"Whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM"

Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday - but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.

"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," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable and potentially crashing software."

Until now, Google's open source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamouring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.

Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.

The Flash plug-in won't work, for example, so forget watching YouTube videos. Printing or bookmark management aren't implemented yet and privacy controls aren't fully baked. Google said there are more than 400 bugs that need to be stomped.

Even though only released for the experimental crowd, the new versions are a big step forward for the browser. First, the versions will plug into Google's auto-update service that automatically downloads new versions. Second, the products bear the Google Chrome brand, not just the Chromium label of the only incarnations available until now. And third, a much larger audience will be helping Google debug the code through automated crash reports of the new versions.

Not everyone can try the Mac and Linux versions, though. A Google spokesman said the Linux version supported only the Debian and Ubuntu incarnations of Linux, and the Mac OS X version only works on Intel-based Macs.

Original article: Google debuts Chrome for Mac, Linux from CNET News.com