Google releases Chrome 18, a new version of its Web browser featuring hardware-accelerated Canvas support.
Google has
released its Chrome 18 browser with new hardware-accelerated Canvas rendering.
In a blog
post, Karen Grunberg of the Google Chrome team
said Chrome 18 has been released to the Stable Channel for Windows, Mac, Linux
and Chrome Frame. Chrome 18 also features several security enhancements and bug
fixes.
In a March 28
post on the Google Chromium Blog, John Bauman and
Brian Salomon said Google has enabled GPU-accelerated Canvas2D on capable
Windows and Mac computers, which should make Web applications like games
perform even better than a pure software implementation.
Bauman and
Salomon also noted that Chrome 18 features software-based
WebGL
support via
SwiftShader, a software rasterizer licensed from
TransGaming. WebGL enables compelling 3D content on the Web.
Keep in mind
that a software-backed WebGL implementation is never going to perform as well
as one running on a real GPU, but now more users will have access to basic 3D
content on the Web, Bauman and Salomon wrote.
The release of
Chrome 18 follows by a couple of weeks the release of
Firefox 11. On March 13, Mozilla announced the
release of
Firefox 11, which adds new in-product developer
tools that make it easier to visualize page elements. Firefox 11 also expands
Firefox Sync capabilities to let users sync add-ons across computers.
Firefox 11
also includes new developer tools that represent the structure of Websites in a
new way and make it easier to live-edit Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) code. The
first is a new visual layout tool unique to Firefox, Page Inspector 3D View.
Nicknamed
Tilt,
it is a new WebGL-based Website visualization tool that highlights the
structure of a page better than a flat view, so anyone can immediately
understand the relationship of the code to the page output.
In addition,
Firefox now includes the new
Style Editor tool, which allows developers to
edit CSS like a text editor and see changes instantly, entirely within the
browser.
And Firefox 11
introduces Add-on Sync. Users now have the option to sync add-ons between
computers to allow for a seamless experience across Firefox at work and at
home. Users can enable this feature in the Preferences window on the Sync tab.
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