14 DAY TRIAL // One day after it pushed Chrome 5 all the way to Beta stage, Google released a new build of the open source browser via the Dev channel. For the time being, Chrome’s Dev channel continues to serve version 5 of the browser, although the search giant is bound to make the jump to a superseding iteration, as it starts defining the next major release. Early adopters running Windows, Mac, and Linux can now download Build 5.0.396.0 of Chrome through the Dev channel.
In the second half of April 2010, the Mountain View-based search giant released Google Chrome 5.0.375.17, a Build that came with a few reverted features in terms of the graphical user interface. Google promised at the time that, once it had dealt with a few issues affecting the browser, the evolution of the UI would be brought back to normal. This happened with Chrome 5.0.396.0.
“The toolbar, omnibox and other UI changes reverted for Chrome 5 have been restored in this build. Fixed bug related to scheme stripping that could cause URLs of the form 'http://ftp.foo.com' to be misnavigated, by not stripping the scheme in this case. Many bugs fixed relating to stripping 'http://' and its interaction with the clipboard. Chrome should now prepend schemes onto the pasted text in a variety of situations,” a member of the Google Chrome team revealed.
Testers got more than their fill this week, with Beta releases coming from all major browser makers. Earlier this week, Microsoft released Platform Preview 2 of Internet Explorer 9, pushing the successor of IE8 one step further in terms of the development process. At the same time, there are new releases from Opera and Mozilla, namely a development snapshot of Opera 10.54 and a new Beta Build of the next update for v3.6, Firefox 3.6.4.
The latest Dev channel release of Google Chrome 5.0 is available for download here. Google Chrome 5.0 Beta for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 3.6.4 Beta is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Platform Preview 2 Build 1.9.7766.6000 is available for download here. The latest release of Opera 10.54 for Windows is available for download here.