Hands On: Google Chrome 2

Google on Thursday unveiled the latest version of its Chrome browser, moving the product out of beta and promising speed boosts of up to 30 percent. How does it measure up?

If you are already using the beta version of Chrome, the features will be familiar, including the speedier JavaScript performance of the browser's V8 interpreter. Google touts a 30 percent speed increase for Chrome; my testing actually showed a 44 percent improvement.

Chrome 2 completed the well-known SunSpider JavaScript benchmark in 1503ms, compared with 2689ms for version 1. This leaves the competition in the dust: Internet Explorer 8 required 9,065ms, while the Firefox 3.1 beta took 3,045ms.

In terms of features, not much has changed since our preview of the Chrome 2 beta. Most notably, you can now remove the thumbnails of your choice from the new tab pages you open. It also includes auto-fill, a full-screen mode, and the ability to drag and drop windows to fit the screen equally.

Two more features that have long been available in Windows browsers are full-screen mode and auto form filling, which saves you from retyping your address and phone number over and over.

The new version also fixes numbers bugs, which you can read about on the browser's developer blog, chromium.org.

Apple Introduces Updated Nehalem Xeon Xserve

The Cupertino company unveiled an improved family of Xserves, based on the Intel "Nehalem" Xeon processors.

"The Xserve is the best workgroup server for our education, business and creative customers," said David Moody, Apple's vice president of Worldwide Mac Product Marketing. "With up to twice the performance, better power efficiency and an innovative SSD drive option, this is the best Xserve we've ever made."

According to Apple, the new line features a power supply with an average energy efficiency of 89 percent

The Xserve standard configuration features the following:

- a single 2.26 GHz Quad-Core Xeon 5500 series processor with 8MB of fully shared L3 cache;
- 3GB of 1066 MHz DDR3 ECC RAM;
- a single 160GB 7200 rpm SATA Apple Drive Module;
- dual Gigabit Ethernet on-board;
- two PCI Express 2.0 x16 expansion slots;
- Bonjour-enabled Lights-Out Management processor and Server Monitor Software;
- internal graphics with Mini DisplayPort output;
- two FireWire 800 and three USB 2.0 ports; and
- an unlimited client license for Mac OS X Server version 10.5 Leopard.


Additionally, build-to-order options and accessories for Xserve include:
- dual 2.26 GHz, 2.66 GHz or 2.93 GHz Intel Xeon processors
- 160GB and 1TB 7200 rpm SATA Apple Drive Modules;
- 450GB 15,000 rpm SAS drives (third party option);
- internal Xserve RAID card;
- Gigabit Ethernet, 4Gb Fibre Channel cards
- a 750W redundant power supply.

The new Xserve is immediately available for a suggested retail price of $2,999