Its a great value add to search, but not everyone is a Google+ user and not everyone likes to have personal search results. Instead, you might want to bring back the Twitter search results. If you’re among those, you’re lucky, coz a Chrome Extension lets you do exactly that.

Sidebar for Google Search modifies your Search results by placing a customizable sidebar on the right. You can choose to display results from Twitter, Wikipedia, Wikitionary, Youtube, and more.

Not only the Twitter search results are accurate, they are nearly realtime. All the top search results are shown. However, they are rarely ordered by relevance. But in most cases, it serves the purpose well.

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Firefox 7 is released and its back to re-capture those early days when it used to be among the leaders. Lets see how they bechmark against each other for various tests:

Test system: Tests were conducted on Core i7 Macbook 6gb DDR3 RAM, Windows 7 & OSX Lion.

Matrix: A Relative matrix has been used to make graphs easy to read.

Benchmark Tests:

• SunSpider Tests
• Generic Javascript operations
• DOM / CSS operations
• Startup time

Performance Results:

Overall performance: Chrome 14 vs Opera 11.5 vs Firefox 7 IE9

Firefox seems to have recovered from the times where it used to be a low performer. Chrome is still holds the top position overall, on Windows & Mac. However, Chrome 14 was slower than Opera on Windows.

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The new Chrome extension does he right things: Mute Tabs.

Mute Tabs

Mute Tabs looks on to all your open tabs for the audio violator, and puts a musical icon on it, makes an easy visual aid. It might not work with every html plugin, but believe me, it can tag the tab almost all the time.

All sounds in modern browsers such as Chrome are made by plug-ins such as Flash, Silverlight, QuickTime, etc. (expressed in HTML as <object> or <embed>), Java applets (<applet>), or HTML5 audio/video (<audio>, <video>). The extension scans open webpages for these tags. If configured, webpages that include any of these tags that are making sound will have their tab icon changed to the MuteTab icon () to make it easier to see which tabs play sound. Also, the extension collects a centralized list of the found sound source tags.

More on how Mute Tabs works

Firefox users can be satisfied with BarTab. BarTab can load or unload any or all tabs, while keeping their spots in the browser. Its still better than force quit or crash, Firefox can start with all tabs unloaded except for the one you’re on, restarts are silent.

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MightyText (formerly Texty) has created an android app that can push notification to your Chrome browser whenever a new sms arrives or you receive a phone call. The SMS is fully synced (two-ways) between the android device and the chrome browser.

The part we love about MightyText is that an incoming SMS messages appear on your screen as a pop-up, giving you the option to read and reply to them without touching the phone. The conversation with your contacts are shown in different threads, just like in some of the native apps on android or iphone, along with full call logs. And of course, its also a good way to backup your sms, call logs, without doing any extra work.

The application is in its beta stages and you can apply for a beta preview here. The app only works with Chrome and Anrdoid 2.2+ device. Go ahead and apply for the beta, you may want to retweet their message to get faster invites.

UPDATE: People are apparently going crazy over the app. I was lucky to nab one early on, but they are trying to accommodate everyone as fast as they can. I’ve been using it for a bit now and it is seriously awesome.

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iChromy brings Chrome to iPad, well sort of, giving the goodness of the tabs sitting nicely at the top of the screen. It also saves space by making address bar also act as a search bar, just like chrome. It saves space and easier to use.

iChromy also includes a built-in ‘read later’ function just like Instapaper and other sharing options.

iChromy is available for Free in iTunes app store, works on ipad iOS 4.2 or later, go ahead and try it out.

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Google has, quietly, made the necessary upgrades to its webpages to support the new SPDY protocol reducing the page load time of Chrome for pages on its own servers by a stunning 50%. In effect, Google sites should load much faster in Chrome than in any other web browser.

SPDY incorporates features like multiplexed streams, request prioritization and HTTP header compression. To demonstrate the productivity. To be more precise, it’s 64% faster made possible as SPDY allows many concurrent HTTP requests to run across one TCP session and to make SLL the standard transport protocol.

