Faster than a speeding rabbit: speed, sync, and settings

In the spirit of the lunar new year, we’re excited to kick off the Year of the Rabbit with a slew of enhancements in the Chrome beta channel. Today’s new beta includes a dramatic improvement in JavaScript speed, new password sync features, and entirely revamped browser settings.

In our new beta release, JavaScript is as quick as a bunny. With a new speed boost that we previewed in December, Chrome’s JavaScript engine V8 runs compute-intensive JavaScript applications even more quickly than before. In fact, this beta release sports a whopping 66% improvement on the V8 benchmark suite over our current stable release.



This release also includes a preliminary implementation of GPU-accelerated video. Users with capable graphics hardware should see a significant decrease in CPU usage. In full screen mode, CPU usage may decrease by as much as 80%! This means better battery life so you can keep going and going like that pink bunny in the commercials.

For those of you who enjoy the convenience of saving passwords in Chrome, you can synchronize your saved passwords across multiple computers, along with your bookmarks, preferences, themes, and extensions. For added security, you can choose to encrypt your synced passwords with your own secret sync passphrase. To enable sync, visit the “Personal Stuff” section of Chrome’s settings dialog.

Speaking of settings, you’ll notice we have reworked the look and feel of the settings dialogs. Instead of opening in a separate window, they now open in a tab. More importantly, we’ve added two new settings features that make it easy to customize Chrome to your liking. Firstly, if you can’t remember where a particular pesky configuration setting is, simply type its name into the search box to see the settings that match as you type. Secondly, you can also now jump directly to most settings pages using their own dedicated URLs, without needing to navigate through a sequence of windows. Here’s a short video of the new settings interface in action:



As always, we’re eager to get your feedback, and look forward to bringing this basket of beta-fortified carrots to the stable channel over the coming weeks! (For those of you keen for some fun and games in this Year of the Rabbit, we’ll leave you with the mind-bending #ThinkFastGame speed challenge to try out alongside our new beta.)

Posted by Jeff Chang, Product Manager and Min Li Chan, Product Marketing Manager

New Chrome extension: block sites from Google’s web search results

Today the Google web search team launched a new Chrome extension to block low-quality sites from appearing in Google’s web search results. Read more in the post below, cross-posted from the Official Google Blog. - Ed

We’ve been exploring different algorithms to detect content farms, which are sites with shallow or low-quality content. One of the signals we're exploring is explicit feedback from users. To that end, today we’re launching an early, experimental Chrome extension so people can block sites from their web search results. If installed, the extension also sends blocked site information to Google, and we will study the resulting feedback and explore using it as a potential ranking signal for our search results.

You can download the extension and start blocking sites now. It looks like this:

When you block a site with the extension, you won’t see results from that domain again in your Google search results. You can always revoke a blocked site at the bottom of the search results, so it's easy to undo blocks:



You can also edit your list of blocked sites by clicking on the extension's icon in the top right of the Chrome window.



This is an early test, but the extension is available in English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Turkish. We hope this extension improves your search experience, and thanks in advance for participating in this experiment. If you’re a tech-savvy Chrome user, please download and try the Personal Blocklist extension today.

Posted by Matt Cutts, Principal Engineer

A dash of speed, 3D and apps

Today, we’re excited to bring several new features from Chrome’s beta channel to the stable build, including WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store.

WebGL is a new technology which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser. With WebGL in Chrome, you can experience rich 3D experiences right inside the browser with no need for additional software. Curious about the three-dimensional possibilities? Try out these demos to experience the power of WebGL in the latest stable version of Chrome.

With Chrome Instant (à la Google Instant), web pages that you frequently visit will begin loading as soon as you start typing the URL. (“Look, Mom - no enter key!”). If supported by your default search engine, search results appear instantly as you type queries in the omnibox. To try out Instant, you’ll need to enable it in the Basics tab of Chrome’s options.

Lastly, the Chrome Web Store is now open to all Chrome users in the United States. As part of this, we’ve now added a link to the Chrome Web Store on the New Tab page, along with two sample apps. (If you don’t use these sample apps, they will automatically disappear after some time).

Some of the newest additions in the Chrome Web Store include BBC GoodFood, Autodesk, Sesame Street, nine King.com Games and Marvel Comics. There are also many apps that take advantage of the latest web technologies to deliver an immersive experience, such as Tweetdeck and The New York Times. While the store is currently only available for Chrome users in the U.S., we’re working hard to expand availability to users around the world soon, so stay tuned!



Posted by Erik Kay and Aaron Boodman, Software Engineers