Hardware acceleration, other features pushed back to Chrome 9

Several features that some users were disappointed to see left out of Google’s recent Chrome 7 Beta release aren’t going to be included until Chrome 9, according to official posts on the company’s Chromium dev group website.

The main item everyone seems to be looking for in new browsers lately is full hardware acceleration, which can speed up performance by utilizing power from a system’s graphics card. But that too has been delayed beyond Chrome 8.

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All eyes are on Google and Mozilla to make their move towards enabling full hardware acceleration since Microsoft included the feature in their recent launch of Internet Explorer 9 Beta. The latest beta releases of Chrome and Firefox are capable of it, but the feature must be manually enabled.

“[Microsoft] forced the other folks to wake up and realize the importance of hardware acceleration," former Google programmer Brad Neuberg said during a recent interview.

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Other features not included in the code that was branched off to eventually become Chrome 8 are hardware-based video decoding and CSS support. There were also several graphical enhancements delayed including support for reflections, drop shadows, large layers, masks, and fixes for opacity and canvas issues.

Experimental features can be enabled in Chrome 7 Beta by using the browser’s about:labs section, but the interface is minimal and changes require the use of command line flags. It isn’t recommended for novice users.

There is currently no word on when to expect Chrome 8, let alone Chrome 9, but with Google pushing out new releases every 6 weeks maybe it won’t be as long as one might anticipate.

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While I appreciate the speed and simplicity of Chrome, I’ve become so accustomed to Firefox and all of its add-on capability and customization that I haven’t been able to tear myself away from using it as my primary browser. However, I do recognize the fact that Firefox can be a bloated memory hog at times, and to say that I wish Chrome were more like Firefox would defeat the point of what Chrome is intended to be.

What browser do you prefer and why?

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