Google Releases Chrome 5.0 For Win/Mac/Linux

ddfall writes "Four months after the release of version 4.0 for Windows, Google has announced the availability of Chrome 5.0 for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux — the first stable release to be available on all three major platforms. Chrome 5.0.375.55 is available to download from google.com/chrome. Users who currently have Chrome installed can use the built-in update function."

Comments

Google is catching on fast

[microbee]

Just look at the version numbers. It's already 5! On the contrary Firefox is still lagging behind with 3.6.

Re:Google is catching on fast

[Kabloink]

Microsoft has both of them beat with IE 6.

Re:Google is catching on fast

[natehoy]

Yeah, but remember, they are shooting for version 10^100. They have a long way to go.

Re:Google is catching on fast

[phil reed]

Nigel Tufnel: The numbers all go to eleven. Look, right across the board, eleven, eleven, eleven and...

Marty DiBergi: Oh, I see. And most amps go up to ten?

Nigel Tufnel: Exactly.

Marty DiBergi: Does that mean it's louder? Is it any louder?

Nigel Tufnel: Well, it's one louder, isn't it? It's not ten. You see, most blokes, you know, will be playing at ten. You're on ten here, all the way up, all the way up, all the way up, you're on ten on your guitar. Where can you go from there? Where?

Marty DiBergi: I don't know.

Nigel Tufnel: Nowhere. Exactly. What we do is, if we need that extra push over the cliff, you know what we do?

Marty DiBergi: Put it up to eleven.

Nigel Tufnel: Eleven. Exactly. One louder.

Marty DiBergi: Why don't you just make ten louder and make ten be the top number and make that a little louder?

Nigel Tufnel: [pause] These go to eleven.

Re:Google is catching on fast

[Jackie_Chan_Fan]

The web is only 3.0 !!?

This is confusing!

Re:Google is catching on fast

[Draek]

Bleh, Emacs is already at version 23. Take that, Microsoft!

Note: if you're thinking of replying "Emacs isn't a web browser!", you clearly have never used Emacs.

Sweet...

[ak_hepcat]

Maybe now they'll "officially" release Android 2.2 with chrome built-in...

yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

I used to be looking forward to this day; I used Chrome until the day my http:// disappeared. Due to that, I'm sticking with Firefox.

Re:yay?

[yelvington]

In 5.0.375.55 the protocol appears to be back in the location bar, at least on Linux.

Re:yay?

[ElKry]

I didn't realize it until he mentioned it, but I see it now: The url field does not show the "http://" anymore. It does show "https://", but I guess someone decided that it was more useful to show more of the actual URL and remove "http://", as it's not informative in any way anymore.

Re:yay?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Parent is not a troll. It's a valid complaint. Displaying the entire URL, including the protocol, is absolutely the standard and should remain that way.

Re:yay?

[MichaelJ]

So if I copy all but the first character, I get exactly what I copied, but if I copy the first character it prepends the protocol to the front on the clipboard? That's incredibly inconsistent. I should have control over whether or not I get the protocol when I copy, and that control should be the extent of my selection.

Re:yay?

[istartedi]

Heh. I didn't even realize that. The funny thing is, I have no idea how to upgrade anyway. They don't have the usual File/Edit/View menus. There's just a wrench icon, and it doesn't appear to have any updater under its menu hierarchy.

Googling around (heheh) I found out they left out the F/E/V on purpose. That might make sense for mobile, but I'm using a nice wide LCD with more screen real estate than you can shake a stick at. Without F/E/V I feel like I'm subject to somebody's vision of "clean minimalist design" where they thought they knew what was best for the user. For cryin' out loud, if I wanted to use a Mac I'd already be using one. Hey... maybe it'll automaticly upgrade to 6.0 if I throw it in the recycling bin... no, wait... AHA! The updater is in the "About Chrome" thingy.

Oh sure, bury the updater in the widget that usually just shows copyright info. That's, just... wonderful. To be fair though, interfaces to updaters aren't quite as standard as F/E/V.

Re:yay?

[Daniel Dvorkin]

Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why. No other justification is needed.

