Google on Thursday updated the beta version of its Chrome browser to add several features it showed off at a recent Chrome OS event, including Google Instant in the omnibox and Adobe's Flash Player plug-in in the Google sandbox.
Google Instant is currently in use on Google Search and provides suggestions as a user types a query. Google is now extending this to the omnibox - the URL space in Chrome that doubles as a search box - so URL suggestions will show up in a drop-down menu as you type.
Instant in the Omnibox will also allow for faster navigation to frequently visited Web sites. If you visit ESPN.com a lot, just typing "E" into the omnibox, and Chrome will automatically load ESPN.com. Visit Twitter multiple times a day? Once Google learns your Web site patterns, typing "T" will take you to the site.
Enable the Instant feature on the Basics tab of Chrome's options.
Google will also bring Chrome's existing sandboxing technology for Web pages to the Flash Player plug-in in Chrome for Windows. "The sandbox adds an additional layer of protection to further guard against malicious pages that try to hijack your computer or steal private information from your hard drive," Google said in a blog post.
The feature will be added to the Mac and Linux versions in future releases, the company said. Google added this to the developer test version of Chrome earlier this month. A video demo of the technology is below.
This beta release will also include WebGL, which brings hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the browser, Google said.
"It is based on the OpenGL ES 2.0 API, which should be familiar to many 3D graphics developers," the company said in a separate blog post. "Google, Mozilla, Apple, Opera and graphics hardware vendors have been working together to standardize WebGL for over a year now, and since the spec is just about final at this point, we wanted to get our implementation out there for feedback."
One of the Web apps utilizing WebGL is the Body Browser, a human anatomy explorer built by a team at Google as a 20 percent project.
Google has four versions, or channels, of Chrome: Canary, Dev, Beta, and Stable. Beta is for those who "like to use and help refine the latest features" and is fairly close to the stable option "but may lack the polish one expects from a finished product."