Aug 9, 2011 09:28 GMT  ·  By

While Google Chrome 14 is on its way from the dev channel to the beta channel - a Chrome 14 beta should be landing very soon - the Chrome team is working on the very latest update, Chrome 15 which is coming to the dev channel shortly, but is only available as Chromium for now.

The latest updates include many under-the-hood tweaks and enhancements, but also some user interface improvements, especially for Mac OS X, Lion in particular, as well as a few other capabilities.

As developer Peter Beverloo reports in his weekly round-up, there are quite a few new things in the latest Chromium 15 builds.

One change that no user will probably notice directly is the switch to Clang from GCC for compiling the source code for the Chromium and Chrome binary builds. Clang is the LLVM front-end for C, C++ and Objective C.

The change will only affect Chrome 15 and beyond and should result in smaller binary files. This is of no importance to regular users, but compile times should be significantly smaller after the switch as well.

The latest Chromium 15 builds incorporate two full-screen modes for Mac OS X Lion to support the new full-screen feature introduced in the latest OS X update.

There is a native-looking mode, which maximizes the browser but still keeps the dock visible, as well as the existing 'true' full-screen mode, which gets rid of the entire UI as well as the dock. The form-validation UI has also been updated for Mac builds.

There are also more changes to the multi-profile UI, new icons have been included and the option only shows up now if users have created more than one profile, even if multi-profile support is enabled, which it isn't by default.

As Google announced last week, there have also been some updates designed to support Web Intents, a framework for web apps which enables them to delegate tasks to another app, without any prior knowledge of it.