Google Chrome waves bye bye to beta

Google's browser, Chrome, has officially left beta.

At the Le Web 08 conference in Paris this week, Google VP Marissa Mayer told TechCrunch's Mike Arrington that the move would be happening, but she did not say when. Google representatives than confirmed the Thursday change of status for Chrome.

The first people to get the non-beta version are new users who download the browser directly from Google. Also yesterday, a small proportion of existing Chrome users automatically got the update. Today, all the remaining Chrome users (10 million, according to Google) will get the download.

Sundar Pichai, vice president of product development, told silicon.com sister site CNET News.com that this release of Chrome will have "tons and tons of bug fixes", especially around audio and video playback, which should now be "more stable". Chrome will also be faster. Pichai said Google's browser is 1.4 to 1.5 times faster than it was at launch.

Browser wars

Top 10 alternatives to Internet Explorer from Firefox to Chrome.

There are new features, as well. The bookmark manager is being revised to do a better job for people who have lots of bookmarks, and for those who want to import or export bookmark lists. Privacy options have all been consolidated into one dialog box. And there are improvements in the security features of the browser.

Features that the team is still working on include autofill for forms, native support for RSS feeds, "and so on". But the top three features that Pichai says he and his team are working on are extension support and Mac and Linux versions.

Pichai said: "All the development is in the open." Users can monitor Chrome's progress at Chromium.org, or download the Google Chrome Channel Chooser, which will tell their installation of Chrome to download either the betas between major updates of Chrome, or even the nightly (and often buggy) builds of the browser as it is developed.

For a Google product, Chrome is leaving beta very quickly - 100 days after public launch. Pichai said that Chrome now meets Google's "internal standards for stability and performance" and that its heavy use inside Google before its public release has contributed to its rapid graduation to released product status.

Google has big plans and goals for Chrome. Truly widespread adoption of the product won't happen in businesses or on the pre-installed software suites of new computers until the product is not just known to be stable by users but vouched for as production-ready by Google - and that means taking it out of beta, even if the word itself means less than it used to.

Original article: Google Chrome breaks out of beta from CNET News.com