Chrome 9 goes stable with WebGL and Chrome Instant

In a statement on the official Google Chrome Blog, the browser’s developers have announced the availability of a new version in the stable channel. It brings some performance improvements and a handful of new features. Google’s development efforts on Chrome have been moving forward at an impressive pace. The company is iterating very quickly on new features and stabilizing them as they trickle down through the various release channels. The most noteworthy new features introduced in the stable release of Chrome 9 are support for WebGL and Chrome Instant. WebGL is a relatively new standard that emerged in 2009 with the support of the Khronos group. It provides a set of JavaScript APIs that wrap the functionality of OpenGL ES, allowing developers to render 3D graphics in the Canvas element. Mozilla and Apple have also adopted the standard and have their own increasingly mature implementations. Google officially supports WebGL with hardware-accelerated rendering in Chrome 9. To take the feature for a spin, you can try out some of the WebGL demos at the Chrome Experiments website. Another major feature in Chrome 9 is support for Chrome Instant, the browser equivalent of Google’s instant search innovation. As the user types a URL, the autocompletion mechanism will automatically load pages. This feature is integrated into the browser, but is not enabled by default. Users who want automatic loading will have to opt-in by toggling a preference in Chrome’s settings panel. Users can download the latest version of Chrome from Google’s website. For more details about some of the bug fixes, you can refer to the release notes.