I’m sure you’ve all been waiting, hearts in your throats, to find out when Google will bring its fancy new Chrome browser to the Mac. Well that wait—the wait for finding out when the program is coming, not the wait for the browser itself—is over. So, er, I guess you could say the wait for the wait is over?
Last Friday, Google’s Brian Rakowski, who’s the product manager for Chrome, said that the browser, which internally just hit a new major milestone, is due out for Mac and Linux in the first half of this year. Sometime. Currently, the versions for those platforms are running at the very basic “test shell” level, meaning that they’ve still got a ways to go before they can do anything more than viewing web pages.
The latest development iterations of Chrome have added more features to the young browser, including autocomplete of URLs, full page zoom, browser profiles, better safe browsing, and the groundwork for eventually supporting browser extensions, a la Firefox. Newer versions of underlying technologies like WebKit and the V8 JavaScript engine got integrated as well. The company plans to release updates to the “stable” version of the browser approximately every quarter.
I’m intrigued to try a Mac-native version of Chrome, though I don’t know if it’ll knock out Safari, my current browser of choice. What about you, friendly neighborhood MacUser readers? Any interest?