What’s been happening in web browser land over the past seven days?
Let’s take a quick look…
Google Chrome 14 – New Stable Release
The latest stable release of Google Chrome – now sitting at version 14 – was pushed out at the weekend, adding: –
- Web Audio API allowing for various ‘fancy’ audio effects to be added to webapps, browser games, etc
- Open source ‘Native Client’ technology, which allows C and C++ code ‘…to be seamlessly and securely executed inside the browser.’
- Chrome Web Store rolled out to 24 more countries (including Sweden, Brazil and Russia)
- Support for OS X Lion fullscreen mode and overlay scrollbars
Firefox 7 Beta 5
Last week Firefox 9 found itself penciled in for a December release; Firefox 8 moved to the ‘Aurora’ channel, and Firefox 7 – the next major release of the browser – hit Beta 5.
Firefox 7 brings better memory management (Mozilla claims up to 30%-50% less than Firefox 6); the dropping of the ‘http://’ prefix from the address bar; and the usual under-the-hood stuff, such as improvements to Firefox Sync, improved performance of HTML5 Canvas animation and faster loading times.
Opera 12 Pre-Alpha
Opera fans were able to get their hands on a pre-alpha release of Opera 12 late last week, which brings with it GTK3 support, as well as the expected smattering of core updates, fixes and under-the-hood features.