Most of the shortcomings of HTTP were identified back in 1995, but little has been done to improve speed. As a result of that, both TCP and HTTP have evolved into a bottleneck of data downloads. HTTP is especially criticized for latency issues since HTTP can only fetch one resource at a time and servers cannot communicate with a client without a client request – and even then it can only support six connections at a time in most browsers. Apart from that, HTTP also uses uncompressed and redundant request and response headers.

SPDY Speed Improvements in Chrome
SPDY supports unlimited connection streams, with provision to proritize certain SPDY requests over others and even allows blocking overloaded channels. It also supports header compression and allows the server to communicate with a client without a client request.

SPDY is not much different, it still uses HTTP methods, headers and “other semantics.”, still using TCP.  The difference is in connection management and data transfer formats.

How to Benchmark SPDY Improvements

You can always see speed improvements by calculating pageloading times. But there’s another way to measure it navigate to chrome://net-internals in a Chrome and Click on “View live SPDY session” to see all SPDY connections.

Google would open source the complete implementation of SPDY, as soon as all looks baked.

In case you wish to test SPDY out, Download any Chrome browser (stable, beta, developer, canary, nightly build) and point it to any Google site, it should be significantly faster.

More on SPDY [official whitepaper]

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IE9 vs Chrome 10 vs Firefox 4 Benchmark

Platform: Windows 7 32bit on a Intel i7 Macbook Pro, 4GB RAM.

We are not testing 64bit since IE9 has poor performance on 64bit as it still uses older javascript engine, while IE 9 32-bit is using the newer, more efficient Chakra JIT.

Benchmark Results:

V8 Benchmark results

Sunspider Benchmark Results:

Kraken Benchmark Results

Peacekeeper Benchmark:

Chrome 10 wins in 2 tests and Firefox 4 does in one, and IE & Chrome tie in sunspider test.

Browser Verdict

I really don’t think that JavaScript performance is an issue any more, its fairly fast enough to be handled by users. What matters more is better support for modern technologies like HTML5. When it comes to the support for modern technologies, Firefox & Chrome beat IE9 out of the scene. There is a huge set of features tha IE9 needs to learn from Chrome 10 & Firefox 4:

Application Cache (offline), Web Workers (threads in JavaScript), HTML5 Forms (validation mechanism, CSS3 selectors), JavaScript Strict Mode , ForeignObject (embed external content in SVG), SMIL Animations (SVG animations), File API, WebGL (3D), CSS3 Transitions (for animations), CSS3 Text Shadow, CSS3 Gradients, CSS3 Border Image, CSS3 Flex box model, ClassList APIs, FormData, HTML5 History API, Drag’n Drop from Desktop.

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Synchronize Chrome Tabs, Session across Multiple Computers

We all happen to use multiple computers and hop all the time. Even if you don’t, its not hard to lose track of last session when there are 30+ tabs, and you are about to open more. Google Chrome provides ability to sync bookmarks, form autofills, extensions, themes, preferences, out of the box but there’s no support for saving Tabs from current session.

Its time for your to save your Chrome Tabs, Session and sync to the cloud so that the next time you login to any other machine (or the same machine), you can select and restore the session.

TabCloud is a great extensions that lets you backup & sync all your tabs to the cloud, so that they are available across any number of computers, on demand.

To get started, install the TabCloud extension and simply click the TabCloud icon on the menu, login the first time to see your current open windows and previously saved windows, you can save open windows, or restore saved ones. You can also delete previously saved sessions.

TabCloud also has a Firefox Extension, that works in a similar manner.

Sync Chrome, Firefox Tabs with Android

This is also one of the killer feature of this extension that allows all chrome, firefox tabs to be synced with Android, using the android app.

Additional features:
- Middle (or ctrl) clicking any tab icon opens just that tab.
- Clicking on an open tab icon jumps to that tab in a browser.
- Dragging a tab icon allows you to move tabs between windows, including to and from saved windows that are not currently open.
- Secure login using your Google account, with the option to logout on the TabCloud menu.
- Click on any windows name to rename at any time.

