Chrome 7 will use GPU and get Labs section

Following Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 4, Google’s Chrome browser will also use the GPU. In addition, the developers in Chrome 7 want to experiment with new browser features via the Labs section.

On the Chromium weblog, developer Vangelis Kokkevis insight in Google’s plans to overhaul Chrome’s graphics system. The aim is to use the browser, just like IE9 and Firefox 4, for certain rendering tasks, such as showing 3d WebGL graphics and certain CSS transformations. But the graphics processor could also be used for 2D graphics, such as scaling images.

To make GPU acceleration possible, Chrome gets an extra process layer, called ‘gpu process’. This process gets graphics jobs from the render engine and handles them using the DirectX or OpenGL api. For security reasons, Google would have deliberately chosen to run the new GPU process in a sandbox, so that Chrome’s rendering system cannot directly access the graphics APIs.

The latest builds of Chrome 7 already contain experimental parts of the gpu accelerated compositingsystem, where currently video layers and WebGL elements can be handled by the GPU. Text and other 2D elements are still processed via the CPU, but development around GPU rendering is said to be rapid since Google has stepped up the pace of new Chrome releases. As a result, the open source browser from Google may be available before the official release of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 with GPU rendering. Whether it will pass Firefox 4, which is currently in beta round 4, is less likely.

The Chrome developers also have a Labs section in Chrome 7 hidden, a name for a test environment that is also used in Gmail. Windows users can access a test page that mentions ‘side-tabs’ after entering ‘about:labs’ in the address bar. All tabs are displayed vertically on the left side of the browser window. Mac users will see ‘tab expose’ here. This component should be a variant of OS X’s Exposé, while the Labs window for Linux users remains empty for the time being. At the moment, the functions do not work yet, but Google will probably activate them in the short term.