Google has worked hard on Chrome and it looks like finally the efforts are paying off. Chrome 14, is the newly released update for Google Chrome and the reviews say it that it can be worthy of being called as the best Web browser for any operating system available today. There was a comparison which was tested on against Chrome 14, which included the latest releases of Firefox and IE 9 on a Windows 7 box. Looking at the Web standards compatibility, Chrome 14 was a clear winner.
The Acid 3 compatibility test carried out was to check out how well a browser complies with Web standards such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), JavaScript, and Extensible Markup Language (XML). IE scored 95, Firefox 6 won the minor battle with 97, while Chrome had a perfect score.
Recently, there was an updated HTML5 Test on August 23rd, which was focused on noting how compliant the Web browser is with the HTML5 Web page standard. There again the rankings were same, but the differences made a poor show by IE. Chrome had lead once again with 341 out of the total of 450, while Firefox 6.02 had a minor improvement with 313. IE was at the last spot, but the difference was terrible as it scored just 141 of the total. It showed that IE was no where close to being compatible with HTML5. A matter of concern was thus highlighted for the future of IE as HTML 5 is gaining popularity and will have users asking for its compliance on a large scale soon.
Comparing the browsers on different benchmarks, Chrome was by far a leader in most of the cases, with IE leading in just one of the many cases. First benchmark was Kraken 1.0. Here it should be noted that lower the score, better would be the browser. Chrome 14 had a score of 4578.5millisecondss (ms),which bettered its Chrome 13 score, which was 4927.7ms. Firefox took second with a score of 7588.2ms. and IE came in last with a wretched 17,051.9ms.
Second on the benchmark list was Peacekeeper, where higher scores are better. The lone benchmark which had IE score better than that of Chrome. IE had a score of 8,343, Chrome came in second with 7,663 and Firefox a distant last with 4,588 points. Talking about Google’s own JavaScript test V8 Benchmark Suite, where higher scores are better, Chrome was by far a clear winner with no real competition. Chrome 14 scored 7,591, Firefox flopped with a showing of 3,614 and IE did even worse with 2,193. Last on the list was SunSpider 0.9.1, the oldest of the JavaScript Web benchmark tests, where lower results are better. here the competitiveness had something to talk about as Chrome won by a mere 2.7ms. Chrome 14 scored 249.9ms, IE 9 scored 252.6ms and Firefox shows well with 301.2ms.
Apart from the competition, Chrome 14 had an inclusion of 2 new important features which might show its effectiveness only in the long run. First here is the Web Audio application programming interface (API) which allows developers to create interesting sounds effects for games and applications. Programmers even have an option to add 3D dynamically positioned sounds sources and mix multiple sound sources.
The second important feature is that Chrome 14 supports C and C++ applications in Google’s Native Client SDK (software developer kit). Native client is meant to let developers create local applications that run locally within Chrome.
Chrome 14 has got many positive reviews and those who want to download it, it can be downloaded from here.