New Google Chrome for Mac OS X release

Google released a new beta version of the Google Chrome browser for Mac OS X late last week. To see if you have this new release as an automatic update, look on the Chrome About dialog, and this new release is labeled "5.0.307.7 beta".

The new Google Chrome for Mac OS X browser contains the following new features:

• Access to over 2,200 Chrome extensions.
• A bookmarks manager.
• A way to synchronize your bookmarks across all your computer systems, whether they are Mac OS X, Linux, or Windows. This requires a Google user account.
• A new Task Manager (which you can access in the menu system: View > Developer > Task Manager). This lets you keep an eye on memory and CPU use of the Chrome browser, each tab in the browser, and plugin memory use (such as "Shockwave Flash" currently using 40.5MB RAM and 4.5% CPU). I have to admit, it is funny to see the Flash plugin eat memory and CPU while no animations are even running.

One note on the Google Chrome Extensions: I've tried to install several "mouse gestures" plugins, and they do not work on Mac OS X at this time.

As another Chrome extensions note, I prefer to keep my bookmarks on Delicious, but so far the Delicious plugins I've seen for Chrome are much more limited than the Firefox Delicious plugin I normally use.

Mac browsers: Chrome, Firefox, and Safari

Firefox is probably still my favorite Mac OS X browser, but Chrome is getting to be a very close #2.

Which begs the question: When will Apple have a long-needed update for Safari available? The Chrome developer team seems to be running at a much faster pace than the Safari developer team.

Google Chrome for Mac OS X links

Here are several links related to the new Chrome for Mac OS X release:

• Google Chrome Extensions
• Google's release statement about Chrome for Mac OS X.
• Google Chrome themes