Bit of a slow week this time around- it appears I was rather mistaken when I estimated we’d be seeing some major updates. We’ll actually be seeing a major update to the stable channel next week. For now…I don’t hvave all that much for you guys. Aside from the Canary channel (which updates every day, regardless) the only changes we saw were to the Beta channel and the Dev channel- and even then, there was nothing particularly major. Chrome’s Beta channel’s gone from 13.0.782.55/13.0.782.56 to 13.0.782.99 on all platforms. The Beta channel for Chromebooks also received pretty much the same upgrade, going to 13.0.782.99(Platform version 587.80). Finally, the Dev Channel’s been updated to 14.0.825.0 from 14.0.814.0. Safe to say that’s the largest update in the list, and it brings a number of changes to WebKit with it.
Chrome Developer Channel Release 14.0.825.0
Like I said, some pretty considerable changes to WebKit in this one, in addition to a few reverted features and functions. The majority of these reversions are rather technical in nature, and aren’t entirely likely to affect the end user in any considerable fashion. The most noticeable of the changes to this version- reversions first- are listed below.
- Downloaded items have been moved from download helper back to tab contents
- ERR_CONNECTION_CLOSED will once again be treated as a successful download.
- On Linux, externally stored passwords are now profile specific. More details can be found here.
- On Chrome OS, status icons are hidden when they aren’t supposed to be shown.
- A number of changes have been made to Autocomplete. Searches of less than one word will not be autocompleted “if they’ve only been visited once and the user has not yet typed more than one word). (92778) Past Searches now autocomplete when in Keyword Mode. (92360)
- Focus has been moved from the Omnibox when opening a new tab with alt+enter
- The Keyboard shortcut ctrl-shift-o now shows the bookmark manager on Linux and Windows
Most of the other changes are either more technical in nature, or simple bug fixes and updates. Unfortunately, this release brings with it a few new bugs for those of you on Chromebooks- the bugs are listed below, straight from Google’s own update post.
Anyway, that’s more or less all there is to say about the dev channel update. Those of you who want to find out more can, as always, take a look at the SVN Revision Log.
Chrome Beta Channel Release 13.0.782.99
After looking through the SVN revision log, it seems as though virtually every single change in this release is a bugfix-there’s only three that aren’t, and those are mostly technical changes to background processes and the like. There’s not a whole lot to see- or say- about this one, truth be told. If you want to see precisely what the Chromium team’s fixed with this one, you can take a look at the SVN revision log. The good thing about this update is that it doesn’t come packaged with any new issues- it only repairs old ones. Good coding, that.
Chrome Beta Channel Release 13.0.782.99(587.80) for Chromebooks
Chrome OS releases aside, it isn’t often that we see a separate Chrome update designed specifically for the Chromebook. A lot of you are probably wondering exactly what differentiates this release from the standard Beta channel update. Unfortunately…I have absolutely no idea. Google didn’t actually link us to a changelog for this one. With that in mind, I think it’s safe to work on the assumption that, for some reason, the latest Beta release for Chrome OS just happened to lag behind the standard browser update, for some reason. Again, I’m not entirely clear on the details- anyone have any idea what to make of this? I’ll be looking into it, myself; I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.
That’s it for the updates this week. See you folks next Sunday.
