14 DAY TRIAL // Google’s software engineers have churned up new versions of their open source web browser, Chrome, updating the software on all fronts, including Mac OS X.
The Stable and Beta channels have been updated to version 14.0.835.186 only to address a zero-day vulnerability within Flash Player.
The new builds contain updated version of Adobe’s Flash plugin, keeping users on the safe side.
The Dev channel, on the other hand, is a different matter altogether. Here, version 15.0.874.21 brings quite a few changes, including new features that are exclusive to Mac users.
Affecting all platforms (Mac, Windows, Linux, Chrome Frame), are a bunch of bug fixes.
Google has fixed a bug that caused a crash if you tried to use the speech input keystroke (Ctrl+Shift+Period) on a (non-speech-enabled) textarea, as well as numerous other known stability issues.
On the Mac front, notable additions include a bubble UI to notify the user when a page requests fullscreen mode.
The people maintaining Chrome for Mac were also able to squash a bug where “pages requesting fullscreen mode on OS X Lion would put the browser into fullscreen mode rather than presentation mode,” according to the release notes.
If the latest new additions work out fine, Google should be releasing Chrome 16 on the Dev channel as soon as next week.
In this respect, the Beta and Stable channels would be promoted to version 15.
To be noted that only Stable builds of Chrome are to be relied upon.
However, if you cannot resist testing out the latest alpha versions of Chrome, we recommend making a backup of all your bookmarks, passwords and other sensitive data before proceeding.
Chrome for Mac requires an Intel-based computer with at least 128 MB of RAM and roughly 100 MB of free hard disk space.