Going further, extension has some awesome features planned which would include:
- Realtime synchronisation and auto saving
- Some kind of passphrase/PIN based security/encryption
- Optionally use bookmarks to save tabs instead of external service
- Overwrite previously saved windows to update them
- Hold shift to copy tabs or open them in the background

The extension is open source, if you are a developer, go ahead and check it out at http://github.com/Connorhd/TabCloud

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The latest Chrome Dev builds now ”upgrade” from the last Chromium 7.0.548.0 to Chromium 8.0.549.0 fixes just one bug with the sync feature.

Chrome 7 is targeted to all under the hood enhancements and almost nothing for th user appeal. Chrome 8 will change this. In addition, it will continue to improve the performance with  full hardware acceleration and support for native 3D graphics via the proposed WebGL standard, bringing IE9′s hardware performance out of the context.

WebGL promises hardware accelerated 3D graphics which go deep down the Operating system level (native API) to enable web developers to bridge the gap between desktop and the web when it comes to gaming. So what this means is that Games on the web would be as capable as native Games. All in all, good news for all Gamers, its going to get cheaper, more portable than ever.

Chrome 8 also adds new features to Chrome Labs. Some come especially handy for Chrome OS, like the Background WebApps feature, Remoting and, to a lesser degree, the Cloud Print feature, Chrome Instant – Google Instant in chrome.

Chrome 8 dev is just the preview of some basic features, more stuff is coming as it goes stable. Its going to prove-out to be very interesting release for a couple more reasons, both the Chrome Web Store and Chromium OS are scheduled to launch in the same time period.

Download Chrome Dev 8.0.549.0

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Google has released issued its first beta edition of Chrome 7.0.517.24, (~ Tuesday’s developer-channel release). There are no viusal changes to the user but a lot of stuff is being fueled under the hood. The about:labs adds a new FEature to it: Google Instant search from Chrome’s SearchBar

The new features include the activation by default of the WebGL 3D graphics technology, and some hardware acceleration for some CSS transformations.

As Google states it:
“A lot of the work that’s being done in 7.0 is largely not user facing and in some cases is a legitimate work in progress,” said Chrome team member Anthony Laforge in a response to comments criticizing the version 7 release as insufficiently novel. “With our new release cycle and about:labs, I’d suggest you stay tuned, things are going to start moving quite fast.”

The about:labs feature on Windows presents new experimental options for Chrome users. Also through about:labs, Windows gets an upgrade to the omnibox, the dual-purpose address and search bar, so it shows the search-as-you-type behavior of Google Instant. It’s awkward at this stage–the omnibox drop-down covers the top search results–but it will improve over the course of time.

A lot more hardware acceleration is pending, but its perfectly possible that it would finish full cooked in Chrome 7 stable.

Even though it does good on Graphics rendering, IE9 actually suffers in JAvascript execution, when compared to Google Chrome. But Google is about to change the RAce forever by Brining more powerful Hardware acceleration to Chrome 7, which would speed up the browser by 60x times.

Hardware acceleration allows the browser to offload intensive tasks like image scaling, rendering complex text or displaying scripted animations to your PC’s graphics card. It has the benefit of freeing up the PC’s main processor and speeding up page load times.

Today’s faster graphics cards have created a new playing field for hardware acceleration. Soon, Firefox 4 will also take advantage of the new technology. Chrome 7′s developer builds already posses Hardware GPU acceleration, but Hardware acceleration is rather much more difficult to implement because of the Chrome’s tightly sandboxed rendering model—which prevents web pages from interacting directly with the OS.

Grab the latest developer build of Chrome 7 and launch it from the command line with the new --enable-accelerated-compositing flag.

Chrome 7 is in its early stages as of now. As per the Google’s new accelerated release schedules, Chrome 7 stable falls within 2010.

More Features

Apart from Hardware acceleration, the Mac OS version of the browser is also experimenting with something Google calls “Tab Overview” or Tabpose. Tabpose is similar to Mac OS X’s Expose; but uses it for switching among Chrome’s Tabs

The Google Instant Search would also be integrated to Chrome 7.

Looks like Google will blow away the competition with Chrome 7. After all, every giant gets lucky on 7.

