Google Releases Chrome 12

An anonymous reader noted something that will be of interest to the 26% of Slashdot readers who have switched to Chrome: "Google has released Chrome 12, adding plenty of new features to its minimalist web browser and fixing a number of security vulnerabilities. Google software engineer Adrienne Walker said of the safe browsing mode, 'We've carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download.'"

Comments

Version numbers

[gizmod]

Sheesh, these browser version numbers are climbing quickly. Quick release cycles these days. Firefox 5 is allready in beta.

Re:Version numbers

[Lunaritian]

Mozilla has already changed to "Chrome numbering", they're currently developing versions 5, 6 and 7...

Re:Version numbers

[WrongSizeGlass]

I have Chromium 12.0.742.91 on my computer. Have they really made hundreds of beta releases?

Not betas, but builds.

I wonder how many versions of Chrome will ever have a minor version number greater than '0'? I don't recall seeing one recently (at least since Chrome 4).

Re:Version numbers

[Anonymous Coward]

And today (maybe yesterday) they released 13.0.782.11, which replaced 13.0.782.10, which (I kid you not) replaced 13.0.782.1 (no zero at the end, otherwise, same number). I draw the conclusion that they are happy to make an install available every time they push the "compile" button.

A single number doesn't allow you to take branches into account. Version 13's stable branch is 782. After branching 13.0.782.0, a bug was fixed, and that build (13.0.782.1) was released. Nine more bugs were found and fixed, and 13.0.782.10 was released.

Every build that might conceivably be released gets a unique number. This way you know exactly what code was in a user's build when they report bugs. Chromium is open source, and anyone can cut a release at any time.

I have no idea why people get so upset over the way version numbers change. The only reason you should need to see a version number is when reporting a bug.

Re:Guys: I need to know diff. between Chromium

[Lunaritian]

Wikipedia lists the differences between Chrome and Chromium.

Re:Guys: I need to know diff. between Chromium

[SanityInAnarchy]

I have "heard tell" (no, I can't produce you a quote) that CHROMIUM doesn't store things "up in the GOOGLE CLOUD" like passwords - whereas by way of comparison, Google CHROME, does.

Not quite. I know that Chrome has the option to set up "sync", which allows you to synchronize everything (passwords, bookmarks, etc) between Chrome installations. However, I have that disabled, and unless you can produce a quote or a link to the contrary, it seems much more likely that Chrome simply stores my passwords locally. It even integrates with local secure password stores -- in my case, since I run KDE4, Chrome stores my passwords in KWallet.

Re:Did they add noscript yet?

[chill]

AdBlock Plus, NotScripts, and WebDeveloper are available for Chrome which are the only plugins I really would consider "must have".

Chrome is, for me, significantly faster than Firefox 4 on 64-bit Ubuntu, Windows 7 and Windows XP. It starts up faster, uses less memory, renders pages faster -- all of it.

Yesterday, after viewing dozens of documents in multiple tabs on the web, memory use in Firefox had climbed on my system to over 1 Gb. Closing down and opening the same set of tabs in Chrome, I proceeded to work in that for the rest of the day. Memory usage peaked at 380 Mb, and hovered around 250 Mb.

I could feel Firefox starting to bog down as the day wore on. I did not get that feeling with Chrome.