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A New Coat of Chrome Just Hit My Desktop
Just did an apt-get update & upgrade, and saw a new version of Google Chrome was being fetched. No biggie, me thinks, happens regularly. Except this one is really different.
This new version that hit my desktop, 6.0.472.53, is quite awesome, to tell the truth. Visually, it’s become even prettier than before, even more screen real estate is being used for content instead of controls, menus and other crap (hello, IE?), and those of us running KDE 4 are obviously happy to see it fitting even better into our Oxygen or Air themes.
An annoying drawing bug that has plagued Chrome for awhile, but only on my laptop with integrated Intel graphics, weird white blocks covering tabs when resizing the window or opening new tabs, is gone.
Font rendering is absolutely stunning. This is funny, because recently I desperately tried to get better font rendering in all of my apps. Had this been Windows, all my fonts would’ve seemed fine, but having Linux, and then being presented to the FreeSans and FreeSerif fonts, DAMN! Nothing else will seem pretty anymore. In Firefox, I forced all font families to FreeSans, FreeSerif and Liberation Mono to get pretty fonts, but this is not really a fix, so I’ve been looking for a proper fix, getting “regular” fonts to render more nicely. With Chrome, I didn’t have the same option to override font families, so I had to settle for proper fonts with strong hinting and jagged edges. This new version, everything looks beautiful!
Oh, and the speed… I mean, was this a minor update? I think not! It’s so extremely fast now that I don’t know where to start. I’m thinking it might somehow have to be related with the fixed font issue, really, and I’m suspecting that maybe now Chrome pulls more from your fontconf and GTK stuff. But really, I’m just talking out of my ass here
Oh yeah, and Ctrl+Shift+I now opens the “Chromebug” pane
Either way, here’s +1 from one happy camper!
If ChromeOS is going to be anything like this, hmmmm… Why not?
Fantastic font rendering, fast HTML rendering, sweet experience all the way
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