One of the commenters on the CNET story on the issue compared it to the Windows practice of hiding file extensions, which is a good analogy. We know how well that worked out (click here on mysterious_attachment.doc{.exe} and see what happens!) Sure, the protocol name may be gabble to most users, but at least the information's there, right out front. And occasionally it even leads them to educate themselves, asking a more technically knowledgeable friend, "What is that http thing, anyway?"

Re:yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

your looking a beta/dev versions. They are still trying things out there. They make it to beta or not based on feedback.

Re:yay?

[Anonymous Coward]

It does.

Re:yay?

[Tetsujin]

If Chrome does this, then this is a flaw. Transparent clipboard modification should never be done, by any program.

A (much) better method would be to insert the protocol string when the user clicks on the URL bar.

I can't stand all this extra logic they've stuck into URL bars (and other text fields, for that matter) in the last ten years or so... It's a text entry field, it should act like one. It shouldn't select all when I click on it, it shouldn't try to guess where I want my selection to end, snap it to word boundaries or whatever... And the simplest, most straight-forward way of making the protocol selectable for copy/paste is just to have it in the URL bar in the first place.

Re:yay?

[unix1]

It's inconsistent UI on 2 counts:

1. Copying to clipboard:
- selecting the whole URL prepends http:/// in front in the clipboard (expected behavior would be to only copy what is being selected)
- it is impossible to copy the full URL without the protocol
- selecting part of the URL only copies the selected part (which is expected), unless you select just the domain part, in which case it prepends http:/// again

2. Protocol display: Chrome will display https, file, ftp, and whatever protocols it does/will support in the future; just not http.

It would get really annoying really fast if all apps I use had their own quirks like that.

Re:yay?

[shish]

Because users who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why.

That's a pretty small minority -- I've actually seen more people at the other end of the scale, where they don't know what the URL display is at all. If they want to eg check their yahoo mail, they don't go to the URL box and type "mail.yahoo.com", they go to the search box, type "google", search (using google) to find google, click on the first result to get to the google home page, then type "yahoo mail" into that box, search, and click the first result there...

(This is what happens when we train people to follow patterns with no understanding of how it actually works :( )

Re:yay?

[agent_vee]

When you type in a URL directly to the address bar do you input "http://www.slashdot.org" or "www.slashdot.org"? Personally I think it's fine to leave out http and only display the protocol if it is different like https, ftp, etc... Of course I have updated to the latest version of Chrome and STILL see the http in the address bar so I don't even know what the fuss is all about.

Re:yay?

[thegarbz]

Because slashdotters who want to know what their browser is doing want to see it, that's why. No other justification is needed.

There fixed that for ya. The average shmo couldn't care less what their browser is doing as long as the page loads up. Heck I'm willing to bet that that half of slashdot doesn't care either. I for one am interested in 2 things.
1. Is it SSH encrypted? Browsers make this plainly obvious without the protocol in the address bar.
2. Has the page finished loading? Because it kinda sucks when an button does nothing because the javascript hasn't loaded yet.

Mind you this is semantic drivel since the address bar actually does show in the latest Chrome. But sure let's argue about a supposedly crap feature which was removed from the latest version anyway :-)

Re:yay?

[jensen404]

You have to copy at least apple.slashdot.org for the 'http://' to appear. Copying just the first character will not add the 'http://'

Re:yay?

[laddiebuck]

Rather agree with you except the bit about snapping to word boundaries. If you complain about that, you vastly underrate its importance. I get that with xterms, not text entry fields, but I tell you, double-clicking on the beginning word and right-clicking on an ending word (or blank at the end of the line) to select is so much damn easier than trying to drag the mouse so precisely from the beginning of the selection to the end. Just that way of selecting has probably saved me days of computer time, and that's with me very rarely using the mouse (in an xterm). It's one of the only things I think a mouse is useful for in an xterm.

Re:yay?

[ElKry]

I fail to see how that makes "http://" informative. "ftp://" is shown. Anything but "http://" seems to be shown, including "file://" etc.

If there isn't anything there, it's "http://". Considering that this is the vast majority of a browser's usage, it seems like a good compromise to me - and won't make any difference on your example.

