Chrome 5.0 Out of Beta Channel, Released for Windows, Mac and Linux
Mountain View-based search engine Google releases versions of its Chrome browser to three channels. Any Chrome version is first released to the dev channel. Then it makes its way to the Beta channel. Once all the kinks and bugs are solved, the software makes its way to the stable version.
This is precisely what happened with Chrome 5.0. At the start of the month we were reporting that Chrome 5.0 made it to the Beta channel. Now we report that it made it to the Stable channel. To be more precise, Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 has been released as a final, stable version to Windows, Mac and Linux users all over the world.
Here is what you can expect to get from Chrome 5.0:
- HTML5 Features: Geolocation, App Cache, web sockets, file drag-and-drop. You can for example drag and drop attachments to outgoing emails, and if you turn on a Gmail Labs experiment, you can include images in the body of the email by dragging and dropping them.
- Preferences synchronization. This feature is similar to the Bookmark Sync feature in Chrome 4.0; it lets you sync browser preferences, like themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language.
- The bookmark manager has a new look.
- V8 JavaScript performance improvements
When Chrome 5.0 Beta was rolled out, Google touted the fact that it is the fastest Chrome version to date. How much faster can the final version of Chrome 5.0 be? Product Manager with Google Chrome, Brian Rakowski sheds some light on the matter: “[The] new stable release for Windows, Mac and Linux is our fastest yet, incorporating one of our most significant speed improvements to date. We’ve improved by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks since our very first beta, back in Chrome’s Cretaceous period (September 2008).”
Here are some images to put things in perspective.
The Flash Player Plugin is not included in the stable version of Chrome 5.o, even though it was included in the Beta version. Google explained that it will enable this feature once Flash Player 10.1 is released.
If you would like to get Google Chrome 5.0, you can download it here.
Up there I mentioned that Google uses 3 channels to distribute versions of the Chrome browser. If my explanation did not clear things up for you, perhaps this Christoph Niemann visual representation clears things up for you.
This is precisely what happened with Chrome 5.0. At the start of the month we were reporting that Chrome 5.0 made it to the Beta channel. Now we report that it made it to the Stable channel. To be more precise, Google Chrome 5.0.375.55 has been released as a final, stable version to Windows, Mac and Linux users all over the world.
Here is what you can expect to get from Chrome 5.0:
- HTML5 Features: Geolocation, App Cache, web sockets, file drag-and-drop. You can for example drag and drop attachments to outgoing emails, and if you turn on a Gmail Labs experiment, you can include images in the body of the email by dragging and dropping them.
- Preferences synchronization. This feature is similar to the Bookmark Sync feature in Chrome 4.0; it lets you sync browser preferences, like themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, and language.
- The bookmark manager has a new look.
- V8 JavaScript performance improvements
When Chrome 5.0 Beta was rolled out, Google touted the fact that it is the fastest Chrome version to date. How much faster can the final version of Chrome 5.0 be? Product Manager with Google Chrome, Brian Rakowski sheds some light on the matter: “[The] new stable release for Windows, Mac and Linux is our fastest yet, incorporating one of our most significant speed improvements to date. We’ve improved by 213 percent and 305 percent in Javascript performance by the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks since our very first beta, back in Chrome’s Cretaceous period (September 2008).”
Here are some images to put things in perspective.
The Flash Player Plugin is not included in the stable version of Chrome 5.o, even though it was included in the Beta version. Google explained that it will enable this feature once Flash Player 10.1 is released.
If you would like to get Google Chrome 5.0, you can download it here.
Up there I mentioned that Google uses 3 channels to distribute versions of the Chrome browser. If my explanation did not clear things up for you, perhaps this Christoph Niemann visual representation clears things up for you.
