Last week Betanews had an excellent write-up regarding the current status of Google’s Chrome web browser, specifically up to it’s latest 4.0 development builds.
Since it’s somewhat recent release Google Chrome has come a fair way into it’s own development into a power-house competitor in the web browser market. While it has progressed nicely, one thing that has been a bit odd about Chrome’s development is how Google branded it in regards to it’s version numbers, in relation to it’s actual progress.
Google made it clear up front that they wanted to develop a browser that wasn’t so much about the bells and whistles, but was more about the actual core web technologies; a browser that could support fast rendering of modern intensive web pages, and full-on web based applications. As they stated up front, Google Chrome started as a bare-bones browser, but incredibly fast at rendering content.
A little over a year has passed since Google Chrome’s first public release. Within that short year we’ve seen Chrome go from 1.0 beta builds, all the way to 3.0 production builds, and more recently 4.0 development (beta) builds as well. The part that is a bit odd is that Google’s products tend to be in ‘beta’ status for quite some time, even publicly, and not only did Chrome go to a final build rather quickly, but also has had several milestone builds within the past year. With each ‘milestone’ the browser itself saw no major changes in appearance or functionality, it simply got better at rendering, and even faster with each subsequent release.
Yes, while there weren’t major changes Google did add in some features during those build releases, like theme support, HTML5, Tab Page, and the foundation for extension support. But, do those features really constitute the right to have a whole new milestone version number? Sure, maybe all of them combined would constitute a 2.0 build, but going from 1.0 to 4.0 in a year is highly unusual. I will admit that what Chrome has done is brought a lot to the table with it’s browser design and rendering engine. The WebKit engine in Chrome has proven itself to be faster than anything else out there, and the multiprocess browser design that splits each tab into it’s own separate process is a simple, but powerful innovation.
With such a powerful browser, a lot of people — myself included — are going to want much more from it. It’s a bit frustrating to try and use Chrome, then as a result miss out on the functionality one is used to from many other browsers (natively, or through extensions). While Google stated they wanted Chrome to concentrate on the core browsing experience they have at least started to implement a framework for extensions, so that the community can build on the browser themselves. Also, even though it’s “4.0″ right now it’s only been a year. If it continues in it’s tracks 2010 can be a very big year for Chrome development, and adoption. Hopefully we will see Chrome blossom into a feature rich browser, if at the very least it is done through extensions.
Read More: Google Chrome 4: Yes, it’s fast, but is it usable?
