Google Chrome 13 now in development

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Google has upped the version number for Chrome (again). We’re now at Chrome 13.0.767.1 for Windows, Mac, Linux in the dev-channel.

Yes, that means the Chrome 12 is likely to be finalized become stable before Memorial Day.

Google has this bad habit of sharing very little in their initial dev release notes that indicate what is actually new or planned for the release. They seem to save most of the good bits until the release is a little further along.

At this point we know that one of the biggest changes in Chrome 13, is a change in Linux support.

“We are discontinuing support for Ubuntu Hardy for 13.0, in effect
matching that Ubuntu has officially stopped supporting Hardy (including
stopping security updates) as of May 12th, 2011,” Chrome engineer, Anthony Laforge wrote.

There are also a lot of bug and stability fixes as well as fixes for regressions. One of the regressions that jumped out at me was the fact that Chrome 13 ‘re-enables’ DNS prefetch.

“This feature got disable accidentally in WebKit because it is off by default,” Google’s patch tree states. “In this patch, we explicitly turn the feature
on.”