Google Develops Hardware Accelerated Chrome UI

News
By Wolfgang Gruener
published

Google has revealed first details about a new Chrome user interface that has been in development for some time, but has remained a mystery until this past weekend.

The company currently develops the Aura window manager, which will take advantage of hardware acceleration capabilities to display an advanced interface in Chrome and Chrome OS.

A recently posted wiki page and a Chromium project page describe Aura as "a new accelerated user interface framework for Chrome UI" which "must offer rich visuals, large-scale animated transitions and effects that can be produced only with the assistance of hardware acceleration."

There isn't much detail and not even mockups beyond basic window buttons such as restore, maximize and minimize at this time, but the Chromium revision blog is, with more than 400 changes to Aura over the past two months, an indication that Google is working on a major new feature.

The new interface will mark a departure from the Gtk toolkit, which has been used for Chrome's interface so far and may take Chrome much closer to a platform that can compete with (and possibly go beyond) Windows in a cloud environment. Google said that its main goals for the initial release of Aura is cross-platform code for a "flexible windowing system" on multiple form factors. The company said that it will initially not support multiple monitors and there will not be software rendering support for remote desktop capability.

Wolfgang Gruener
8 Comments Comment from the forums
  • anonymous_user
    If it departs from GTK, does that mean it will no longer have an integrated appearance in Linux? I really like that it has the option of using the system theme and icons. It makes it look much more like a native application.
    Reply
  • lockhrt999
    Finally!!! Chrome feels very slow when I have more than 50 tabs opened. I think hardware acceleration is there in FF since its 3rd version.
    Reply
  • de5_Roy
    veery chromeulent.
    no i don't know what that word means. :D
    Reply
  • kaisellgren
    I hope this means that we get better tab management. I hate having 30+ tabs open, and I especially hate launching the browser with those tabs as it tries to load all of them at the same time. Plus, this should mean better hardware acceleration in general which is welcome because Chrome is lagging behind IE and Fx in terms of hardware acceleration.
    Reply
  • Ichy
    hardware accelerations is great and all, but I would like to see a more robust download manager. One with the capabaility to pause downloads, close the browser, and still be able to resume the download. If their is a extension for this, please let me know. I do feel that even if the later is true, it should still be a built in function- FF has something similar btw.
    Reply
  • Ichy
    ichywith the capabaility to pause downloads, close the browser, and still be able to resume the downloadStupid none editable comments- the last part isn't to clear. I ment being able to resume the download after the browser had been reopened. say in the instance of a crash, the browswer closes while downloading a file. Once one reopens their browser, the dl has to start over from scratch- very annoying.
    Reply
  • dreamer77dd
    This is also going to be used in Chrome and linux version? Are they both getting these updates? Mornings grrr need more coffee.
    Reply
  • TheGuardian
    lockhrt999Finally!!! Chrome feels very slow when I have more than 50 tabs opened. I think hardware acceleration is there in FF since its 3rd version.When does GPU acceleration ever slow something down??
    Reply