Article by George Norman

On 05 Feb 2009

Chrome 2.0.160.0, the latest dev channel release, reaffirms Google’s commitment to come up with the fastest JavaScript engine on the market to date. Alongside a rather long list of changes, this update also brings a new regular expression (regexp) engine to the V8 JavaScript engine version 0.4.9.3. In related Google news, it must be said that we might finally get some insight into the much awaited Chrome extensions.

“One of the new features in the most recent dev-channel release of Google Chrome (2.0.160.0) is Irregexp, a completely new implementation of regular expressions (regexps) in the V8 JavaScript engine. Irregexp builds on V8's existing infrastructure for memory management and native code generation and is tailored to work well for the kinds of regexps used by JavaScript programs on the web. The result is a considerable improvement in V8's regexp performance,” Software Engineers Erik Corry, Christian Plesner Hansen and Lasse Reichstein Holst Nielsen explain.


This is a dev release, so for the time being only developers will get to play with it. Regular users and Google fans can play with the latest Chrome 1.0 release, version 1.0.154.48. If that is not enough for you, there is one alternative: switch to the dev channel (details provided with the release of Chrome 2.0 pre-Beta).

According to a recent study, Google’s market share, when it comes to the Chrome browser, is still very small – around 1%. Google is definitely putting a lot of hard work and effort into improving and promoting its take on the web browser, and it is expected that including extensions will help.

“The extension process is a special type of renderer that controls rendering of the various pieces of UI that an extension wishes to add to the browser chrome. It is not able to interact with content directly - instead, the extension can arrange for user scripts to be injected into a page that the extension process can then communicate with,” say Chromium.

Extensions have been announced for some time now, but Google never got around to providing a timetable. According to programmer Nicolas Moline, Google will address this issue at the Google I / O developer conference in San Francisco (Moscone Center, May 27th).



Tags: Google, Chrome

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