Google News, Inside.

Chrome for Mac Latest Updates

Posted at 11:15am EST on 05/07/2009

Here are some of the latest updates for Google Chrome for Mac.

Week of Mar 29 – Apr 4

• Middle-click, command-click, and “open link in new tab” should now all correctly open a new tab without tab bar wonkiness.
• Starting to work on getting code coverage numbers
• Added a bit of hysteresis to start dragging a tab so they don’t fly off so easily
• Breakpad (Crash reporting) framework now fully open-sourced! Yay!
• Omnibox first-cut almost ready for landing…stay on target! Stay on target!
• Valgrind build running on waterfall bots

Some great updates, but still not a finished product. Chrome was announced a little under a year ago, and Chrome for Mac was promised in September 2009, but still no finished [or beta] product available.

Chrome definitely still has the buzz, in my opinion, of being a faster and better browser, but Apple is really doing the right things with Safari 4.

Apple is playing catch-up with Chrome before Firefox even begins to think about staying in the game. Chrome was released, then shortly after Apple released its Safari 4 beta with huge improvements to its JavaScript engine, putting it, in my mind, almost at par with Google Chrome.

If Apple’s Safari 4 is even close to par with Google Chrome once it’s released, Mac users will be far less likely to adopt Chrome and just stick with Safari.

Chrome for Mac is likely to be full of bugs too, in it’s initial release, while Safari has been through iteration after iteration of testing, making a bold statement that it’s a better browser for the OS X platform.

Google did a great job of launching Chrome for Windows and is having a wide-spread adoption of it, but has completely failed in the OS X market.