14 DAY TRIAL // Two new releases of Google Chrome were made available for download the past week, pushing forward the browser on two of the development fronts it is advancing on. The Mountain View search giant delivered updates to both the Dev and Beta channels of Chrome, offering early adopters new builds to test-drive. In this regard, testers have been able to download Chrome 5.0.342.2, through the Dev Channel, and 4.1.249.1025, through the Beta channel.
Chrome 5.0.342.2 was offered exclusively to Windows users, and is designed to deal with a problem introduced by a previous build, namely 5.0.342.1. Last week, Google updated Chrome Dev to 5.0.342.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms and also pushed ChromeFrame to 5.0.342.0. However, following the release of 5.0.342.1, testers began to report issues accessing their emails via Gmail in offline scenarios.
“Windows has been updated to 5.0.342.2 to fix the Crash related to offline Gmail. Known issues: Gears should work on Win7 x64,” Karen Grunberg, from the Google Chrome team, revealed. Just a day later, the search giant offered a new release of Chrome Beta for Windows. “The Google Chrome Beta channel for Windows has been updated to 4.1.249.1025. This release fixes a few UI and stability issues: Cookie Manager, translate infobar, and performance improvements,” Orit Mazor, Google Chrome Team, stated.
Both 5.0.342.2 and 4.1.249.1025 are new steps Google is making toward delivering the next versions of Chrome. According to the search giant, the 4.0 Stable version will be followed by v4.1, a minor update that delivers five features, such as the integration of Google’s machine translation technology. At the same time, Chrome 5 is designed to be the next major release of the open source browser, and a version that will be offered by the end of 2010, considering the rapid development pace imposed by Google.
Google Chrome 5.0.342.2 is available for download here. Google Chrome 4.1.249.1025 Beta is available for download here.