14 DAY TRIAL // Chrome 11.0.696.50 Beta is now available from Google’s servers for all supported platforms, including Mac OS X, with bug fixes for some of the recently reported issues, including inconsistency of the Flash plugin.
Karen Grunberg of the Google Chrome team announces in a blog post that “The Beta channel has been updated to 11.0.696.50 for Macintosh, Windows, Linux and Chrome Frame platforms.”
According to Grunberg, the developers have been busy fixing a number of bugs that plagued the open source web browser, including one that prevented the Adobe Flash plug-in to load until the tab got activated.
Prior to version 11.0.696.50, going to settings from notification popup crashed Chrome.
Other changes include the disables speech input for readonly and disabled input fields, renamed Blob.slice to Blob.webkitSlice (changed it to take start and end parameters), and renamed BlobBuilder to WebKitBlobBuilder.
More details on the latter change can be found here.
Chrome fans are encouraged to visit the SVN revision log, as well as the bug reporter, to learn more about this release, or submit bugs, respectively.
To run Chrome, folks using a Mac will require an Intel-based computer with Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard or OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard (all incremental versions are supported, including Mac OS X 10.6.7), a minimum 128 MB of RAM, and roughly 100 MB of free hard disk space.
As usual, all available versions of Chrome for Mac (Dev, Beta, Stable) can be downloaded using the link below.
Download Google Chrome for Mac OS X (Free)
A note about Google Chrome release channels and updates
Google Chrome uses a release system with three distinct channels: Stable, Beta, and Developer preview, called the "Dev" channel.
The Stable channel is updated with features and fixes only after they are thoroughly tested in the Beta channel, while the Beta channel is updated with stable and complete features from the Dev channel, where ideas get tested.