Google is now introducing GPU hardware acceleration from Chrome. This enhancement would speed up the rendering of complex pages by offloading a lot of the processing to a computer’s graphics card.

The strategy is inline with other Popular browsers Microsoft’s IE9, Firefox hardware D2D acceleration.

IE9 is scheduled for first public beta next month, and Chrome seems to have the early basic preview already on the horizon. At this moment, Chrome only uses hardware acceleration for displaying some content and going further, they will have “even more of the rendering from the CPU to the GPU to achieve impressive speedups.”

Going further, they will offer support for accelerated 3D graphics in the browser. to match that of IE9.

How to get Hardware GPU Acceleration in Chrome

To try it out, get the Chromium builds. Once installed, you need to run the application with the –enable-accelerated-compositing flag. To do so, you can either run the program from the terminal and set this switch by hand, or – in Windows – check the properties for the executable and append the flag to the target in the properties dialog.

As of now the differences in page rendering may not be huge but as far as my tests are concerned, they were noticeable for heavy, complex pages. Try it out.

Related: IE9 vs. Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera Performance

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14 months ago, Chrome was still at version number 1. Today we are well into the version 5 cycle with version 6 approaching beta status. Without doubt, Chrome shows the fastest pace not just in version numbers, but new features, performance and GUI modifications. Google believes that the release cycles aren’t short enough and decided to cut the release time of stable versions in half.

Related: IE9 vs. Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera Performance

Over the next few months, they are going to roll out a new release process to accelerate the pace at which Google Chrome stable releases become available. What this means is that we would see a new stable version about once every six weeks.

Google explains the reason for this change as:

• Shorten the release cycle and still get great features in front of users when they are ready
• Make the schedule more predictable and easier to scope — good project management practice
• Reduce the pressure on engineering to “make” a release — Release pressure off software engineers to finish features in a single release cycle, if a certain thing is half baked, push it to next one and deliver whats ready.

Evidently, new features are coming every few days, and Google doesn’t want to make users wait for them long enough before they can use them.

Needless to say, Google’s pace is much faster than Mozilla’s and Microsoft’s roadmap. Mozilla is aiming for a major new release once every six months and Microsoft is more on an 18-24 month schedule.

According to the new schedule it feels like Chrome 6 is already overdue. The expectation now is that every Chrome version may not be perceived quite as comprehensive as previous releases. Chrome 6, for example, will deliver major changes in its user interface and menu structure. However, recent Chrome developer versions showed fluctuating HTML5 graphics performance and HTML5 feature support and it appears that the shorter release cycle may help Google to catch up with new features or rivals in less time, while the competition may have a tough time to keep up with Google.

Microsoft is still gearing up for its dazzling IE9 Beta to be released next month, which hit had been teasing with benchmarks over long months now. .

So, get ready to see us pick up the pace and for new features to reach the Chrome stable channel more quickly.

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How to Try Chrome OS Apps, Features in Chrome Browser

Step 1. To begin with,  add these command line switches to your Chrome shortcut, without the “quotes”:

“–enable-apps” : turns on extension apps, otherwise you’ll get an error when you try to install them.
“–apps-panel” : (optional) instead of loading the new tab page, Chrome will display a floating panel above the current tab

Step 2. Next we  install  some Google apps:

They’re hiding in a folder called resources — which you’ll find in your Chrome profile folder.

• On Windows, they reside in %localappdata%\Chromium\Application\6.0.428.0\Resources.
• Linux /opt/google/chrome/resources/.

Step 3. Head to your Google Chrome extensions tab (chrome://extensions) and make sure you see the developer mode buttons above. If you don’t, click the plus next to the text to reveal them.

Step 4. Now click “load unpacked extension” and browse to location you found in step 2. Click into the folder of the app you want to install (like gmail_app), then click OK. If the install is successful, Chrome will refresh your Extensions page and you should now see the icon for the app.

Step 5: Loading app: Open new Tab and click one. There you have it — the new tabs that  use full-color .PNG images which are packed with the apps. Overall, the Google apps seem to work the same as a pinned tab — just with nicer icons and ease of access. You can try the same for other apps.

