03 September 2010 | Author: J. Morton News Editor

Chrome gets a shiny new v6 release for its second birthday

Google, long front-runners in the race of search engine popularity, poked their heads into the web browser market just two short years ago, and have been making ground on competitors ever since, with recent figures showing it eclipsing Apple Safari as a preferred browser.

For being such a good boy for the Mountain View company, Google gifted the browser with a stable sixth version on its second birthday. The latest edition of Chrome promises faster speeds and a simplified interface, according to the company.

In an official Google Chrome blog posting, Brian Rakowski, product manager at Google, noted there have been many changes in the browser since its inception.

"In August 2008, JavaScript was 10 times slower, HTML5 support wasn't yet an essential feature in modern browsers, and the idea of a sandboxed, multi-process browser was only a research project," he said.

Spreading the love, he added: "All browsers have come a long way in the last two years and the web has become much more fun and useful."

However, the news of Chrome 6 won't stay fresh for long, as The Register reported they have Chrome 7 on the docket for release just six short weeks away, in sync with the firm's 'ultra-rapid release cycle'.

Sceptics have pondered the usefulness of such an aggressive launch campaign.

"It'll be interesting to see if anybody else than the early adopters are going to be okay with their browser changing every month and a half," Chris Blizzard of Mozilla commented. "We prefer to take more time to prepare people for bigger interface changes. I'm actually a little bit skeptical about a six-week cycle — where do you find the time to really innovate in such a short time span?"

The to-be-released Chrome 7 will reportedly offer graphics hardware acceleration and a new tabbed browsing experience.

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