14 DAY TRIAL // Google is getting ready for the regular three channel push for Google Chrome. Google Chrome 17 should be landing in the dev channel next week, the week after that at the latest.
In the meantime, Chrome 16 will be pushed to the beta channel and Chrome 15 will be made available to the 200 million people using the Google browser worldwide.
The latest Chromium builds are already labeled as Chromium 17. At the same time, the Chrome dev channel build is seeing only minor increments, going from Chrome 16.0.912.0 to Chrome 16.0.912.4.
That's the usual sign that the team has shifted from new features to focusing on bug fixes to get Chrome 16 ready for the beta channel.
Whichever Chrome you use, the next week or so promises to bring new features and capabilities, plus plenty of fixes for the unstable channels.
The big launch will be Google Chrome 15 stable, that's the one that will affect the most people. Probably the most visible change in Chrome 15 is the revamped New Tab Page.
The redesigned New Tab Page looks a lot slicker than the current one Chrome stable users get, but it's been rather buggy as well. The latest tweaks to the new tab page have removed the hated Bookmarks section and brought back the bookmarks bar, from the previous version of the NTP.
The bookmarks section proved rather buggy, but that was fixable, the bigger problem was that people really wanted their bookmarks to be reachable the first time they open a new tab page, regardless of which section they used last, Apps, Most Visited or Bookmarks.
Of course, the NTP is not the only thing that's new in Chrome 15, there are plenty of other, albeit smaller, new features landing as well. Expect a big announcement coming soon.
At the same time, those wanting to stay on the cutting edge have more things to play with as new features are introduced in Chrome 16 and, of course, the upcoming Chrome 17. There are plenty of experimental ones in particular, available from chrome://flags and not enabled by default.