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Chrome 7 released to the stable channel

by Pete Mason on 20 October 2010, 13:23

Tags: Chrome, Google (NASDAQ:GOOG)

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A few weeks ago - six to be precise - the Chrome development team promised that, going forward, a new version of the browser would be released about every month and a half. Keeping to their word, the stable channel has been updated, bringing Chrome up to version 7.

Though the build number is getting bumped up, there's a disappointingly small number of new features. What there is, though, is a huge number of bug fixes and under-the-hood tweaks that should improve the browsing experience in terms of both speed and stability.

According to the official announcement, 826 individual bugs were fixed with this release across all parts of the browser.

Otherwise, the only major additions are support for AppleScript for UI automation under OSX and a new way of dealing with and managing sites that are blocked from creating cookies. In addition, the new version implements the HTML5 parsing algorithm, the File API and directory upload.

It's a little disappointing that Google has almost arbitrarily increased the version number because a specific date has passed instead of using it to mark a significant development milestone. However, there's probably only so much that can be included in each new release now that the development cycle has been halved to only six weeks.

The latest stable build - version 7.0.517.41 - is available now for Windows, Linux and OSX directly from Google. More details on the specific changes can be found at the Chrome Releases blog.



HEXUS Forums :: 9 Comments

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That's great news! I would much prefer a faster and more stable browser than one laden with buggy features. Why does this article make it sound like a disappointment? Way to go Google!
Always happy to accept new bug fixes and tweaks :).

But surely they're gonna run out of sensible numbers if they go up a version every 6 weeks, that's nearly 9 versions every year.
I don't understand why they go for full version number increases every time, bug fixes and a bit of speed up is a .x release surely?

Unless they are just building hype… actually, that'll be it :)
As soon as they have the highest number they will probably slow down. They have to beat IE9 and Opera 11 surely?
I tried Chrome a few days ago - I don't care how fast it is, if there's no bookmarks sidebar I won't be changing from Firefox.