Google: Chrome will be 60 times faster
No, that's not a typo in the headline: In a post at the Chromium blog, software engineers James Robinson and Gregg Tavares say that early versions of Chrome 7 are boasting speeds 60 times faster than Chrome 6. The key, they say, is hardware acceleration -- the same technology that's giving Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 beta such a boost.
The new feature, say Robinson and Tavares, "picks the best graphics API to use on each OS that Chromium supports: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux."
By offloading graphics-processing tasks from the CPU to the GPU, freeing the CPU from having to render not just regular (and increasingly complex) 2D graphics, but 3D graphics as well, Google is applying a turbo booster to a browser that is already known as a speed demon. In the hypercompetitive browser market, Google is playing catch-up when it comes to hardware acceleration, but if these 60-fold speed improvements are for real, Chrome could leave the competition in the dust.
