Updates include QuickTime plugin, printing, better keyboard shortcuts

Oct 23, 2009 08:49 GMT  ·  By

According to the development team behind Google Chrome, this week, “Printing and the QuickTime plugin make their initial appearance on Chrome for Mac,” while “lots of important Extensions changes and quite a few bugs are also fixed.” Users are advised to also read the Known Issues if they are running the browser on a Mac.

As usual, the Chrome Dev Channel first lists changes for all supported platforms (Mac, Windows and Linux), with the development team noting that CSS rounded corners are now antialiased on Windows and Linux, a feature previously enabled on Mac OS X.

On the Mac side, printing now works, the developer claims. Autoupdates no longer cause problems if Chrome is already running, while hitting backspace with an active IME no longer goes back in history, according to the release notes. “The QuickTime plugin no longer crashes,” another line reads, “and often displays properly (though there are still bugs to be ironed out).” The plugin whitelist has been removed, so that Chrome will attempt to load all NPAPI plugins, Google’s developers add. They also say that users should expect more plugin crashes from now on. As for keyboard shortcuts, the Ctrl-tab switches tabs again, and Cmd-` switches windows again.

As noted above, the Dev Channel also lists a bunch of known issues. Mac users in particular need to be aware of them, going by Google’s blog post. The issues include: if an older version of Chrome is running when this version is automatically installed, the running version will not quit cleanly and will spike the CPU at 100%; according to the developers, it will be necessary to Force Quit the application (Cmd-Option-Escape to open the Force Quit dialog); Cmd-opt-left/right navigate history instead of switching tabs (use cmd-{/} as workaround). One Linux-specific issue still looms. According to the changelog, some fonts may look blurry or extra bold.

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