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Behold, there’s a solution that will make it possible to automatically sync iPhone Bookmarks with Firefox and Chrome [and vice-versa] i.e. Sync Firefox, Chrome Bookmarks with iPhone, in a blink of the eye.

Step 1. For Firefox, Download and Install Xmarks Addon from here and for Chrome from here.

Step 2. Configure the plugin by signing-up for an account (if you are new to xmarks) or login with your existing account. Fill in the required fields and wizard will guide you through it. Sync will execute and backup of all your contacts will be placed on Xmark’s server. If you are an existing user, you might want to “merge bookmarks” than overwriting them.

Step 3. Install the Xmark in IE from here or Safari from here. Follow the same procedure as Step 2 to sync your account. After a successful sync, all your browsers have the same Bookmarks, synced on every change or periodically.

Step 4. Sync your iPhone using iTunes while selecting the browser you chose in Step 3, under the “info” iPhone tab.

That’s it, you will automatically sync Firefox, Chrome Bookmarks to iPhone on every Sync. Ain’t this addon cool? Look here for more Firefox addons and Chrome Extensions.

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As usual, Safari was the first to fall, followed by IE 8, then was Firefox on Windows 7 x64 and iPhone’s mobile Safari. Google Chrome, however, is the last man standing.

Charlie Miller, the first hacker to take safari down, says that Chrome is still the hardest one to exploit.

“There are bugs in Chrome but they’re very hard to exploit. I have a Chrome vulnerability right now but I don’t know how to exploit it. It’s really hard. They’ve got that sandbox model that’s hard to get out of. With Chrome, it’s a combination of things – you can’t execute on the heap, the OS protections in Windows and the Sandbox.”

The mobile Safari attack was particularly impressive, since running code on the iPhone requires a valid digital signature. By rearranging bits of pre-signed code, Halvar Flake of Zynamics was able to deliver a malicious payload via Safari and force the iPhone to cough up its complete SMS database. Contacts and messages were laid bare — including deleted ones.

“Nils”, for the 2nd year in a row, exploited a previously unknown vulnerability in Mozilla Firefox to take complete control of a 64-bit Windows 7 machine. He used several tricks to bypass Address Space Layout Randomization (ALSR) and Data Execution Prevention (DEP) to get his drive-by download to load an executable on the target machine.

Normally, ASLR+DEP are held up as significant roadblocks to thwart malware attacks on the newest versions of Windows but, as this contest shows, skilled hackers with enough motivation and resources can bypass those mitigations easily.

Conclusions?

Most of these exploits aren’t being used on the internet, it’s still an indication of just how scary the landscape of the Internet is right now. How do you stay safe? Google Chrome looks like a good choice, obviously, but there’s another option you might consider: Opera. Opera has relatively small market share and even hackers don’t bother about preparing exploits fro this browser.

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ANGLE or Almost Native Graphics Layer Engine, is an Open Source Project to make it possible to run WebGL, a driverless API to DirectX 9. The project is still-developing cross-platform Web standard for accessing low-level 3D graphics hardware based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API that can be implemented directly in a browser without a plugin.

WebGL is implemented in many browsers but has direct dependency on OpenGL drivers on each Windows, Linux and Mac OS X. On the other hand, the competing graphics API is Microsoft’s Direct3D, which is part of the company’s DirectX graphics technologies. Microsoft’s DirectX technologies have increasingly become dominant in PC gaming and have almost ruled out OpenGL on windows.

The challenge with WebGL is that many Windows machines  can’t (Mac, Linux can) render WebGL content because the OpenGL drivers aren’t installed, even though the computer has powerful graphics hardware (GPU to be precise).

ANGLE will allow Windows users to overcome this problem and run WebGL content without having to find and install new drivers for their system. Because ANGLE aims to use most of the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, it may help developers working on mobile and embedded devices as per Google.

“ANGLE should make it simpler to prototype these applications on Windows and also gives developers new options for deploying production versions of their code to the desktop”

Access ANGLE on Google Code

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But it’s time to change it all. Microsoft has built the new browser ground up and lead innovation to let the industry to follow. IE9 is the First browser to support full GPU acceleration (Direct 2D) Rendering which means your graphics card is now put to good use. Earlier to this Firefox 3.7 nightly showed some GPU rendering which is pretty limited.

