Chrome may still be a fringe player in the browser market, but Google’s trying to change that. With the introduction of version 4 for Windows, the company is going after a mainstream audience, though the latest release still doesn’t run on Linux and Macintosh environments. Datamation has the details.
One of the key items that Google’s Chrome browser had lacked since its first release in September 2008 was an extensions system for add-ons. It’s an omission that has now been corrected with the release of Chrome 4 today for Windows.
Linux and Macintosh versions of Chrome 4 stable are not yet available.
Chrome 4 has been in development at Google since August 2009 and includes a number of new features and improvements over the previous Chrome 3 stable release — though some of the features have already been showcased in other, more bleeding-edge Chrome releases, since Google has three main release branches for Chrome: dev, beta and stable.
The new Chrome stable release comes amid heated times for the browser market, less than a week after Mozilla updated its users to Firefox 3.6, and as Chrome is racing past Apple Safari in browser popularity.
Leading the new features in Chrome is the inclusion of Chrome Extensions. According to Google, there are over 1,500 features that Chrome users can now take advantage of with the new enhancement. Users can browse through a complete list of Chrome Extensions at the Extension Gallery. Among the most popular Chrome Extensions is one called IE Tab, which enables Chrome users to view pages in an Internet Explorer tab inside of Chrome. (Ironically, Google provides a similar kind of feature to IE users with its Chrome Frame technology.)
