14 DAY TRIAL // The first Chrome 7 Beta has arrived. Google Chrome 7.0.517.24 has been graduated from the dev channel to the beta channel. The Google team has been working on polishing this build for the past few of weeks and it has been labeled stable enough for a beta release.
"The Beta channel has been updated to 7.0.517.24 for Windows, Mac, Linux and Chrome Frame," Google Chrome's Anthony Laforge wrote in the rather lackluster announcement.
It's safe to say that the more eager Chrome users will be disappointed since the latest beta doesn't really bring anything new compared to the previous one.
There have been some improvements in performance, JavaScript and otherwise, and a number of bugs have been fixed, but it's certainly not as big an upgrade as the Chrome 6 beta.
In fact, some users have been taken a bit by surprise by the lack of new features and have voiced their concerns in the announcement's comments section.
Laforge then added that most of the changes are under the hood and that the improvements may not be immediately noticeable in the first Chrome 7 beta.
"A lot of the work that's being done in 7.0 is largely not user facing and in some cases is a legitimate work in progress. With our new release cycle and about:labs, I'd suggest you stay tuned, things are going to start moving quite fast," he said.
A couple of the upcoming features he is referring to are the Chrome Web Store and hardware acceleration. The Web Store is slated for launch soon and the team has been making the necessary changes and updates to fully support web apps, in the way Google envisioned them.
Hardware acceleration support has been one of the hot topics around, ever since the IE9 beta was released. While Google Chrome 7 Beta doesn't have full hardware acceleration enabled by default, it does have some of the components which can be enabled via command-line switches.
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.