Well alright, not exactly for you – more like for everyone who doesn’t yet believe it’s freaking fast! Chrome 6.0 was announced a few weeks ago and probably it wasn’t a big surprise because we’re kind of getting used to the fact that Google produces new versions of its browser much faster than the rivals.
Yep, Google 5 Beta is good and it is as fast as the cheetah (sorry for a clumsy comparison), but really – what about the muscles? If we take a look at the forthcoming IE9 and Firefox 3.7 this situation reminds an old street race discussion – something like what cars are the best: American muscle cars or Japanese super cars? First one have got horrifying horse powers and the second ones are just pretty damn fast but lack the engine power. Anyways, who said that you need power? We can see how fast the Chrome market share grows which, according to our comparison, means the muscle cars are cool but they are the past century.
So what should we expect from Chromium 6?
It is logical that 6th version wouldn’t differ much from the previous one. But we want to mark out some of the new features:
- More speed
Chromium developers keep improving JavaScript performance that makes this software so fast; so 6th version will demonstrate us more speed thanks to JavaScript;
- Improved geolocation support
Chrome already does have this feature but it hasn’t been available in the beta or stable versions of Chrome. The 6th version will have this system enabled by default. As for now you can reach geolocation via Google maps. For the note: geolocationis used for mapping or including your location in some messages where this kind of info is relevant;
- Enhanced right-to-left languages support
This is a good news for the Asian audience because Chrome has had some issues in displaying right-to-left languages in its early versions;
- New “pre-connections” system
The most significant feature of new Chromium is a so-called “pre-guessing” that will be based on the process of pre-connection according the analysis of your web browsing history and habits. Creating the “pre-connections” will speed up the browser and will make your web experience more user-friendly.
When a navigation takes place, and we’ve seen navigations to that domain/port before, and the history-based probability that we’ll need to make a connection to a second site (host/port) is sufficiently large, then we preconnect to that second site while we are still connecting to the primary site (and before we’ve gotten content from the primary site”, – this is how Google staff explained this new feature.
Frequent updates as a factor of success.
It is really interesting to observe how Google produces new Chromium versions “on the fly”. You may have noticed this fast pace in the releasing process – today we are talking about ver. 6 while the ver. 2 was released on May 24, 2009 which is only a year (!) ago. Here is a small comparison chart that reflects a timeline trend of how major browsers were updated.
As we can see the average release frequency for Internet Explorer is once in two years or so, for FireFox it is approximately once a year and for Chrome this is twice a year. Such frequent updates mean that the bugs from the previous version are being fixed rather promptly which in turn brings a higher quality to each new browser version. That of course means more Chrome users. So these upgrades are defnitely one of the reasons why Google has managed to push Chrome into the top browsers list so fast.
Among the other reasons that stand behind Chromium’s popularity is Google Chrome extensions directory that actually brings all popular web extensions to Chromium (another trump for Chromium developers). Also we think that Google OS release can boost Chrome market share (it’s obvious that most users will use Chrome as default browser) as well as the long-anticipated Google tablet that will be packed with Google OS and Chrome by default.
So now that we know it all it is not so hard to predict the future of this software – according to the trend from Wikipedia Google Chrome is now being used by about 8% of Internet users, that’s three times as much as it was a year ago. And if things go really well for Chrome we can very well expect it to have 18% just one year later. And that’s not something outstanding – even now over 16% of our blog audience are Chrome users, we’re sure our website is not the only one that experiences this rapid Chrome effect. Besides, our audience mostly consists of web designers, graphic artists and computer graphics pros – those guys are known to be the indicators of general web trends. Anyways, we’re sure Chrome does have a very interesting future – the only question is how exactly bright it will be, and what other browsers have to say to this. What do you think will happen to Chrome browser in a year? Let us know in the comments.
