General users can now download the beta version of Google Chrome for Mac, as the web browser has finally been made available Tuesday.

Chrome for Mac has been a long time to come, more than a year after its Windows counterpart first debuted in beta. Although it was initially planned to allocate in first half of 2009, the product has hit numerous delays.

Google co-founder Sergey Brin has admitted this year that Chrome's absence on the Mac platform has been embarrassment for his company. The company has worked to ensure that the beta version of the browser may get a period at the end of 2009.

Download available from Google, is 17.6MB. Requires Mac OS X 10.5 or later, and only runs on Intel processors.

We've been working hard to deliver a first-class browser for the Mac

Google is planning to launch Chrome browser beta version for Mac OS X in December. Nick Baum, product manager for Chrome, gave the details in a post on the Google Groups page for browser extensions. The post encouraged developers to update their extensions to take advantage of the new Chrome user interface.

"Why make the switch now? The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," Baum said. "We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that. If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"

In October, Google Chrome for Mac released the status of developer preview. To the new version will be added QuickTime and printing compatibility.

Company officials had previously said they hope to release a final version of Chrome for Mac by the end of 2009. Currently, the Webkit-based browser is only available as a test version for developers, even though three versions of it have already been released on Windows.
[via Apple Insider]

Last week I found an Ubuntu package repository for the Chromium browser, the open source project behind Google’s Chrome browser. I didn’t get excited until I saw this post, which shows that the packages do contain a working web browser!

Chromium for Linux is pre-alpha software, but farther along in development than I expected. The GTK-based Linux interface looks and works just like Windows interface. The browser rendered sites I tested it with just fine, and I haven’t been able to crash the it yet. Lots of features, such as bookmarks, the options window, and even the about window, are simply are not implemented yet.

The big missing feature currently is the tab bar. You can open a new tab just fine, but the tab bar is missing so there’s no way to switch between tabs. Like the Windows version, Chromium for Linux runs each tab in its own process. Tab crash detection seems to not be implemented yet as killing a tab process causes the page to just stop responding.

Chromium, even in this early state, feels much faster than Firefox. I compared the 280Slides presentation editor running in Firefox 3 and Chromium, and the difference was like night and day. Chromium scores very well in the SunSpider Javascript benchmark: 4.7 times faster than Firefox 3, and 2.9 times faster than Firefox 3.1 Beta 3.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3	1914.6ms +/- 6.2%
Firefox 3	3082.8ms +/- 0.2%
Midori 0.1.4	1111.4ms +/- 1.2%
Chromium	657.4ms +/- 2.6%

The Ubuntu Chromium Daily Builds PPA makes installing Chromium in Ubuntu very easy to do. However, these packages are pre-alpha and completely untested, they may not work for you at all. Follow the directions on the PPA page to add the software repository. Install Chromium from the package chromium-browser (click the link to install), or by running the command below in your terminal:

sudo apt-get install chromium-browser

The repository should be updated daily with the latest Chromium code. I’ll definitely be following Chromium for Linux’s development from now on.

[via tombuntu.com]

Redmond (WA) – Microsoft's new Internet Explorer has looked rather underwhelming in the way it aligns itself with common web standards and how fast it can load web pages. But Microsoft has released a quiet surprise document that claims IE8 is much faster in real life than it is in benchmarks indicate – and will beat Google’s Chrome and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Benchmarks are only one side of the performance capability of hardware and software, as they tend to explore only specifics and are often skewed towards a certain set of features. That was especially the case with recent browser benchmarks — which are anyway a rather questionable way to measure browser performance, as the speed a browser loads web pages will be different for every user. But, we have to admit that the latest round of JavaScript benchmarks was fairly convincing — as it they were in line with subjective speed improvements demonstrated by Chrome and Firefox and left the subjectively slower IE8 Beta somewhat in the dust.

The guys over at Ars Technica have now discovered a document published by Microsoft that claims the opposite. According to Microsoft, IE8 will beat its rivals in real world performance in actual web page loading and not just JavaScripts. If Microsoft’s test is correct, then IE8 will load twelve of the 25 largest websites faster than Chrome or Firefox, while Chrome wins in nine and Firefox in four. The comparison, however, did not include Firefox 3.1 Beta, but rather the upcoming 3.05, which does not yet include the much faster TraceMonkey engine.

It is not only surprising that IE comes out on top in this test, but we also noticed that IE is fastest in loading the web pages of its rivals – google.com and mozilla.com – while Firefox leads in loading microsoft.com.

The report is available for download here.