14 DAY TRIAL // Some GUI features have been removed from the latest development build of Google Chrome, with the Mountain View-based search giant indicating that it needs to do additional testing before implementation. Early adopters can now download Google Chrome 5.0.375.17 for Windows and Mac OS X, through the Dev channel, and those already familiar with past version 5 testing releases will notice a few changes. Essentially, Google has decided to remove some features, impacting the UI.
Chrome 5.0.375.17 comes with “disabled profile based Autofill (this will return in a future release). Various UI features related to the url bar/ omnibox have been removed from this release (e.g. http:// truncation, star icon, etc...). We are currently examining ways to address the usability issues that were raised and plan to reintroduce in a future release,” Anthony Laforge, Google Chrome, reveals. “We have restored the shortcuts for the bookmarks bar and bookmarks manager (Ctrl+B and Ctrl+Shift+B respectively).”
The graphical user interface features haven’t been removed completely, instead, they have only been postponed to a later Dev channel release of Chrome. “Changes to the omnibox, toolbar buttons, window shape, default theme color, new tab animation, autofill, and possibly other things are going to be postponed to M6 so we can spend more time testing, polishing and tweaking them,” a member of the Chromium-dev team explains.
Because the UI features were temporarily reverted, the bugs associated with them will also be retargeted. Still, the promise from Google is that all the features removed will be making a comeback in future releases of Chrome. “We expect to ship one or two Dev releases without these, to ensure we've gotten rid of everything we need to, and at that point the reverts will themselves be reverted (i.e. the trunk will regain all the changes, so we can continue to work on them), while the branch for M5 will continue on without them,” the Chromium-dev team representative adds.
The latest Dev channel release of Google Chrome 5.0 is available for download here.