Nov 3, 2010 11:20 GMT  ·  By
The Google Chrome dev channel has been updated to a recent Chromium 9.0.570.0 build
   The Google Chrome dev channel has been updated to a recent Chromium 9.0.570.0 build

The Google Chrome team has just pushed a fresh update to the dev channel, the first official release of Google Chrome 9. With the beta and stable channel now on version parity and both providing Google Chrome 7, you may have realized that, at this moment, there is no official Google Chrome 8 release.

Those that follow Google Chrome development pretty closely, will know that this is just a temporary thing since the Google Chrome 8 beta should be landing very, very soon, perhaps later today or at the very latest before the end of the work week.

When the Chrome team is ready to graduate a dev channel version to the beta channel, it usually waits to get the beta out first before updating dev channel users to the most recent Chromium build.

This time, it was the other way around, the dev channel is now at Google Chrome 9.0.570.0, but the Chrome 8.0.552.xx beta is not available yet.

One possible explanation is that, while the beta release is ready, the team is waiting for a Flash Player update, which is scheduled to be available tomorrow.

Google Chrome bundles the Flash Player plugin and always comes with the most recent version. Google probably didn't want to launch the Chrome 8 beta only to have to update it a day or two later.

The stable version of Google Chrome 8 should be landing at the end of the month, if the team is able to keep up with the six-weeks development cycle which has been recently introduced. It has managed to do it so far so there's no reason to doubt this.

Google Chrome 8 comes with a number of new features and improvements, granted some have been pulled to ensure stability. You can check out a list of things to expect in Chrome 8 here and the features that have been pushed to Chrome 9 here.

With the first official release of Google Chrome 9 available now, you can expect a beta in about six weeks time and a stable version in early 2011.


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.