Our early impressions of IE9 were good, but it has gone better.

Rendering the web page in most browsers including IE8 is performed on the CPU. Direct2D (a new Windows API in Windows 7) uses hardware Direct3D acceleration to accelerate 2D graphics. This would be available as a patch for Windows Vista. Through the use of Direct2D, IE9 performs all graphics rendering on the GPU, providing quicker page rendering, faster, smoother animation, and high quality image scaling, resulting in richer experience.

Download IE9

Performance Benchmark

The New engine used sounds exactly like V8 engine used in Chrome. On the Inside, the new IE9 JavaScript engine will compile JavaScript into native code, just like in V8, and the technique it will use to speed up the object-oriented nature of JavaScript also sounded similar to the approach V8 takes.

We don’t go by the words of the manufacturer, we like to test it on our own. Today Microsoft announced a Preview of IE9, we got our handson and reviewed it. We used SunSpider benchmark to get Real world-alike Javascript performance results and Some intense graphics Based applications like Bing maps, google Maps and some of the demos hosted by Microsoft itself.

SunSpider Benchmark

Results:  My eyes popped out, IE9 seems to have some great improvements:

Clearly, IE9 has come very close to Safari  and beats all versions of Firefox. It would be some time till it touches chrome’s mark (may be in the final version) but the results are brilliant so far.

Graphics Framerate (FPS)

Era of Rich graphics on web just started over last few years with beginning of Maps applications and some fantastic animations in various webapps. We took some of the most common ones: google Maps, Bing Maps and few demos hosted by Microsoft for IE9 and then average framerate over all of these and results were eye-opener:

IE9 sweeps of all browsers in this area. The GPU acceleration is way to mature than in Firefox 3.7. And Opera 10.5 does some decent job thanks to it’s Vega graphics and Carkan engines.

Update: IE9 vs. Chrome 10 vs. Firefox 4 Benchmarks - on Core i7 machine

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The list of changes so far is fairly small for PC users. But the javascript performance improvement is again noticeable. On the contrary, Mac users will notice a bit more of a difference, with fixes addressing plugin stability and crashing while dragging tabs, a slightly improved cookies manager, and minor tweaks to Chrome’s task manager.

On the performance ( the thing that matters most) Chrome 5 speeds-up Javascript execution by upto 22% as per the Sun Spider Benchmark done on Windows 7:

This Makes Chrome 5 dev “World’s Fastest Browser”.

Detailed Results:

