Google Chrome Review 2015 Mac Browser Market

Results for the SunSpider Javascript benchmark provided one of the testings biggest surprises.

Google Chrome Review 2015 Mac Browser Market

The Mac browser market might be better off if Google applied some of the innovation it touts in other areas of its business to its Chrome Web browser.

The latest version is once again a lightning-fast, efficiently functional browser, at or near the top of the pack in every benchmark I ran.

But the things that have changed about Chrome since this time last year dont seem quite as significant as those that have remained stubbornly the same.

The pace at which Google turns out new Chrome iterations has slowed from brain-melting to just really fast.

While Chrome leapt from version 8 to version 21 between 2011 and 2012, its only advanced to version 29 since then.

A review of Chromes release notes reveals numerous security patches and bug fixes.

Since version 21, Chrome has also gained occasional speed boosts and other small new touches, including the ability to quickly display what permissions each of your installed extensions has.

A reset button, new to the latest version, claims to let you restore your browser to its original settings, including resetting your homepage, themes, new tab pages, and search engine of choice.

The reset button is buried at the very bottom of Chromes initially hidden advanced options, and I wasnt overwhelmed by its effectiveness.

The release notes mention improved guesses in the omniboxthe combined URL and search barfor what you might be typing, plus new support for MathML, a markup language for easily displaying complex mathematical equations.

However, none of the MathML demo pages I tried would display their samples correctly in Chrome.

More dismayingly, Chromes interface remains fundamentally unchanged from last year.

The browser still lacks visual polish, and has made only minimal efforts to match Safari, Firefox, or Operas attempts to evolve around how people use their browsers.

While you can now pin tabs to your browser window, Firefox-style, theres still no easy way to open all bookmarks in a given Bookmarks Bar folder without right-clicking to summon a contextual menu.

I wish that as much attention was paid to human touches as to the speed and security of the underlying code.

I will give Chrome one sincere compliment, though: Its easy to switch your default search engine from Google to Bing, Yahoo, or the engine of your choice.

For a program specifically designed to keep users in Googles ecosystem more often, thats a laudably courteous feature.

Meanwhile, the work Google has put into speed and stability improvements has definitely paid off.

With a little help from hardware acceleration, Chrome ran beautiful 3D games and demos in WebGL with nary a hiccup.

And a round of benchmarking tests, conducted on a 2.9GHz Core i7 MacBook Pro with 8GB RAM, ranked Googles browser at the top of the heap in many key categories.

The aging Safari 6 still holds the crown in HTML5 vector graphics rendering; it scored nearly twice as well as Chrome 29.

Googles browser still beat Opera 15 and Chrome 21 (narrowly) and Firefox 23 (far, far more widely).

In HTML5 bitmap graphics and text rendering tests, Safari again beat out Chrome, Opera, and Firefox, if only by a nose.

Google Chrome For Mac Review 2015