14 DAY TRIAL // Mac users preferring Google’s open source web browser over the likes of Safari, or Firefox have a new developer build to try out. The beta and stable channels remain in place at version 12.
As usual, Anthony Laforge is proud to make the proper introductions on the Google Chrome Releases blog, announcing that “The Dev channel has been updated to 13.0.782.20 for Windows, Mac, Linux, and Chrome Frame.”
Affecting all platforms, including Mac OS X, “This release contains a number of stability fixes and we put hardware accelerated Canvas 2D back behind a flag,” Laforge reveals.
Testers interested in learning more about this release can visit the SVN revision log, as usual.
Those who find bugs are encouraged to use the bug reporter to explain to Google what needs to be fixed in the next release.
For example, one tester is reporting that Google is at the sixth developer release of Chrome that hasn’t been able to fix a crash that happens when multiple tabs are open.
“I usually only have a few tabs open, and every few minutes ALL OF THE TABS CRASH! This has been happening for the past five or six dev channel releases! PLEASE fix this!”, he writes.
Of course, users need to ensure they’ve provided Google technicians with all the information they need to address an issue.
For example, this issue could be Mac-specific, in which case the user needs to provide their exact hardware configuration, Mac OS version, and so on.
User Albert Kim adds, “still no compact navigation for mac users,” just to give you another example of what developer builds of Chrome are prone to.
As for the stable channel of Chrome, it recently reached version 12 with a number of new features and updates, including hardware accelerated 3D CSS, new Safe Browsing protection against downloading malicious files, and the ability to delete Flash cookies from inside Chrome.
Chrome 14.0 Dev is likely not far with Chrome 13.0 expected to enter beta relatively soon.