The first official Chrome update is out, but don’t look for release notes from Google – there aren’t any.
Though Google Chrome has generated plenty of buzz, millions of downloads and has been an internal work in progress for at least the past two years, apparently Google doesn’t yet have its release engineering process up to snuff.
“We’re working on the change list for the current version of Google
Chrome — 149.29,” Mark Larson Google Chrome Program Manager wrote in a mailing list posting. “The delay is not really excusable, and I hope we’ll
fix our release process so this doesn’t happen again.”
To be fair though, Google had to release the 149.29 release faster than they likely would have wanted. Since last Tuesday a number of researchers have alleged vulnerabilities in Google Chrome that potentially could have left users at risk. Google is making the right decision and moving to protect users first.
“149.29 is a security update and we released it as fast as we could. We would’ve liked more time to prepare things, but some of the vulnerabilities were made public without giving us a chance to respond, update, and protect our users first,” Larson wrote in a mailing list posting. “Thanks for being patient as we work out the kinks in all of our processes.”
The harder issue though at this early stage – for me personally at least – is the versioning of Chrome. Instead of calling it a 1.0 alpha (or beta) we’ve got long version numbers like 2.149.X which will undoubtedly be confusing in the long term.