Chrome 7 Shows Off Hardware Acceleration, ‘Tabpose’

Though Chrome 6 is still in beta, Google is showing off a few features of the even shinier, if not a bit further off, Chrome 7.

Check it:

(via WebMonkey)

Chrome 7, which is currently available in developer build form, is the latest browser to take advantage of hardware acceleration. Chrome’s tightly sandboxed rendering model — which prevents web pages from interacting directly with the OS — means that hardware acceleration is a little more difficult for Google than it is for IE or Firefox.

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Hardware acceleration isn’t the only new trick up Chrome’s sleeve. The Mac version of the browser is also experimenting with something Google calls “Tab Overview” or Tabpose. Tabpose is similar to Mac OS X’s Expose; it allows you to visually pull back and see all your tabs as thumbnails and quickly switch between them.

Chrome 5 is currently the shipping version and Chrome 6 — which features a considerably sexier interface — is currently in beta. Thus far Google has not confirmed any release dates for Chrome 6, nor when Chrome 7 will move to beta status.

However, if you’d like to test the early builds of Chrome with hardware acceleration, you can do so now right here. Grab the latest developer build of Chrome 7 and launch it from the command line with the new --enable-accelerated-compositing flag.

You can also grab the beta of Google Chrome 6 here.