The latest release adds multi-profile support by default

Sep 24, 2011 08:31 GMT  ·  By

Google Chrome 16 is here, after a couple of weeks available only as the open source Chromium, and as the experimental Google Chrome Canary Builds, the latest and greatest Chrome is available for dev channel users, the bravest early adopters.

With only a couple of weeks of development behind it, there's not much setting Chrome 16 apart from Chrome 15 at this point, but you can expect more new features as things progress and Chrome becomes more mature.

"The Dev channel has been updated to 16.0.889.0 for Windows, Mac and Chrome Frame. Due to known bug, Linux isn't updated," Dharani Govindan, Google Chrome, announced.

Here are the fixes and updates compared to the previous release:

- Updated V8 - 3.6.4.0; - FTP: fixed compatibility with servers which send 451 response for CWD command; - Windows and Mac: Enabled multi-users (multi-profiles) by default; - Fixed many known stability issues.

Maybe it's just a coincidence, but it looks like Linux users are becoming second class citizens for Google.

You'd expect that, with Chrome OS being based on Linux, although there are big differences between it and traditional Linux distro, Google would be more careful with the platform, or at least have more resources dedicated to it.

Whatever the case, Linux users don't get to enjoy Google Chrome 16 just yet, though this should be temporary. That said, Google Chrome 15 already has a very poor track record on Linux and several builds were released with some major usability bugs.

Still, everyone else gets to enjoy the new release which comes with a few new features already.

Support for multiple profiles has been enabled by default again, after being disabled for Chrome 15 due to stability issues. The team hopes to ship multi-profile support with Chrome 16 now.

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.