14 DAY TRIAL // With the holidays over, the Google Chrome team is back to work pushing updates to both the beta and the dev channel. Google Chrome 9.0.597.44 Beta is a new step towards the stable release of Google Chrome 9 which should be coming in the next couple of weeks. Google Chrome 10.0.628.0 Dev brings the dev channel in line to the Chromium releases, the most cutting edge Chrome builds.
"The Beta channel has been updated to 9.0.597.44 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame," Anthony Laforge from the Google Chrome team, announced.
"Flash Player sandboxing has been temporarily moved behind a flag --enable-flash-sandbox," he explained.
This being a beta release, the focus is on polish and bug-fixing so don't expect any new features. Unfortunately, you should expect a step backwards, since the Flash sandbox is no longer enabled by default.
Google doesn't provide any explanation for this, but it's likely that issues crept up during the beta testing and the feature was not deemed stable enough to be enabled by default.
This may be just a temporary measure, but it could potentially mean that Google Chrome 9 won't come with the Flash sandbox, as was previously expected.
Meanwhile, work on Google Chrome 10 is progressing. The latest update brings the latest version of the V8 JavaScript engine, V8 3.0.4.1. The core WebKit 534.16 web rendering engine is now included in the latest Google Chrome 10.
Native Client apps no longer work in Google Chrome 10.0.628.0. This is likely just a temporary issue. For now, this release is available for Windows and Linux only.
You can expect Google Chrome 10 to be the fastest Chrome release to date, as is always the case. Hardware acceleration should be better supported in the upcoming version. Cloud Print is also built into Google Chrome 10.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.