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Today’s Beta release improves on two of Chrome’s core principles: speed and security.

One of the things people like best about Chrome is that it loads web pages quickly. To get you where you want to go even faster, Chrome will now start loading some web pages in the background, even before you’ve finished typing the URL in the omnibox. If the URL auto-completes to a site you’re very likely to visit, Chrome will begin to prerender the page. Prerendering reduces the time between when you hit Enter and when you see your fully-loaded web page--in some cases, the web page appears instantly.

On the security front, improvements to Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology should help protect you from additional types of malware attacks. Previously, Chrome focused primarily on protecting you from sites that would exploit your computer with no user interaction required. Now, we’re seeing an increase in malicious websites that try to convince you to download and run a file that will harm your computer. Some websites even pretend this malicious file is a free anti-virus product.

To help protect you against malicious downloads, Chrome now includes expanded functionality to analyze executable files (such as “.exe” and “.msi” files) that you download. If a file you download is known to be bad, or is hosted on a website that hosts a relatively high percentage of malicious downloads, Chrome will warn you that the file appears to be malicious and that you should discard it. We’re starting small with this initial Beta release, but we’ll be ramping up coverage for more and more malicious files in the coming months. Remember, no technical mechanism can ever protect you completely from malicious downloads. You should always be careful about which files you download and consider the reputation of their source.

Try out these changes in the new Chrome Beta--we look forward to hearing your feedback. As always, please keep in mind that the Beta channel inherently comes with more bugs and kinks to work out.

We originally reported on SPDY way back in November 2009, when Google introduced it as yet another experiment in making the Web faster, like Go, Native Client and speculative pre-connections. Over the last 18 months, though, SPDY support has found its way into the stable build of Chrome.

SPDY is basically a streamlined and more efficient version of HTTP. At its most basic, SPDY introduces parallel, multiplexed streams over a single TCP connection -- but at the same time, SPDY allows for prioritization, so that vital content (HTML) can be sent before periphery content (JavaScript, video). All in all, the SPDY protocol can halve page load times, which is obviously rather significant.

The best bit, though, is that SPDY is an open-source project. HTTP 1.1 is a lumbering beast that needs to be replaced before low-latency real-time computing really becomes a reality, and SPDY is one of the best options currently on the table. To be honest, we're not sure why SPDY hasn't received more coverage -- it's awesome in every way. At the moment, though, the only way to help speed up SPDY's proliferation, is with an experimental Apache mod.

As far as actually 'trying it out,' your best bet is downloading Chrome, hitting up some Google sites, and then checking chrome://net-internals to see your active SPDY sessions. SPDY is a transparent replacement for HTTP, though, and as such it's rather hard to see its effects. Google's sites definitely feel fast in Chrome, but there are more technologies than just SPDY at work.

Some time ago, TomsHardware has published a nice list of benchmark results for the top 5 web browsers. Unfortunately, they did not test the final version of Firefox 4.

Well, this is no longer the case as the most recent tests now include the following:

Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 4
Google Chrome 10
Opera 11
Safari 5

Startup

The Download Squad staff loves their Gmail, and so do our readers (according to Sebastian's recent-but-not-at-all-scientific poll). It's an excellent app, and I can't imagine ever changing back to a desktop email client.

But Google wants to deliver a more desktop-like user experience in Gmail, and they're planning to lean on HTML5 to do it. Recently Google added drag-and-drop support via supported browsers, and it's a feature some of my less-technical friends love. Google is now working on reversing the process -- allowing us to drag files out of Gmail messages and drop them onto our local folders.

Apart from making user interaction in Gmail more like our desktop apps, Google also hopes to use HTML5 tech to turn on the afterburners. In a discussion with Technology Review's Erica Naone, Adam de Boor talks about possible performance leaps with the upcoming extension app support in Google Chrome.

Extension apps will further blur the divide between Gmail as a Web app and desktop email with permission to access additional local resources, and Boor hopes that it will eventually lead to Gmail startup times of "less than a second."

That'd be sweet... you know, if I ever closed my Gmail tab.

Stopwatch image by Flickr user Erika_Marshall

Following on from last night's IE9 vs. Chrome 6 comparison, I've now pitched all four of the major Windows-based browsers against each other. On the same computer! At the same time! (God bless technology.)

As you will see from the video, Chrome (even with hardware acceleration turned on via command line switches) is in a distant last place, miles behind both Firefox and IE. Opera competes well up to a point, but eventually gives way to Firefox and IE with 1000 fishies swimming about.

I state in the video that Opera is hardware accelerated, but I could be wrong (we've confirmed that they have hardware acceleration devs on staff, but don't know what's under Opera's hood just yet). Chrome also performs very poorly, even though it (apparently) has hardware acceleration. Incidentally, if you want to turn on hardware acceleration in Firefox 3.7, follow this guide.

Both Firefox and IE9 use Direct2D to utilize the GPU's rendering power -- so it's probably no surprise that they both show very similar results. It's most apparent when comparing CPU use; IE9 and FF3.7 are both miles ahead in performance, but both show the lowest CPU utilization!

Still, I'm certain Chrome will feature full hardware acceleration soon enough. The thing I'm most interested in is whether we'll see cross-platform hardware acceleration. Direct2D doesn't exist on either Mac or Linux -- so we'll see how it pans out! Meanwhile, if anyone wants to pit Opera or Chrome against Firefox on Linux, I'd be very interested to see the results.

 [via Google Chrome Blog]

Filed under: Internet, Mozilla, Browsers

Engineer: Jim Roskind
1. What is DNS pre-resolution, and how does it make Google Chrome even faster?
2. Why is DNS pre-resolution difficult to do?
3. Explain in more detail how adaptive pre-resolution works
4. How else is DNS pre-resolution beneficial? Can it help with browser start-up time?
5. How do we measure and benchmark the benefits of DNS pre-resolution?
6. What's next for DNS pre-resolution?