Chrome 8 shines
It’s been just six weeks since the release of Chrome 7 but this week Google pushed out a new version of its browser, Chrome 8. Not happy to rest on its growing market share, the latest Chrome release sports some performance improvements as well as new PDF capabilities.
Naturally, bug fixes are a large part of the Chrome 8 release but this is not just a bug-fix release.
Among the new features in Chrome 8 are new PDF capabilities. The PDF viewer is now built into the browser which means that users can click on PDF links and the file will open directly in the browser. In previous releases this behaviour was created using the PDF plug-in. In Chrome 8 this plug-in is no longer necessary.
The new built-in PDF viewer is also sandboxed by default in Chrome 8. This means that PDF documents can be viewed in the browser without worrying about potentially malicious code. The browser isolates the PDF viewer from the rest of the browser and the machine to protect it from security and performance problems.
Also built into Chrome 8 is support for the forthcoming Chome Web Apps store. The store, which is still to be launched, will allow users to download paid-for and free applications for the Chrome browser.
Synchronisation has been improved as well and all settings can be accessed from the Google Dashboard, with links to the Google Dashboard provided in the Chrome browser’s Options dialogue box.
Performance wise, Google says that Chrome 8 should perform two to three times faster on most platforms than the version 7 release.
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