TEST                   COMPARISON            FROM                 TO             DETAILS

=============================================================================
** TOTAL **:           1.22x as fast     1116.6ms +/- 1.6%   914.2ms +/- 2.3%     significant
=============================================================================
  3d:                  1.14x as fast      169.8ms +/- 8.9%   149.0ms +/- 9.9%     significant    cube: +/- 15.7%    54.8ms +/- 19.9%     morph:             -                   60.4ms +/- 18.9%    55.6ms +/- 21.8%     raytrace:          1.34x as fast       51.6ms +/- 5.3%    38.6ms +/- 14.5%     significant
  access:              -                   98.6ms +/- 1.9%    95.4ms +/- 6.5%     binary-trees:      -                    4.6ms +/- 36.3%     4.6ms +/- 52.7%     fannkuch:          -                   40.0ms +/- 7.9%    39.0ms +/- 9.3%     nbody:             -                   42.8ms +/- 13.2%    41.0ms +/- 5.3%     nsieve:            -                   11.2ms +/- 24.1%    10.8ms +/- 9.6%
  bitops:              1.18x as fast       95.8ms +/- 13.1%    81.2ms +/- 12.6%     significant  3bit-bits-in-byte: ??                   7.0ms +/- 12.6%     8.0ms +/- 45.3%     not conclusive: might be *1.14x as slow*    bits-in-byte:      -                   16.8ms +/- 9.6%    16.0ms +/- 11.0%     bitwise-and:       -                   29.8ms +/- 23.9%    27.4ms +/- 20.2%     nsieve-bits:       1.42x as fast       42.2ms +/- 20.3%    29.8ms +/- 13.0%     significant
  controlflow:         -                    6.4ms +/- 17.4%     6.0ms +/- 41.4%     recursive:       -                    6.4ms +/- 17.4%     6.0ms +/- 41.4%
  crypto:              1.24x as fast       68.6ms +/- 5.4%    55.4ms +/- 7.9%     significant    aes:               -                   23.6ms +/- 12.7%    21.8ms +/- 14.8%     md5:               1.28x as fast       23.0ms +/- 13.2%    18.0ms +/- 15.4%     significant    sha1:              1.41x as fast       22.0ms +/- 13.3%    15.6ms +/- 21.5%     significant
  date:                1.27x as fast      125.4ms +/- 4.1%    99.0ms +/- 6.8%     significant    format-tofte:      1.34x as fast       61.6ms +/- 8.9%    45.8ms +/- 18.7%     significant    format-xparb:      1.20x as fast       63.8ms +/- 5.4%    53.2ms +/- 7.3%     significant
  math:                -                  113.4ms +/- 10.5%   101.6ms +/- 8.9%     cordic:    1.25x as fast       45.4ms +/- 15.7%    36.4ms +/- 7.1%     significant    partial-sums:      -                   49.2ms +/- 12.9%    47.4ms +/- 16.7%     spectral-norm:     -                   18.8ms +/- 3.0%    17.8ms +/- 24.9%
  regexp:              ??                  37.2ms +/- 9.3%    40.0ms +/- 15.4%     not conclusive: might be *1.08x as slow*    dna:               ??                  37.2ms +/- 9.3%    40.0ms +/- 15.4%     not conclusive: might be *1.08x as slow*
  string:              1.40x as fast      401.4ms +/- 3.3%   286.6ms +/- 5.7%     significant    base64:            1.45x as fast       46.4ms +/- 8.6%    32.0ms +/- 15.8%     significant    fasta:             1.52x as fast       62.0ms +/- 7.4%    40.8ms +/- 18.7%     significant    tagcloud:          1.21x as fast       89.8ms +/- 6.2%    74.0ms +/- 9.8%     significant    unpack-code:       1.28x as fast      130.4ms +/- 16.4%   101.8ms +/- 21.0%     significant    validate-input:    1.92x as fast       72.8ms +/- 13.8%    38.0ms +/- 10.6%     significant

Apart from performance on Windows, there are two key updates. First, Chrome will now use your default downloads folder (i.e. Username\Downloads on Vista and Windows 7)

Now user has more control over the content Chrome displays and executes. User settings for cookies, pop-ups, plugins, scripts, and images are being moved to their own panel. In addition, user can choose to hide Extension buttons from the bar.

You can download the dev channel build .

Update: Opera 10.5 Beta is the NEW Fastest Browser on Earth

We write latest and greatest in Firefox, Chrome, Tech Guides, Apple, iPhone, Android, Open Source, Latest in Tech @taranfx on Twitter.

Today, Google introduced a new stable release of  Chrome for Windows, which includes Extensions and inbuilt Bookmark sync. Till now they were part of beta/test releases only.

• How to write Chrome Extensions
• Best Google Chrome Extensions Top 15
• More Extensions

As per today, there are over 1,500 in the official extensions gallery .

Though Xmarks is the most popular Bookmark sync extension around, google recommends use of inbuilt bookmark sync that uses your Google account. You can enable bookmark sync to synchronize your bookmarks on all of your computers so that when you create a bookmark on one computer, it’s automatically added across all your computers.

Here are other Key Improvements:

• Chrome now introduces the Web SQL Database API, which allows user to store data in a structured manner on the user’s computer. In particular, Google is working on Application Cache which gives you the ability to serve HTML and JavaScript that references content in the Web SQL Database. SessionStorage, the little brother of localStorage, is coming soon as well.
• Support for WebSockets: This is a new API for sending data over a persistent bi-directional communication channel, designed to be easier, more powerful, and less resource intensive than using XHR.
• (Windows only) the new notification API that allows you to present information to users, such as event reminders or status updates, via a panel in the user’s status-bar area.
• Integrated a number of new HTML5 APIs in this stable release, including LocalStorage, Database API, WebSockets, and more.
• Improved performance  by 42% over our last stable release and 400% since our first stable release last year.

