14 DAY TRIAL // A few days after Google Chrome 7 stable was released and before the Google Chrome 8 beta, the first sightings of Chrome 9 are already here. Chromium 9 is now available, specifically, Chromium 9.0.562.0 and above have the elevated major version number.
What this means is that the development cycle for Google Chrome 9 has officially begun, though it may take as long as a couple of weeks before a dev channel build is released.
Chrome developers are currently working on the Chrome 8 beta which may land as early as next week. This makes sense since the Google Chrome 7 beta has been graduated to the stable channel this week.
Beta channel users are now, essentially, running the same version as the stable channel ones. This happens every time a new stable version is pushed, but this time around, they won't be stuck like this for too long and should get updated to Google Chrome 8 next week.
The stable version of Google Chrome 8 should land by the end of November, which means that Google Chrome 9 may be available by the end of the year, though that would be even faster than the new six-weeks development cycle Google recently switched to.
Users who want to have the latest and greatest but would rather not mess around with Chromium, the open-source browser on which Chrome is based, essentially a development snapshot, will probably have to wait until the first few days of November, or the final days of October at the earliest, right after the current dev channel branch, Chrome 8.0.552.xx will be pushed to the beta channel.
As for what to expect from Google Chrome 9, the one sure thing is full support for hardware acceleration. Chrome 7 comes with some accelerated features, Chrome 8 adds some more, like experimental support for hardware accelerated Canvas elements, but it won't be until Chrome 9 that Google completes the list.