14 DAY TRIAL // Google continues to produce a flood of minor and major releases of its open source browser, sprinkled with a multitude of pre-release, Dev and Beta Builds, with the latest bits offered on October 13th, 2010, for early adopters testing Chrome 7.0. Google Chrome 7.0 is now up to Build 7.0.517.41 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, with Chrome Frame also having received a bump to version 7.0.517.41.
The Mountain View-based search giant did promise earlier this year that it would increase the pace at which it is delivering both minor updates and major upgrades to Chrome, indicating that users will be able to enjoy new features more rapidly as the release process was accelerated.
So far, the last Stable version of Chrome remains 6.0, with v7.0 in Beta, and Chrome 8.0 having graduated to the Dev channel.
But so far, the flood of Chrome releases is not accompanied by a flood of new features. Both Chrome 7.0.517.41 Beta and Chrome 8.0.552.0 Dev offered this week are designed to fix issues with the browser, rather than introduce major changes.
“There were only a few minor fixes in this release, specifically around plugin loading and crashes,” Anthony Laforge, from the Google Chrome team noted, speaking about Chrome 7.0.517.41 Beta.
In fact, the largest number of new features was introduced in Chrome at the end of September 2010 with the advent of Chrome 7.0.536.2 Dev for Windows, Mac, Linux.
It was at that time that Google had kicked up a notch hardware acceleration for Chrome 7.0.
Early adopters testing pre-release versions of Chrome are undoubtedly aware that the search giant enabled accelerated compositing and support for 3D CSS transforms by default in Chrome 7.0.536.2 Dev, as well as also switching on WebGL.
As far as hardware acceleration is concerned, Google still has to hammer away at Chrome in order to catch up with Internet Explorer 9, which was released in Beta in mid-September 2010.
Google Chrome 7.0 Beta and 6.0 Stable for Windows are available for download here.
Google Chrome 8.0 Dev for Windows is available for download here.
Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) Beta is available for download here.