Google Chrome’s stable channel has got an update today which brings Chrome 18 with many new features. The highlights of Chrome 18 are faster graphics support and over nine bug fixes.

SwiftShader & Canvas2D

With Chrome 18, users can enjoy basic 3D content even on older computers and configurations. For this, Google has integrated SwiftShader technology in Chrome which is now enabled by default. The SwiftShader is a software rasterizer developed by TransGaming and it automatically kicks-in for the users who can’t run content on the GPU.

On Capable (read modern) systems, GPU-accelerated Canvas2D has been enabled in this release. Canvas2D specification defines the 2D Context for the HTML canvas element, and hence enables game developers to create more rich content for the web.

These two additions make Chrome a much faster platform for online gaming and rich media content developed on WebGL. Along with these graphics features, Chrome 18 fixes over nine critical issues related with XSS, SVG text handling, SPDY proxy certificate checking etc. Content Security Policy is another important feature enabled in Chrome 18. Although, it will land gradually to avoid issues with older extensions.