Google has been pushing Chrome with better and newer features. In the last beta release, that of Google Chrome 18, we have seen that Chrome’s hardware acceleration now expands even to older computers. Google has introduced a number of changes which will help render and display 3D content, even on older computer. Moreover, Chrome 19 dev has JavaScript enabled, so that’s another piece of great news for Chrome users.
Displaying 3D content on older is no easy task. Google seems to have worked really hard on this one. The company purchased a software called SwiftShader, which has been made by TransGaming. This software helps display 3D content on older computers and those running Windows XP. It stars working on your computer when the Chrome’s built-in GPU doesn’t function.
If you want to see exactly what is being accelerated, you may navigate to chrome://gpu. Also if you add ‘ the–blacklist-accelerated-compositing and–blacklist-webgl flags’ to the browser’s command line, you will be able to force the SwiftShader into working.
Google is also working diligently on Chrome 19, although it is to be released by the end of 2013. In the developer’s build of Chrome 19 released, there is support for latest version of JavaScript. Some other new components that Google is supporting for Chrome 19 include weak maps, lexical scoping and proxies. This particular version is codenamed ‘Harmony’ and will be released hopefully by the end of 2013.
You can download Chrome 18 beta from here.
And you can download Chrome 19 dev from here.
Image courtesy Randy.
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