Google Chrome 9.0

I know that, in my last post, I promised to begin a series describing what you and/or your child can do once either/both of you learn the basics of computer programming. I still intend to do that but, first, a little good news that may have slipped in under the cyber-world's radar.

Although it has attracted relatively little attention in both the "traditional" and "online" media, Google's Chrome 9 web browser hit the cyber-street today. While you might think that such an event would be of interest only to those of us who are usually referred to as "nerds" or "geeks," allow me to explain why this event may become quite significant in the upcoming months.

As I've made clear in past postings, I'm a firm supporter of Web Standards compliance in general and the importance of Open Source web standards such as HTML 5 and OpenGL in particular. Based solely on standards compliance and support , Chrome 9 comes pretty close to convincing me that prayer is not an absolute waste of my time. Running on my 1 GHz Intel XP Service Pack 3 laptop, Chrome 9 scored an impressive 242 (plus 13 "bonus points") out of a possible 300 on the HTML 5.org's stress test page. If that isn't enough to grab your attention, read on.

Wanting to separate corporate/media hype from real performance, I went to the WebGL demo page and put Chrome 9 to the ultimate test of displaying a combination of WebGL content imbedded in a HTML 5 web page. The results of that experiment caused me to lose my customary cynicism toward web technology. (If you're not using Chrome 9, you can see what I mean by checking out the demos by Cooliris and Google on You Tube).

If you have ever tried to write a mathematical expression more complicated that ax²+bx+c = 0 inside a simple HTML web page, you know what frustration is. Furthermore, if you wanted to include any simple diagram other than a straight line, you were forced to fall to introduce an " tag along with an image file. Google 9 now supports two existing web standards, Scalable Vector Graphics(SVG) and the Mathematical Markup Language (MathML), that will make your life far less complicated if you find yourself needing to create web documents. Although Chrome 9 does not fully support the entire HTML 5, SVG, and MathML specifications, it easily exceeds the capabilities of its three nearest competing browsers combined. (See the respective World Wide web Consortium's (W3C) web site for more detailed descriptions of HTML 5, SVG, and MathML. Also, see the Khronos Group's WebGL specifications.)

When I ran the above-described sequence of tests using other web browsers, Opera 10 scored 177 plus 7 (as did Opera 11); Firefox 3.6 came in with an anemic 139 plus 4, while Internet Explorer 8 came in dead last with a mere 77 out of 300 with no bonus points. Not surprisingly, none of the three browsers just mentioned were able to display even the simplest examples of WebGL. As for SVG and MathML, Chrome 9's incomplete support is far better than the total lack of such capability in its competitors.

And for the last bit of good news, Chrome 10 will soon be in beta testing. For us tech geeks, it doesn't get any better than this.