Google's Chrome 5.0 beta goes like the clappers

WEB BROWSER DEVELOPER Google has released another Beta of Chrome 5.0 that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux and it is quite a bit faster than the previous version.

The Google team appears to have optimised the V8 JavaScript engine to squeeze more speed there. Google claims that it is about 30 per cent faster than the Chrome 4 Beta, and 213 per cent faster than Chrome 1 Beta.

However there are also some natty HTML5 Features under the bonnet that also make the Chrome 5.0 release of the browser interesting.

These include Geolocation APIs, App Cache and web sockets, as well as new file drag-and-drop capabilities.

According to a Google spokesperson this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome.

Chrome will automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome's auto-update mechanism.

The Chrome 5.0 Beta comes with enhanced synchronisation capabilities, which are built on top of bookmark sync. It can synchronise bookmarks and browser preferences.

Specifically, by using the new synchronisation capabilities of the latest Beta development milestone of Chrome 5.0, users can enjoy the same themes, startup, homepage, web content and language settings across all Beta version 5.0 instances on multiple computers. µ