What’s New With Google Chrome 5

A few of us here at MoG are avid Chrome users, supplemented with Firefox for development reasons. I am a big fan of what Chrome has become. It is simple, incredibly fast, and works really well with other Google products. With yesterday’s newest release of Chrome 5 for Windows, Mac and Linux. It happens to be the first stable release for Mac and Linux users who happened to be in beta beforehand. We should expect to see Chrome consuming a greater browser market share as it matures.

Yesterdays release has a bunch of new features.

• Sync bookmarks across multiple computers
• Sync browser preferences including themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings
• Enable each extensions to work in incognito mode through the extensions manager

It also incorporates HTML5 features such as:

• Geolocation APIs (try enabling the geolocation functionality in Google Maps)
• App Cache
• Web sockets
• File drag-and-drop

Oh, and did we mention it is FAST?! I do a speed test every morning against Chrome and Firefox, and Chrome wins hands down every time by sometimes a full 30-40 seconds. Check out Google’s video battle of Chrome 5 versus a potato, sound, and lightning.