Google has released the thirteenth version of its Chrome browser with a number of interesting new features.
Continuing on its usual track to improve web browsing speed, Google Chrome 13 introduces a new Instant Pages feature. In some cases it is possible to determine where the user is going to click next, for example, clicking on the next page button on a multipage article, or on the first search result on a search result page.In cases where Google can accurately determine where the user might go next, it can begin loading that page in the background and rendering it, so when the user clicks, the page is loaded instantly. This is being developed as a web standard, so it is available for any site to use.
The following video demonstrates this technology:
Google Chrome 13 also makes some improvements to the Omnibox that can also lead to speedier browsing. Since Google integrates search in its location bar, and so it offers suggestions from Google when you are entering anything in the location bar. This might speed up searches, or looking for new websites, however previous version of Google Chrome never used to tap into your own browsers history to offer suggestions that might help you find a web page you visited before. In Chrome 13, the Omnibox now taps into your browser history to offer matches from titles and URLs of previously visited websites.
Page preview is another feature that has been added to this latest release, and it uses the inbuilt PDF reader that was added way back in Google Chrome 8.
Chrome 13 also adds one very unique feature — it was initially being planned for Firefox 4 as well — multi-selection of tabs. One can now select multiple tabs at a time (by pressing the Ctrl or Shift key pressed) and perform some operations on them in bulk. You could select multiple tabs, and close them together, close all other tabs, duplicate the tabs, pin the tabs, or bookmark the selected tabs. You can even select multiple tabs and drag them together to a another window or a new window. As you can imagine this is a very useful feature which sadly hasn’t been highlighted enough by Google.
There is some API goodness for extension developers as well. Chrome now includes a new proxy API that developers can use for managing proxy settings. Greasemonkey support has also been improved with “@run-at” to control when the script runs.