Topic: Google relaunches Chrome beta

[Clive]

Google has reintroduced a beta version of its Chrome browser.

Last December, Google dropped the beta tag, which signifies the development stage of a product, only to relaunch it this week.

Google promises that the new beta version will be a testing ground for new features and improvements to speed.

Google have also set up the Google Chrome blog to reveal changes and additions.

The beta version will not replace the current Chrome browser, but will run side by side with it.

"The best thing about this new beta is speed. It's 25 per cent faster on our V8 benchmark and 35 per cent faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version, and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version," said Google Chrome product manager Brian Rakowski in a blog post.

"We're doing our best to quickly churn out new features as they are available, rather than saving them up for occasional major releases," Rakowski added.

Among the new features are autofill, full page zoom and autoscroll.

Chrome was launched last September to much hype but it has failed to make inroads into Firefox's and IE's dominance in the browser market.

Google has developed a reputation for leaving services in beta - its popular web mail service Gmail, launched in 2004, is still in beta.

www.google.com/chrome

[Rik]

The only difference between Microsoft and Google being that the latter admit the product is a beta.

[Simon]

It might have made more sense to called the first beta, the alpha, but then, I don't suppose a lot of people would have used it, and their data harvesting would have suffered.

[Rik]

They could have called it the alpha male, that would have worked.