At the beginning of this month, Google launched a preview or beta version of the Chrome browser [version 5] for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The company promised it was the fastest version of Chrome to day, and even proved it with a speed video. Well, Mountain View-based Google announced today on its Google Chrome Blog that a stable release of Chrome version 5 is now available for everyone using Windows, Mac, or Linux.
While the release of a stable version of Chrome 5 is a milestone in its own right and we’ll further discuss it below, the bigger news here is the fact that Chrome for Mac and Linux will no longer be in beta. That’s right the young browser for Mac and Linux, which was released in June 2009 as an extremely buggy developer version, is now graduating from beta to stable phase. The company usually releases its products in three phases: dev, beta, and stable.
Now, as we had previously reported, the new stable version of Google is equipped with various different features such as synchronization of “themes, homepage and startup settings, web content settings, preferred languages, and even page zoom settings” across various computers. The newly-released browser also contains several HTML5 tools such as “Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop.”
Unfortunately, one feature that didn’t make it to the stable release is the native integration of Flash Player. Google had to actually remove the built-in Flash Player when version 5 of the browser was still in the developer phase because of various issues caused by the player. However, Google expects to integrate the feature as soon as the full stable version of Flash Player 10.1 is released.
The new stable release of Google Chrome 5 is available at Google.com/chrome. Existing users should be updated automatically.