Google Earth 6: Better Street View and 3D Trees

Google Earth 6 doesn't have too many new features. You can now use Street View just like in Google Maps by dragging the pegman icon. "To view street-level imagery for a specific location, zoom into an area at an altitude of approximately 500km. You will see a pegman icon appear at the top right below the navigation controls. Click and drag the icon across the 3D viewer. A blue border will appear around roads that have street-level imagery available," explains Google.

Another new feature is the "3D Trees" layer that can be enabled from the "3D Buildings" section. Google Earth includes 3D models for city parks (San Francisco, Chicago, Tokio, Athens) and remote forests (Amazon Forest).

Historical imagery is now more accessible: just click on the date of the oldest imagery in the status bar and you'll be able to see all the historical images that are available for the same location.

Google Earth 6 also adds ground-level navigation that lets you explore 3D buildings and 3D trees, 3D measurements for heights and widths of buildings and a much better Tour Recorder that improves motion fidelity.

Google Earth Includes a Web Browser

Google Earth 5.2 no longer uses the operating system's web browser when you click on links. Google Earth comes with a WebKit-based browser, so you'll never have to leave the application to open a Wikipedia page or the website of a local business.

"Sometimes when you want more information, you may want to click through to a link to see the full Google Places page for a business, or learn more about a photographer whose photo you really enjoy. In the past, this has required opening a link in an external browser to see the full page. For Google Earth 5.2, we've added an embedded browser that lets you browse the full web. Click on a link, and the browser pane slides across the screen. When you want to return to the Earth view, just click the Back button," explains Google.



Apparently, Google Earth uses the Qt port of WebKit (QtWebKit) and it doesn't include the V8 Javascript engine from Google Chrome. I tried to run the V8 benchmark suite in Google Earth and the result was very poor: about 10 times lower than the latest Chromium build.

As in the previous versions, Google Earth for Windows and Mac also includes a plug-in that lets you embed a Google Earth view in any web page. Google Maps is the most popular service that lets you use Google Earth in your browser. Now you can browse the Web in Google Earth and use Google Earth in a Web browser.

If you don't like the embedded browser, you can disable it by going to Tools > Options > General and checking "Show web results in external browser".