14 DAY TRIAL // Google Chrome’s popularity keeps on rising with more and more people switching to the lightweight, Google-powered web browser. Now that the stable Google Chrome is available for Linux, there’s no reason not to try it out for yourself. Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 is the first stable release for the Linux platform and is the fastest and most feature-rich Chrome yet. With a lot of work going into the fit and finish, Google finally believes it has a rock-solid browser for the Linux crowd.
“Since the initial beta release of Google Chrome for Linux last December, we've been hard at work adding the polish necessary to upgrade the browser to our stable channel,” Evan Stade and Elliot Glaysher, software engineers at Google, wrote in the announcement on the Chromium blog.
“From the early porting days of layout test fixing, deep and hairy posix and raw X11 code, to designing a truly native UI and building a host of new and polished features, we’re thrilled to work with the larger community to deliver a fast, stable, secure, and sophisticated browser,” they added.
If you were running the latest Google Chrome beta, you’ll see absolutely no changes in the stable release. After extensive testing, Google found it to be ready to shed the beta label and released it as it was. If you haven’t tested Chrome for a while, or maybe never, there’s plenty to like.
Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 is fast, JavaScript performance is several times better than it was in the first dev-channel releases for Linux, not to mention the first beta release for Windows. It also rocks a fully native GTK-based UI but with all the tweaks and quirks, you’d expect from Chrome. Of course, you can use Google’s native theme if GTK is not cutting it for you, or you can choose from the online gallery from hundreds of themes.
Google Chrome comes with support for browser extensions and a surprisingly large online repository of user-created ones. One of the main reason people still hold on to Firefox is the large collection of add-ons they’ve gathered over the years, yet most would be surprised by how many of those add-ons have their equivalents for Google Chrome. And now, extensions work in Incognito mode as well, Chrome’s private browsing feature.
Another relatively recent addition to Google Chrome is the sync feature, which enables users to synchronize not only their bookmarks, but also their preferences and even themes. All of this is built in, but requires a Google account to store the data online.
Of course, HTML5 support is very solid in Google Chrome, with some of the latest improvements being support for the Geolocation APIs, App Cache and file drag-and-drop. The Adobe Flash Player integration Google has introduced to testing releases of Chrome is not enabled by default in the stable release. This is partially because Chrome comes with a beta version of the upcoming Flash Player 10.1. However, Google says that this will change once Flash Player 10.1 final is released, a great addition for Linux users tired of flaky Flash support on their favorite operating system.
Google Chrome 5.0 is available for download here on Softpedia.
