14 DAY TRIAL // Google is moving forward with the development process of its next major iteration of Chrome for the Windows platform. Early adopters can now download and start test-driving Google Chrome 5.0.342.3, which is also available for Mac OS X and Linux, since the Mountain View-based search giant has synchronized the releases for all supported platforms. Karen Grunberg, from the Google Chrome team, emphasized that the latest update of Chrome offered through the Dev channel brought to the table a variety of stability improvements.
In this regard, Chrome 5.0.342.3 now no longer crashes when end users will be opening Gmail in offline scenarios. At the end of February 2010, testers started reporting issues with accessing their emails offline in Gmail by using Chrome. According to reports, the open source browser would end up crashing instead of actually opening the Gmail messages offline.
In addition to the offline Gmail stability issues, Chrome 5.0.342.3 also resolves a number of additional crashers. Grunberg additionally warned that early adopters were bound to stumble upon a number of problems by running 5.0.342.3, including more crashes, especially in scenarios in which users would attempt to close down the browser while the Authentication dialog was still opened.
Google is moving fast with the development of its next versions of Chrome. In parallel with the next major iteration, v5, the search giant is also building a minor upgrade for the recently finalized v4.0. Testers are already also able to grab 4.1 releases through the Beta channel. At this point in time, Google has yet to indicate when the final variants of Chrome 4.1 and 5 will be offered to the general public. Still, judging by the rapid pace of development, Chrome users won’t have to wait all that long for the next versions of the open source browser.
The latest version of Google Chrome 5 is available for download here.
The latest release of Google Chrome Beta is available for download here.
Google Chrome 4.0.249.89 Stable for Windows is available for download here.