Posted on September 17, 2008 - by Mike Panic | Visited 792 times, 1 so far today

Google Chrome gets first update and more confusing

The new web browser that everyone is talking about and not using, Chrome, just got an update to it.  This update is kind of unusual though in the fact that you now have a choice of how beta and unstable you want it to be.  If you are into trying out new things, reporting bugs and getting fresh updates daily or every few days, this is for you.  If you use Chrome on a regular basis though, the update is kind of mandatory as it

fixes bugs with areas including Microsoft’s Silverlight software, tab behavior, video playback with YouTube and other Flash players, and scalable vector graphics, and it suppresses full-text indexing of sites accessed with encrypted Web connections

Cnet News has all the information on how to do the update, to me the killer is you can’t even update from the software itself, you need to go to another website.  Then you have to choose which updates you want to receive, Beta or Dev, and then watch as it updates.  I have no problem with software being released and not being finished, it happens all the time, but with Google’s track record of keeping apps in beta for years and years, why put so many users through the growing pains of both Dev and Beta versions?  Me thinks Chrome should have been a private invite only release like Gmail was originally to get most of the issues flushed out in the first place.

Chrome is nice, it has a lot of cool features and has everyone who uses the internet interested, but as reported earlier, no one is really using it and no one on a Mac can even start to use it.  It pains me when major companies rely on the free labor of their own users to finish building and fixing software that shouldn’t be released yet, much less make them jump through hoops to get the update.

Anyone here a die-hard Chrome user yet?

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