While most news this week has centered around the beta release of Internet Explorer 9, Google has released some exciting information about the upcoming Chrome 7 Web browser. Google claims that it will be up to 60 times faster than Chrome 6, and will have superior graphics performance via GPU acceleration.
Chrome has developed the reputation as the browser to beat when it comes to speed, and this announcement ups the ante for all browsers.
“These early numbers show up to 60x speed improvement over the current version of Google Chrome,” said software engineer James Robinson, writing on the Chromium Blog. “With Google Chrome’s fast release cycles, we expect to be able to get these enhancements to users quickly and add new performance improvements over time.”
Google is also working on 3D graphics capabilities for Chrome 7. This will bring new capabilities to the web browser for developers, resulting in more modern games, impressive photo galleries, 3D data visualizations and virtual environments. Google created this video to give you an idea of what the future might look like in Chrome.
So how will it compete with Internet Explorer 9?
One thing is clear — Internet Explorer 9 is a browser to be reckoned with. If you can get over the fact that it’s made by Microsoft, the company seems to have learned from past mistakes. It’s also likely to get more love from Web developers — Internet Explorer 9 adheres to Web standards more so than any previous version of the browser.
Ultimately, we won’t have the answer to that question until both browsers are released to the general public. Internet Explorer 9 is currently in beta and a developer version of Chrome 7 is now available, with a stable release expected later this fall.
