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Chrome 7 and OS X

If you’re a Google Chrome user, or considering it, on OS X: Go download and try out the dev channel build*.  Yesterday the Chrome team updated its dev channel to Chrome 7, which includes big improvements to rendering speed and stability but also, shocker — better integration with OS X. This includes:

• The development of a real Applescript dictionary (something Firefox doesn’t have), adding one more way to script Chrome.
• Chrome now enables OS X Services, which in Snow Leopard are quite powerful ways of piping text and other data from one application to another or to a service.
• Chrome also lets you send selections to  the system wide dictionary.app

* Safari has 2 basic “channels” of build, the official stable Safari releases, and the “Webkit Nightly” builds which are released every day and might be of questionable stability/reliablity. 

Chrome on the other hand has 4 concurrent channels of builds you can use.

• The official “Stable”, or release, version of Google Chrome; the most stable, but also the most behind the features and development curve.
• The beta channel which is very stable and has newer features than the Stable channel; this build is actually suitable for most users (remember that Google kept gmail in beta for years. Beta is sort of the new release for Google), its just not certifiably solid.
•  Then there’s the Dev channel, which contains a lot of new features, its kind of the testing ground for UI changes and features; some stay, some change, some come and go. You can get a good idea of the future of Chrome by trying out the dev channel, and it’s actually pretty stable; I use it day to day for a lot of browsing and almost never crash it.  
• Finally, there’s Chromium, which is the open source base for Chrome, a lot of the development of Chrome happens there, lots of changes from day to day that might eventually come downstream to the other builds, not really for day to day browsing.