14 DAY TRIAL // A new testing release of Chrome 9.0 is available for download, but unfortunately, it’s not the first Beta development milestone of the next iteration of Google’s open source browser.
Not that Chrome 9.0 Beta is that far off, with the Build planned for delivery any day now.
Still, it appears that the Mountain View-based search giant has found a few more rough edges to fix before Chrome 9.0 is ready to ship to the public for testing.
In this regard, early adopters can now play with a new Dev channel Build of Chrome 9.0. “The Dev channel has been updated to 9.0.597.10 for Windows, Mac, and Chrome Frame,” revealed Anthony Laforge, Technical Program Manager, from the Google Chrome team.
Obviously, Chrome 9.0.597.10 is just a minor update compared to the previous Dev Channel release, being focused on delivering a few changes to issues which affected version 9.0.587.0.
According to Laforge, Chrome 9.0.597.10 Dev is designed to introduce “primarily stability fixes and minor UI tweaks, no new features or functionality have been added.”
It’s important to note that Chrome 9.0.597.10 Dev is still a pre-release version of Chrome 9.0 meant for testing. Customers should avoid deploying this release into production, as there are still problems they will inevitably come across.
Such as this regression issue: “certain sites fail to render the first time. The temporary workaround is to re-load the page.”
But early adopters will still get to play with Chrome 9.0 Beta ahead of the end of 2010, especially considering the evolution of the Beta and Stable Channels.
At the start of December 2010, Google shipped Chrome 8.0.552.215 Stable, and at the same time, pushed the Beta of the open source browser up to version 8.0.552.215 as well.
But make no mistake about it, the Beta Channel won’t be serving version 8.0 for much longer, as it will evolve to v9.0.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here.
Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.