14 DAY TRIAL // The latest development milestone of Google’s open source browser brings to the table a variety of changes, impacting all flavors of Chrome. The Mountain View-based search giant made available for download Chrome Build 5.0.371.0 through the Dev channel for all supported platforms. As it is the case with the Beta variant of Chrome 5, the Dev releases of version 5 are synchronized in terms of development and availability, with testers running Windows, Mac OS X and Linux all being able to take Build 5.0.371.0 out for a spin.
According to Anthony Laforge, from the Google Chrome team, Chrome 5.0.371.0 offers “Geolocation support; fixed bug where HTML5 audio/video elements stopped firing timeupdate events; WebGL is running inside the sandbox under the --enable-webgl flag (i.e. this no longer requires the --no-sandbox flag to run). Browsing with the --no-sandbox is dangerous and we strongly recommend that you not do it; [and] changes to the Omnibox (e.g. the bookmark star has moved, icon changes, etc...).”
At the same time, Google has updated the web browser engine on which Chrome is based. As you might already know, for Chrome, the Mountain View search giant tapped the WebKit Open Source Project for the underlying engine. With the advent of Google Chrome 5.0.371.0, WebKit has been bumped up a notch from r56820 to r57160.
Ahead of the delivery of Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview, there was a lot of speculation that Microsoft would also embrace WebKit, to the detriment of its own proprietary technology. The Redmond company dismissed such rumors on several occasions, but only with the delivery of Windows Internet Explorer Platform Preview, namely IE9 1.9.7.7.45.6019, did it manage to completely squash such speculation. IE9 1.9.7.7.45.6019 continues to have the Trident rendering engine at its foundation, but does feature a new JavaScript rendering engine, codenamed Chakra, which delivers JS performance almost on par with Chrome.
The latest versions of Google Chrome 5.0 are available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview is available for download here.