On a side note, I am deeply disturbed by the fact browsers would render htm[l] files when using "ftp://". It just sounds horribly wrong to me.

Re:yay?

[vitaflo]

"Without F/E/V I feel like I'm subject to somebody's vision of "clean minimalist design" where they thought they knew what was best for the user. For cryin' out loud, if I wanted to use a Mac I'd already be using one."

FWIW, the Mac version of Chrome *does* have File/Edit/View still in the menubar (working as expected), and does not hide http:/// or in any other way mangle your copying of urls.

Chome 6

[jbeaupre]

I'm waiting for Chrome 6 ... only because I like the sound of hexavalent chromium.

Re:Chome 6

[ElKry]

You don't have to wait, I'm posting this from Chrome 6.0.408.1

Of course, you're going to have to use the dev channel, and get ready for a hell of a bumpy ride...

Chrome vs Chromium on Ubuntu?

[jaavaaguru]

Why would I download Chrome when I already have Chromium which gets updated automatically by Update Manager, remaining consistent with everything else on my laptop?

Re:Chrome vs Chromium on Ubuntu?

[Anonymous Coward]

Installing Chrome .deb will neatly add "http://dl.google.com/linux/deb/ stable main" to the list of software sources. This will give you automatic updates.

stable?

[nnet]

Stable? Still says beta.

Re:stable?

[The MAZZTer]

The "beta" indicator is an indication of your update channel... it's not part of the version number. I'm guessing you're on the beta channel and noticed the stable channel got the same version, but yours still says "beta". Am I right?

this is going to be

[nimbius]

a hard sell for me. The entire point of linux and me switching to it was the privacy and security. What is my incentive to switch from a floss browser on a floss OS to a nonfree browser (or not as free as id like to see it) which saps my bandwidth on the backend to report my surfing habits back to google.

and no, i cant trust that it isnt communicating with google or wont decide to at some point in the future. The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.

Re:this is going to be

[MrEricSir]

Why not go with Chromium?

Re:this is going to be

[ChipMonk]

The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.

I don't think so.

I do. The common mantra seems to be, "Enough privacy to get people to stop complaining." Google, Facebook, Myspace, Microsoft, Apple, Adobe are all guilty of this thinking, and they're showing no sign of letting up.

Some may argue that "people" should be replaced with "governments," but that's a pointless swap. Governments are made of people, and people will complain about privacy abuses to governments, knowing full well that it won't do any good to complain to the abusers.

Re:this is going to be

[MrEricSir]

Facebook went from being a closed network to an open one with several changes to the privacy controls, that awful Beacon feature, etc. They never back down until there's immense pressure. Usually even then they don't back down entirely. And it's all so they can monetize their site.

Google made a mistake with their wifi collection software and quickly admitted to it when asked about it, then came up with a plan to destroy the data.

How are these two things even remotely similar?

Re:this is going to be

[LordLimecat]

which saps my bandwidth on the backend to report my surfing habits back to google.

The whole german wifi debacle is making this company just as hot to handle as facebook.

Several points...
1) If you want to eliminate the "phone home", you can do so very easily under options-->under the hood. Uncheck the top 5 boxes; now your data is secure. This is what I did on a live-boot cd where CPU and bandwidth are at a premium.

2) If you do not feel you can trust that it isnt communicating, you can actually VERIFY that, either through about:net-internals, or wireshark, or netstat, or router logs. Not to mention most of the source is actually AVAILABLE....

3) Google as a whole tends to be in line with foss philosophy. They make it clear what they are after-- your data-- but otherwise they use open protocols, with open access, unlike just about anyone else. Ever try and move your data off of AOL, or Yahoo? Ever try to access hotmail over imap? Ever try and do a contacts export from AOL?

4) If it is really that big of a deal, use Chromium; you really cant complain that that requires blind trust (as it is open source). Of course, note that with any browser, when you use google, you have 90% of the same privacy issues-- most of the Chrome issues stem from auto-suggest.

5) The "wifi debacle" amounted to Google coming out with no prompting or coercion and saying, "We may have goofed and gathered some data, bear with us while we investigate." Thats a lot different than having a leak or getting caught doing something, and I think it is unfair to try to equate them with Facebook. If you're a techie, and have used google products, you KNOW what theyre after anyways, and they generally give you tools to opt out anyways.

