Aug 20, 2011 10:30 GMT  ·  By

Google Chrome 15 is now available for Chromebook owners, part of the dev channel. As Google Chrome 14 graduated to the beta channel of Chrome OS, the latest version is now available, several days after it became available to everyone else.

"The Google Chrome team is happy to announce the release of Chrome 15.0.855.0 (Platform version: 916.0) on the Dev Channel for Chromebooks (Acer AC700, Samsung Series 5, and Cr-48)," Josafat Garcia, Google Chrome, announced.

Google Chrome 15 doesn't come with too many new things, it's too early in the development cycle, and the one thing that's new isn't all that great.

The big new feature in Google Chrome 15, so far, is the redesigned new tab page. It's a lot slicker than the one that's replacing, but it loses points on usability.

There is now a three-pane layout, one for most visited sites, one for apps and one for bookmarks, which means that you're going to have to do a lot more clicking to get to the things you want.

That's not the only thing to consider if you're running the dev channel version of Chrome OS, the latest update comes with some known issues as well, the File Browser Multi-media player is broken and 3G activation takes longer than it should for those with Gobi 3K and 2k modems.

Still, these bugs should be fixed soon enough and there's probably no reason to switch channels just yet. If you do decide you want something a bit more stable, Google Chrome 14 is now in the Chrome OS Beta channel.

Google Chrome 14.0.835.98 is part of Chrome OS 0.14.811.47 and is now available to all Chromebook owners. It's the same version that Google pushed to the dev channel earlier this week. While there were some known bugs, it seems that Google deemed it stable enough to move it up the ranks to the beta channel.