Chrome 27 Beta Now Available, Promises Faster Speeds

Chrome 27 Beta browser has been released by Google, bringing with it some goodies for developers, as well as faster page loading to the tune of about 5-percent. Users who don't mind dippingo into beta territory can grab the latest download now from the Chrome beta page. We've got a run down of the new features and improvements after the jump.

The obvious feature most users will notice is the speed improvements, which are said to increase the rate of content loading by 5-percent. This is due to behind the scenes changes to the browser's resource scheduler, decreasing pre-loaded resources and using an idle connection more often. In addition, webpagetest.org Speed Index values are now included in the metrics used to assess page load speed improvements.

Other changes and additions are specific to developers, and include HTML5 date and time forms, which are featured in the image above. There's also now live audio input to Web Audio API for the Windows and Mac versions of Chrome, as well as Sync FileSystem API for Chrome Packaged Apps. Improvements have been rolled out for the network panel, bringing customizable columns and the ability to "Copy as cURL" a resource by right-clicking on it.

There are a variety of other features for devs, which those who are interested can check out in full here. In case you didn't hear, Google announced yesterday that it will be forking a new rendering engine called Blink from WebKit, promising to bring with it speed and to eventually spur innovation. You can read more about those plans, as well as what one Chrome dev has to say, here.

[via Chromium]