Chrome

Less than a month after Microsoft bought Skype for US$8.5 billion, Google has released a developer preview of WebRTC - an open framework enabling implementation of voice and video Real Time Communications in the browser with the use of HTML 5 and JavaScript APIs. Read More

The Chrome OS avalanche looks to be gaining momentum, with modular computer manufacturer Xi3 announcing a desktop computer addition to the mobile solutions announced by Samsung and Acer earlier in the month. Set to be a new flavor of the company's soon-to-be-generally-available, CES 2011 Innovations Award-winning modular computer range, the cube-like, low power ChromiumPC will be available with single- or dual-core processors and will benefit from a host of new input/output (I/O) modules currently being developed by the Xi3 Corporation and its partners. Read More

Almost two years after Google first announced plans to build an operating system based on its Chrome web browser, the search giant has announced that the first Chrome OS-based netbooks – dubbed "Chromebooks" – from Samsung and Acer are set to go on sale from next month. With no traditional HDD for local storage, the web-centric devices store all the user's apps, documents, and settings in the cloud resulting in some trimmed down devices with impressive boot up times and battery life. Read More

Google has claimed 30% and 35% improvement using the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks with its latest Chrome beta release. Chrome launched in September 2008 and Google says the overall improvement since the first beta is as much as 213% and 305% using these benchmarks. The company has also come up with some novel (read thoroughly unscientific but a bit of fun) ways to test the latest release against some "real life" speed benchmarks. So is it faster than a potato gun? Read More

With Firefox recently racking up one fourth of the total browser market share and Microsoft's Internet Explorer constantly struggling to keep pace, with the older versions being more popular than the newer ones, the Redmond software giant hopes to reverse the trend with the upcoming Internet Explorer 9. However, preliminary test results posted on Microsoft's IE blog have left some - including Gizmag's Dario Borghino - puzzled over the Web standards compliance of the future browser. Read More

Loading pages from the Internet into browsers or accessing your favorite applications may seem pretty fast now, but the folks at Google think it could be a lot faster. Designed specifically for minimizing latency, the new SPDY protocol currently undergoing testing is proving to be an awful lot faster than more familiar HTTP and will shortly break out of the lab and head for the real-world. Read More

Mac users keen to give Google’s Chrome a try have had to endure a long wait compared to Windows users who have had a public stable release available to them since December last year. The wait is finally over with Google publicly releasing an official developer preview but, although it seems stable enough for daily use, there are a few caveats that may make it a good idea for most users to wait a little longer before using Chrome on a day-to-day basis. Read More