Download Google Chrome

We write Latest in Tech, Google, Chrome, Firefox, Open Source, Gadgets and more @taranfx on Twitter.

Taking the step further, Google has now come up with official Chrome Google Voice extension. If you are a Google Voice user, you will find it extraordinary.

The extension is pretty nasty on features, it adds click to call functionality to web pages. So if there is a phone number on a web page, like a Online directory, or Email page or your online address book, it will now have a hyperlink. Click it and Google will throw you a pop up window asking which phone you want to use (Home, mobile, work, etc.). It tehn routes the call as per your preference.

In addition, it adds a small button besides the addressbar. You can type in a name or phone number and call or sms it from the browser, and read recent text messages and transcribed.

voicemails.

As far as I tried, I found it working on all three popular platforms: Windows, Mac and Ubuntu.

On the Integration front, lack of  an API for Google Voice makes it hard for 3rd party applications to use it via web. To harvest anything useful, it needs to take user credentials, everytime. This Firefox add-on integrates with Google Voice using same concept.

It won’t be long before Google integrates Google Voice with Gizmo5 and Gtalk. Probably, after that having a voice mobile subscription would make no sense. All you need would be a smartbook/smartphone with data-only subscription to do all your voice calls.

We write frequently about Google, Telecom,android, iPhone, Gadgets, Chrome, firefox, other latest Tech news @taranfx on Twitter.

With launch of Google chrome Extensions, Google has punched in a new extension to help web developers speed up the performance of webapps: Speed Tracer. For those of you who use GWT (Google Web Toolkit), this tool is a bliss.

Using this tool developers can identify problems in their web apps at a detailed level. Tracer exposes a  ”sluggishness graph” that shows how the app is doing w.r.t UI, network, processing performance. It accurately identifies the bottlenecks that  make the web user experience less delightful.

Google Web Toolkit has added a bunch of new stuff, Speed Tracer is barely one of them.

One of the features that attracted me is: Google Web Toolkit splits code to help speed up the start time of large applications. Basically, Code Splitting enables developers to safely and easily slice and dice their application code so that key functionality can load immediately and other features can be loaded later as needed.

If you have used Java’s VisualVM, you will find Speed Tracer equally competent on the web apps front.

With Speed Tracer, you can trackdown problems caused by JavaScript parsing and execution, layout, CSS style recalculation and selector matching, DOM event handling, network resource loading, timer fires, XMLHttpRequest callbacks, painting, and more. To start with, install the extension to Chrome and checkout the Example Webapps Google provided to test out it’s features. You would love it.

Google just announced Launch of Chrome for Mac and now Chrome Extensions gallery goes live! Available here.

If you are a developer/programmer you can checkout Google Chrome 4 Extensions: How To Create – Twitter Client[Tutorial] and contribute to Open source community

Some of the Other Google Products launched this week:
Google SPDY, Google GO Programming, Google DNS, New Google Search Caffeine, Google Chrome OS, Google Liquid Galaxy,  Google Real Time search, Google Goggles Visual Search. My o My, what’s next?

Future of Google Search

Earlier we had benchmarked various browsers on Mac platform to see how has Chrome beta come along, and Chrome was winning already.

Now comes the Official Public Version which is much more stable and faster. You can Download Chrome for Mac here. (You must be running Mac OS)

New Chrome extensions are coming on the horizon with release of Extensions gallery scheduled for launch this week. Meanwhile you can checkout Top 15 Best Google Chrome Extensions. If you are a developer/programmer you can checkout how you can create your own extension for Google Chrome in easy steps.

Google is seriously on Fire on this holiday season, Here is their Technology making us  nuts: Google SPDY, Google GO Programming, Google DNS, New Google Search Caffeine, Google Chrome OS, Google Liquid Galaxy,  Google Real Time search, Google Goggles Visual Search. My o My, what’s next?

Future of Google Search