScript performance hardly reflect how fast a browser really is or how fast it will be in a real world scenario. We have taken some time over the past weeks and built our own benchmark with tools that have been available for some time as well as CT Mark, which measures the actual load time of web pages. We will use this new benchmark suite, the CT Performance Index, from now on to evaluate browser performance. Here is our first result.