Friday, Jun 5, 2009    Text size: 

The Internet giant has unveiled developer versions of the software for the two platforms, but the company stresses that these are for hardcore developers only.

"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please don't download them," a representative wrote on the official Chrome blog. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable and potentially crashing software."

So what is a developer version even good for? Such releases are invaluable for the lead companies involved, because they can get early feedback from enterprising, bug-hunting developers.

But for everyone else on Mac and Linux platforms, this doesn't constitute a full release of any kind. These versions of Chrome lack support for plugins, including Adobe's pervasive Flash plugin.

Google rolled out Chrome last September to much fanfare, positioning the browser not only as a competitor to Mozilla's popular open-source browser Firefox, but also as a symbol of a next-generational approach to the online experience.

According to Google's illustrated users' guide to Chrome, online applications are slowly rendering most traditional web browsers obsolete.

Google argues that online applications use technologies based on code structures like Javascript and its close cousin AJAX, and web browsers currently can only run one type of code at a time. For example, if a browser is looking at an HTML page that employs a Javascript function, the browser has to let the Javascript code run its course before going back to the HTML.

But will Google be able to compete with Internet Explorer and Windows, both of which come pre-installed on the vast majority of computers sold globally?

Perhaps. Online guru Brandon "Fight the Patent" told XBIZ that although Mozilla's Firefox has earned the respect – and the traffic – of the technically inclined, the browser still commands a minority share of the browser market.

But Google may be able to compete where Mozilla's Firefox browser couldn't.

"Google will need to push to the masses, which I can see them being able to do with YouTube and Google to get people to try and use their browser as the default," Shalton said.

The browser is available at Google.com/chrome.