Re:this is going to be

[LordLimecat]

But at least google takes pains to ensure you can leave them at ANY time by using open protocols and standards. Can you say the same for any of those other companies?

Re:this is going to be

[arth1]

Not to mention most of the source is actually AVAILABLE....

It's the pieces for which source isn't available that worries me.
I mean, would you eat at a place that said "90% of our food is bought from trusted sources"?

Re:this is going to be

[surveyork]

You might be interested in SRWare Iron, a Chrome mod that doesn't track you: > Version 5.0380 beta http://www.srware.net/forum/viewtopic.php?f=18&t=1482 Stable version: http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_chrome_vs_iron.php Or you may like ChromePlus: http://www.chromeplus.org/ ChromePlus is built on Chrome Dev builds, so v 1.3.4 will be based on Crhome 6.0.x

Sidebars?

[simp]

Does Chrome now support a bookmark sidebar? With the wide-screen TFTs everywhere these days a bookmark sidebar has become a must-have for me. I cannot stand bookmark pull-down menus. And to make things worse Chrome has put the default Bookmark menu in the upper- right hand corner of the screen, which for some reason is a place of the screen where my cursor never is.

Re:Sidebars?

[chord.wav]

Not only that, I need tree tabs like I have in Firefox with the Treetab extension. What drugs are they on, that they keep doing the tabs horizontally?

Re:Sidebars?

[swillden]

With the wide-screen TFTs everywhere these days a bookmark sidebar has become a must-have for me. I cannot stand bookmark pull-down menus.

You must be one of those... <shudder>... full-screen people. Dude... windowing environments were invented for a reason!

Re:Correction

[Urban Garlic]

On Debian and Ubuntu, the .deb-packaged Chrome adds the Google deb archive in /etc/apt/sources.list.d/google-chrome.list, which is automatically searched by apt and aptitude, so your regular "aptitude update; aptitude upgrade" will pull in new versions of Chrome. Presumably the Synaptic package gizmo does the same things, but I am far too cool for GUIs, so I don't know.

If you want to turn this off, and leave it off, you can change the settings in /etc/default/google-chrome.

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

One caveat: if you have it installed in ubuntu, it's the beta, so you'll have to remove it "apt-get remove google-chrome-beta" before installing "apt-get install google-chrome-stable".

Re:Correction

[Anonymous Coward]

I suggest, instead of actually installing the .deb, you simply extract the files from the archive to a local directory using dpkg -x chrome.deb.
This way, you're not giving Google any special permissions on your machine, which effectively amount to root access.
Chrome runs perfectly from a local user's home directory when extracted like this.

Re:Can it accept add-ons yet?

[moogsynth]

Yes we all know it has extensions. But Chrome doesn't have Noscript. It does have Javascript-blocking and whitelists but it's an all or nothing choice for each website, which is less than ideal. Chrome also has an adblocker, but it isn't a proper adblocker; it just hides the ads. So clearly, the you are wrong, and Chrome is still not a good choice of browser for the GP.

Re:Can it accept add-ons yet?

[The MAZZTer]

Extensions have been in place since 4.0 or 4.1 or something. Unfortunately there are no APIs for PROPER blocking of resources (ie stopping Chrome from fetching them) but there are already extensions that can at least remove them from the DOM while the page is loading. My favorite is AdBlock.

As for NoScript, Chrome has "lite" functionality built in. You can use Options > Under the Hood > Content Settings to turn off JavaScript and Plugins and then whitelist individual sites when the icons pop up on the omnibar, kinda like NoScript. Only problems/differences:

