Article by George Norman

On 12 Jun 2009

Just the other day we reported that the development team over at Google responsible for the search engine giant’s take on how a browser should look and feel, has released an update on the developer channel. The update they released was Chrome 3.0.187.0 for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux . As usual, the update came with a warning about how you should not download the software unless you are a developer that is willing to put up with “incomplete, unpredictable and potentially crashing software.”

It seems that Google was right in issuing a warning to regular users about downloading early builds of Chrome – it seems there was a critical bug in the Chrome 3.0.187.0 update that crashed the browser. Engineering Program Manager, Jonathan Conradt, explains: “Yesterday's Dev Channel update (3.0.187.0) for Windows had a critical bug which crashes the browser when you use the wrench or page menus. This [Chrome 3.0.187.1] release fixes that issue. If you already have 3.0.187.0 you cannot get to About Google Chrome to force an update.”


The upside is that only the Windows version was affected by this critical bug, the Mac OS X and Linux builds should be okay. The other upside is that if you give it time (about 5 hours according to Conradt) Chrome will automatically check for updates, will detect Chrome 3.0.187.1 and upon updating will fix the issue. If you do not want to wait, you could always uninstall and then reinstall Google Chrome.

“We apologize for the problem and we are making changes to our process to try and avoid issues like this in the future,” added Joseph Conradt. “The dev channel is always going to be a little risky but we agree that major features like this should not go out broken."

On a more joyful note, here are the highlights of Chrome 3.0.187.0
- Import passwords from Firefox on Linux-powered machines.
- Use Keychain for passwords on Mac OS X-powered machines.
- Omnibox no longer drops characters when the user types rapidly.
- Web inspector and “--enable-user-scripts” is up and running once more.
- Plugin deadlock does not cause the browser to hang.
- Upon install, extension buttons are now displayed.
- The maximum number of cookies has been increased to 300 (just like in Firefox).
- The first tab is no longer selected when the user clicks an extension toolstrip.
- Better support for Squid proxies.

If you would like to get on the Dev channel and get the latest version of Chrome 3.0, just click here.

Moving on, the development team behind the Opera web browser is not annoying users, it is teasing them. As you can see here, Opera touts the fact that on June 16th at 9:00 AM CEDT it will “reinvent the Web.” I’m not 100% sure but I think Opera will launch an "in the cloud" web browser on June 16th – and I base that claim on the web page’s description which reads: “The Web is your browser. Discover how fast and fun the Web can be.”



Tags: Google, Chrome, Opera

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