Google has released new developer builds of Chrome for Mac, Windows and Linux users, with a specific focus on the latter platform. Preliminary tests indicate that the Mac version has a few culprits, such as lag in scrolling and quite an appetite for memory.According to Dharani Govindan writing over at the Google Chrome Releases blog, “The Dev channel has been updated to 16.0.891.0 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome Frame.”
The Google program manager documents two Linux-specific changes. One has to do with the fact that Chrome devs have enabled Native Client for 32-bit Linux.
They were able to address a performance issue for Native Client on Intel Atom CPUs, according to the changelog.
Another change is about fixing proxy settings for fetching on Gnome 3 systems when glib2-dev package not installed, says Govindan.
For all supported platforms, including Mac OS X, this Chrome Dev release is said to have fixed many known stability issues.
While I wouldn’t dare contradict the changelog, it does appear that Chrome 16 doesn’t get along with OS X Lion all that well.
In fact, scrolling becomes a major pain in the neck when one reaches the far ends of a page - either the top, or the bottom - for one reason or another.
It may have to do with the ‘rubber-band’ behavior imposed by Lion which allows scrolling momentum to continue after the user has reached the end of a page.
Full-Screen mode also appears to kick in a bit slower now, but this may also have to do with the apparent memory drain.
Of course, Chrome 16 is Alpha-grade software (not even Beta), and this type of behavior is expected, especially since Google hasn’t much focused on the Mac with this particular build.
Needless to point out, future builds will improve every aspect of the browser on every platform, including Apple’s OS.
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