1. Whitelists apply to PAGES, not to RESOURCES. So an offsite resource is still allowed if the host page is whitelisted. This also applies to frames. So this can't be used to block ad scripts like NoScript.
2. Plugin whitelist button doesn't always show up, most notably for swfobject.js (IIRC). The problem is that the whitelist icon shows if there is an embed in the page, but some JS will check for the presense of a plugin before placing the embed. With plugins blocked, the browser reports no plugins available, and so the JS never inserts the embed, so the whitelist icon never appears. I've opened a bug on this; JS access of the plugins array show cause the icon to appear.
3. It's hard to block the whole domain instead of a subdomain (you have to go into the dialogs and do it by hand) and sometimes it doesn't seem to work. Better than earlier versions where it wasn't possible (ytmnd, deviantart, etc were a pain).
4. Page doesn't automatically refresh when you whitelist a site, plus you have to do JS and plugins separately.
5. Some things in Chrome break; the JS features of the Developer Tools (Console, script tab) do not work right when the inspected page has JS blocked. Chrome has JS in its FTP directory listings for some reason; this is treated with the whitelist rules, for another unknown reason.

So it could use improvement, but it's not too bad a start. Especially since it's built-in functionality which Firefox doesn't even have. I am looking forward to hopefully APIs that will allow for an extension that can work more like NoScript.

Re:Correction

[awshidahak]

Presumably the Synaptic package gizmo does the same things, but I am far too cool for GUIs, so I don't know.

So... if you're too cool for GUIs, tell me, why are you using Google Chrome and not lynx or w3m?

Obligatory Adblock Reply

[Mode Frozen]

Hopefully this version will allow development of a potent ad blocker like the famous Firefox addon. Apparently the only thing limiting it from happening is the implementation of content policies in Chrome.

Re:Obligatory Adblock Reply

[Nysul]

Adblock for Chrome downloads the ads, then blocks them. I don't know how you could not notice this, the Chrome ad-block solution is half-assed at best.

can't install behind proxy

[FunkyELF]

I'll keep using Firefox as it is actually possible to download and install it.
Since the day Google released Chrome you haven't been able to install their crappy 550k installer if you're behind a proxy.

Re:Can it accept add-ons yet?

[gazbo]

Well let's see: OP asked if it can "accept add-ons yet" - which it can, and that's what the reply said. He also asked if it had an ad-blocker, which it does. The fact that you choose to declare it to be not a "proper" adblocker is entirely your preference; if OP is like me he couldn't give a fuck whether the ads get downloaded but not displayed (or maybe he could; he didn't say either way).

You also dismiss the Javascript blocking because it's all-or-nothing for each site, when OP said: "or at least disable scripts on a per-site level". So you've discounted another feature even though it meets his (minimum) requirement.

If you don't want to use Chrome then fine, but why are you answering on behalf of someone else??

Re:Vertical tabs?

[mugurel]

It's not that absurd. Having a widescreen monitor (as is common nowadays), my experience is that there is very little vertical space for web content after subtracting space for tool/status/menu bars. At the same time, there's lots of empty horizontal space. Because of that, I switched to vertical tabs in Firefox recently and am pleased with it.

Re:Correction

[CBung]

Are you guys sure there is a difference? I see: google-chrome-beta 5.0.375.55-r47796 google-chrome-stable 5.0.375.55-r47796 Another one of those times when they point to the same thing?

Re:Correction

[somenickname]

Actually, you don't. You just need to "sudo apt-get install google-chrome-stable". They setup their packages in a sane way so that it removes the beta for you (and presumably would do the same if you downloaded it from the website and did a "sudo dpkg -i").

wanted feature #1 for me

[Eil]

I'll switch to Chrome the day it can support a plugin which can block the downloading of ads and other unwanted content, not just hide them with a bit of CSS and Javascript.

(An adblocking proxy isn't a viable solution for me.)

Congratulations to the Chrome Team

[grudgnor]

I can't believe nobody is realizing what an accomplishment Chrome has been. We should be congratulating them on reaching an important milestone. I mean, sure they're building off of webkit and all, but they've done a damn good job with Chrome. Enough to finally pull me away from Safari.

Acid3 fail??

[srix]

The Linux (Ubuntu) version seems pretty flaky on the Acid3 test. Every time I reload the page it gives me different results/scores - sometimes 98/100, sometimes 100/100, and almost every reload results in a bad rendering. FF 3.6.3 on the other hand gives exactly the same score (94/100) and the same rendering on each reload.

uh

[revxul]

4 months? What exactly warrants/constitutes a full version number increase for Google?