There is an untold general, cross-platform, inter-device rule regarding versioning: Major versions are major because they expose significant improvements and functional upgrades to the user whereas minor versions are typically either minor feature upgrades or bugfix releases.

Many projects, corporations and communities deviate from that loosely defined rule, but none do so more than Google has with Chrome. A browser that adopted the best of breed open source technology available at the time and pair it with newly developed, open source components managed to become the sweetheart of the tech community in less than two years. I started using Chrome when the first Mac and Linux versions came out, and since this spring it’s my main browser.

The other day, Update Manager on Ubuntu prompted me that Chrome 8 beta was available. Arguably, eight ‘major’ versions in two years sounds like a huge feat, but as of late I fail to see the point. Chrome 8 beta has little — if any — user-visible improvements or functional upgrades. It has none of the speed improvements that users experienced before in major-version upgrades. On my 64bit linux workstation, the only obvious difference is that they fixed some major SVG bugs that troubled me while coding the GEO|ADS analytics engine.

It seems that Google aims to exceed Version 9 before IE does, but at this rate the versioning scheme adopted by Google will become cumbersome before the end of 2011:

“Hey, I installed Chrome 26 yesterday. 1% faster Javascript execution, some obscure bug fix and a minimally redesigned arrow on the back button! yay!”

Google just announced Chrome, its own browser based on Webkit, Gears, the V8 VM and a host of features inspired by Opera, Safari and Firefox.

The move will no doubt be considered ‘controversial’ by some, given Google’s dominance of the market, but the company seems to have taken many steps to avoid this: everything in Chrome is expected to be Open Source and the company openly acknowledges its intention to keep things clean, fair and open.

The browser seems to be a combination of Webkit, V8, Gears the Opera thumbnail screen, the restructuring of the browser by separating tabs/windows into processes and coordinating them using a management process. The browser also provides an continuously updating phishing site database courtesy of Google (also found in Firefox) and a ‘Privacy’ mode, similar to that found in Safari for many years now. The Chrome comic (also mirrored here more or less describes what’s new and noteworthy; the technologies involved are not new, neither are the features. What is new is the combination of technologies and the focus of the browser’s designers.
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