Google Chrome 5 Stable Released

Google launched the first stable version of Google Chrome that's available for Windows, Linux and Mac. Google's browser has been initially released for Windows and then it was ported to Linux and Mac.

As this image shows, it wasn't easy to port a complex Windows application to other operating systems:


... but the results are surprisingly good:



The Mac version has a polished UI and great features that aren't available in Safari: full-screen mode, bookmark sync, extensions and themes. Some Windows users would probably like to see the menu from Google Chrome for Mac.

Chrome's Linux version has improved a lot since the first dev channel release and will probably compete with Chromium, the open-source version of Google Chrome. For those who don't like the GTK+ theme, Chrome lets you enable the classic theme from Windows.

Chrome 5 has many small new features: extensions in incognito mode, reordering toolbar buttons, disabling individual plug-ins, native geolocation, new bookmark manager which is now a web page, zoom settings saved for each domain, Integrated Windows Authentication and more. It's also much faster than Chrome 4. An important missing feature is the built-in Flash plug-in, which will be added in a future update, when Adobe launches Flash 10.1.