14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome has had a very busy week. The latest beta came out, the first to be released on all supported platforms, Windows, Mac and Linux, a major milestone for the project. Google also opened the doors to its Extensions Gallery, which is already proving rather popular. However, in order to make sure that the latest Chrome build was beta quality, the latest updates to the dev channel have been mostly small bug fixes.
In the meantime, the dev team was still working on a bunch of new features and the Chromium project was moving ahead. Now that the beta is out the door, the dev channel was also updated moving ahead quite a few builds from Chrome 4.0.249.33 straight to 4.0.266.0. Interestingly, the Mac build was held back as the team is still working on bringing extensions support on par with the other platforms.
“Initial implementation of the HTML5 sandbox attribute for iframes. Copying an image from a web page and pasting into Gmail now works. Spellchecker moved to renderer,” Orit Mazor from the Google Chrome team listed the updates for all platforms. “Fixed download dialog truncation in German locale. Fixed options panel truncation in various locales. Implement keyboard access between bookmarks and main toolbar” were the fixes specific to the Windows build. The Linux build also got several fixes.
After two major announcements in one week, the Chrome team could take it easy for a while, but it looks like things are moving at the same pace. With the full focus on the dev channel now, development should start picking up speed again, most likely after the holidays though, at least until it’s time for a new beta, probably towards the end of January 2010. In the meantime, Google is likely going to start pushing Chrome even more, now that it looks a lot more appealing for mainstream users, and if it can pull off ads like the great one it recently launched, it will definitely not go unnoticed for long.
Google Chrome 4.0.266.0 for Windows is available for download here.