From the first Windows beta to the first stable release for all platforms

May 26, 2010 08:48 GMT  ·  By

Google Chrome has come a very long way since it was first released. It’s several times faster, boasts a feature set more than comparable with Firefox and the general level of polish has gone way up. No wonder then that Google believes its browser is ready to shed the beta label on all the platforms it’s available on and has released a stable version for Windows, Mac and Linux. With Google Chrome 5.0.375.55, all three platforms are finally on equal footing.

Considering how much Chrome has evolved since the first release, especially for Mac and Linux, it seems like the Google browser has been around for quite a long time. But Google Chrome is just a year and a half old. The first Chrome beta for Windows landed on September 2nd, 2008, a date now considered its official birthday.

That first release was fast, something that would become Chrome’s calling card, certainly had an innovative interface and some interesting features, but it wasn’t for everyone. It was a bare-bones browser, fully functional at its core, but lacking some pretty big features that most other browsers had.

Google is known for iterating fast and often and Chrome evolved faster than any other competing web browser. By December of that year, a stable build for Windows was released. Again, in terms of features, it was a bit lacking, but the build quality was solid enough to label it as stable.

Things were looking great for Windows users, but everyone else was still waiting for the chance to try out the new browser. That chance came almost a year ago to the day when, on June 4th, 2009, Google finally released a developer preview build of Chrome for Linux and Mac. While there were ways of running Chrome, or rather Chromium, on Mac and Linux before, this was the first time Google put its seal of approval, and branding, on it.

The initial dev channel Chrome releases were far from ready for everyday use, but they were enough to give people a taste of things to come. Within a couple of months, though, Chrome on all platforms was pretty much on par and very usable on Mac and Linux as well. Still, it wasn’t until December 2009, a year after the first stable release, that Google revealed the beta versions of Chrome for the two alternative platforms.

At that point, Google Chrome was almost on equal footing on all platforms. Extensions, one of the big new features of that beta release, weren’t available on the Mac version, but everything else worked like it should. With a beta version for all platforms and an online extensions repository, Google Chrome adoption took off in the following months.

Which brings us to today, when Google felt Chrome was finally ready for a stable release on all three supported platforms. It released Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 for Windows, Mac and Linux, the first time the version number for a major release was the same on all builds. What’s more, the user experience, apart from the platform-specific tweaks, is the same across the board as all versions come with the same feature set.

At this point, Google Chrome enjoys some 70 million users worldwide, far short of Firefox’s 370 million, but enough for it to jump past Apple’s Safari in market share. And with a solid feature set, stable releases on all platforms and the same development pace Google has imposed from the start, Chrome probably has a lot of growth ahead of it yet.

Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here. Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here. Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here.