Chrome: 12chrome 4.0 For Mac

We’ve already written a half dozen times or so about how the Mac version of Google’s Chrome browser continues to surge towards on a daily basis. And today brings another update on that front. The latest builds of have added support for the importing of bookmarks and now features a bookmarks bar by default.

This was one of the features that many users had been stating they would need before they started using it full time. Well, now those users can. There’s also good news on another front: Flash is now much more usable in Chrome for Mac. Previously, we wrote when to play videos on YouTube, but now you can actually pause and jump around those videos just like on any other web browser. One word of caution is a few times, entering HD mode for YouTube videos caused the Flash plug-in to crash.

But, as has been touting, the crash did not crash the whole browser, instead I just got a small drop-down notification that to plug-in was shut down. Opening a new tab, re-enabled it. There is also a slightly new Tab homepage in these latest builds. And there is now the ability restore thumbnails that you have previously removed on this Tab page, which is nice. And while I’m not entirely sure that this is new, you can set the default search engine as well. Though, humorously, Bing is not an option, only Live Search is.

While I’ve been using these Chromium builds on and off for casual browsing, mostly just to test them, I think I’ve hit the point where I’m ready to try using it full-time. I’m simply having a hard time finding things that don’t work on it. Sure, plug-in support isn’t fully baked yet, but as a non-Firefox user, I don’t really use plug-ins anyway. And yes, but the default one looks pretty nice — though I would like to see nicer-looking folders for bookmarks.

The yellow ones remind me of Windows 3.1. As earlier today, these latest builds of Chromium are labeled as version 4.0+. Might we see an official public launch of Chrome for Mac when the software is ready to hit version 4.0? It’s looking possible, and I’d bet that will be sooner rather than later.

Safari, eat Google's dust - its Web browser - under its developmental title - has hit version 4.0 on the, and our tests confirm it's the fastest browser in the world on both and now on Mac OS X. Version 4.0 for Mac adds features we tested and discussed when the beta landed on PCs: an even faster version of Google's V8 Javascript engine, themes to skin Chrome in pretty colours, and a customisable 'speed dial' homepage. But despite its 4.0 moniker and its impressive speed, Chrome for Mac is still riddled with bugs. Big ones, like those spiders in, only even more hellacious. Performance improvements As we said the other day, speed is central to Chrome's manifesto. Web site developers more than ever rely on oodles of JavaScript technology to make their sites as responsive and functional as possible, so browsers need to be able to process and render it with constantly increasing efficiency.

When benchmarking Chrome 4.0's rendering speed on a PC last week, it obliterated its and scored 100/100 on the standards-compliancy tests. On the Mac, it only gets better. It completed the in just 657ms. Only 4 per cent faster than its PC brother, sure, but 34 per cent faster than Safari 4.0.3, which scored 886ms on the same 2.0GHz. Keeping things in some sort of context, Firefox version 3.5.2 on OS X scored 1,508ms and Opera 10 beta 3 scored 5,958ms.

Themes and homescreen As on PC, so on Mac. Chrome's are universally supported across each platform using a standard file format. They spice up the look and give Chrome the option for some extra OS X-suited gloss. The 'speed dial' homescreen - the default screen when you open a new tab or window - differs a little on the Mac, however.

Within version 3.0 on the PC, the Web pages you most frequently visit are displayed as six thumbnail images and can be rearranged and 'pinned' to your heart's content. This is now a feature of Chrome on OS X. Below them on the PC version was a box of recently closed tabs and an adjacent box with nothing but the question, 'What will we put here?'

This empty box doesn't exist in OS X, and the box of recently closed tabs is much smaller. Flash and bookmarks Chrome 4.0 has better support for Adobe Flash now (ironically, the of the browser on OS X didn't work with Flash, meaning Google's own YouTube was unsupported). Problem is, it's still criminally inefficient, resulting in poor frame rates, excessive CPU usage and choppy playback - three issues not present in Safari or Firefox on OS X. But this new build provides slightly better bookmarking functionality. You can import bookmarks when installing Chrome on OS X for the first time - this is a truly remarkable breakthrough - but there's still no easy way to simply import an HTML file containing bookmarks exported from another browser.

Guys, fix this. Conclusion You'd be forgiven for thinking version 4.0 of any piece of software meant it was sufficiently far through its developmental cycle to recommend, but it's really, really not. Frequent crashes and the lack of some rudimentary functionality means there's still a fair way to go before we start advising Average Joseph to haul ass into the OS X world of Chrome. But it's getting there, and we reckon there's only a few more months of development to go before it's ready to go public, at least as a beta. Update: Some readers point out that Chrome 4.0 on OS X is still in pre-alpha stages of development and shouldn't be compared to final products. What we're doing here is comparing how the browser works now in comparison to other products.

Download Safari 4 0 For Mac

Once released as a beta, it'll get tested again. Once released as a finished product, it'll get tested again. All we're doing here is taking a look at how the product currently performs, and nothing more. And incidentally, WebKit isn't a browser - it's an engine that powers a browser. We assure you, as soon as Safari ships with an updated build of WebKit powering it, we'll be testing all over again.