Download Google Chrome 6.0.422.0 Dev WebM VP8 and 5.0.375.70 Beta

Concomitantly with the unveiling of the WebM open web media project, Google released a very early development preview of Chrome, actually a Chromium Build, with support for the new media file format designed for the Internet as both open and royalty-free. Since the second half of May 2010, the Mountain View-based search giant has been busy building support for WebM and the VP8 video codec in releases of Chrome, moving past just the Chromium project. Google Chrome 6.0.422.0 is the first example of the company’s work, a Dev channel release of Chrome for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux that plays nice with WebM and VP8.

For those unfamiliar with WebM, the project, backed by Google, Opera, Firefox, Adobe and others, is set up to define file container structure, and video and audio formats. However, the core of WebM is without a doubt VP8. With the advent of VP8, Google aims to settle once and for all the divergences over a single video codec that can be associated with HTML5.

For the time being, Google supports both Ogg Theora and H.264 with Chrome, while Microsoft and Apple have chosen H.264 for Internet Explorer 9 and Safari, with Opera Software and Mozilla making Opera and Firefox play nice with Ogg Theora. At the launch of WebM, Google, Opera and Mozilla all released versions of their browsers with support for VP8, and Microsoft announced that IE9 would also embrace VP8, but only through a codec installed in Windows.

With Chrome 6.0.422.0, Google makes an important step toward offering WebM VP8 by default to all users. Granted, Chrome 6.0 continues to be just a Dev Build, and there is still much work to be done until the browser version evolves to Beta and to the Stable channels. Still, considering the rapid pace at which the search giant is swapping one Stable release of Chrome for another, version 6.0 is bound not to take that long until it is finalized.

In addition, it appears that the Beta for Chrome 5.0 has made a comeback, even after the Mountain View-based company pushed the browser version to the Stable channel. At the end of May, Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 Stable was released for all three platforms supported. The latest iteration of the open source browser to be served through the Beta channel is Chrome 5.0.375.70. “Google Chrome 5.0.375.70 has been released to the Beta channel for Linux, Mac and Windows to fix some crash and stability issues,” Anthony Laforge, from the Google Chrome Team, revealed.

Google Chrome 6.0.422.0 Dev WebM VP8 is available for download here.

Google Chrome 5.0.375.70 Beta is available for download here.

Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 Stable is available for download here.